• My husband wasn't feeling fulfilled with his job, so we decided he should be a stay-at-home dad.
• Our new dynamic has challenged traditional roles and sparks mixed reactions from our friends.
• There are things that surprise me about our arrangement, including FOMO and continued mom guilt.

Having a stay-at-home husband used to be a novelty for me, but after nearly a year of it, we've settled into a routine where mom works, and dad takes charge of the kids when they are not in school and daycare. While for the most part we are happy in our roles, there have been times when I have been surprised about the reactions to our situation — from both our peer network and within myself.

While my husband was never that interested in kids until we had our own, he has since blossomed as a dad, insisting that he thrives even with little downtime as he enjoys spending time with our two boys so much. Certainly, there's no better sound than hearing their eruptions of laughter at yet another of dad's silly games.

It means that when my husband ended up feeling unfulfilled in his last full-time role, it didn't take him long to decide that he would feel more satisfied taking care of our kids. This opened up the space for me to open myself up to full—time work as a freelance journalist, from my previous part-time capacity, and for us both to lean into the environment where we're most happy. While we're now settled into our roles, there are some things that have really surprised me about our situation.

My husband knows things about our kids that I don't

One of the biggest revelations for me is that my husband has come to know certain things about our kids more intimately than I do. For example, their food preferences, and when they need new clothes and shoes. When I take over meal prep on the weekends, he'll often step in when I'm about to put something on their plates that they no longer like, but which is news to me. I shouldn't be surprised that this happens, but it does make me feel a bit out of the loop, and like I've lost my edge as a mom.

I still contribute a lot to the family

I also feel compelled to "help" where possible, even though I am working full time. We split drop offs and picks up equally, and I help with chores like laundry when he's out with our youngest during the week. On Friday afternoons, I pause work to be able to take our oldest to his weekly swimming lesson, and on Saturday mornings, I take our youngest. I see it as our weekly bonding time. As I work from home most of the time, it's usually easy for me to step in.

I don't think this stems from mom guilt or not feeling like I can fully hand control over to my husband. It's quite the opposite, actually. I'm fully aware of everything on his to-do list and how being a stay-at-home parent is hardly the easier option, having taken 13 months maternity leave myself with our oldest son, now 6, when our roles were reversed.

Whether it's doing laundry, cooking, shopping, gardening, financial and life admin, plus providing silver butler service to our boys, he barely has a free moment all day. I know some moms I know who don't do paid work, or work part-time, while their partners work full-time, concentrating solely on their work during the day and being largely unavailable. I can only imagine how unsupported they must feel.

I still feel FOMO from time to time

It's also hard not to let FOMO (fear of missing out) creep in, especially when it sounds like everyone is having lots of fun in the other room while I am working. Or worse, when the boys come to blows and need grown-up intervention, and I have to stop myself from going in.

It can be distracting, but I like hearing what they are getting up to, because I miss them, even though we are in the same house at the same time.

Other people are going to have opinions about our arrangement

Other people's reactions have been strange too — perhaps not totally unsurprising, but a little disappointing and frustrating. We sometimes get asked how we're affording to live on just one income, even though there are plenty of stay at home moms in our school peer group and nobody asks them the same thing. Likewise, no one asks when the stay at home moms plan to get a job, but I regularly get asked this about my husband.

Our situation might not be permanent, as we're happy to flex as different opportunities arise, but I can bet that if I returned to being the primary carer, fewer people would ask about my career prospects.

Older people also seem to assume that my husband is working and I am at home with the kids. For example, at a recent family gathering an old family friend was with us looking on as our boys ran around the room. We were talking about what a handful they are, and the friend said to my husband, "But your wife does all the work, right?"

The friend also asked whether I was a terrible cook, because my husband looked like he'd lost weigh. Little did they know, he is the cook in our house, and always has been, even before we had kids. These kinds of preconceptions from older generations are unhelpful, but I try not to take it too personally and remember that things used to be different.

Mom guilt doesn't go away

The mom guilt does rise up, though, when I see how fast our youngest in particular is growing up. When our oldest was the same age, around 2, I worked four days a week, and Friday was our day together. I don't have that with our youngest at the moment, as it makes sense for me to work as much as possible, so sometimes I feel a pang of regret of what I could be missing with him.

But I have to remember he is with his dad, and when I was bonding with our oldest on our Friday adventures, daddy was at work. At that time, there were things that I experienced and he missed out on, so it feels like we've come full circle. What I love most, though, is how our boys are seeing that it doesn't matter which parent works and which parent is at home.

I'm not a mom, but that doesn't stop TikTok and Instagram from thinking I am, or at least assuming I'm interested in what moms are doing. I scroll past a day in the life of a wealthy stay-at-home mom in New York City shuttling kids around Manhattan or moms of multiples corralling triplets into matching outfits and then into car seats in minivans — cribs, bottles, onesies, all in threes. Parents hold newborns up to the camera; the babies are captivated by their own image in selfie mode, staring with big, glassy eyes as their moms talk to their followers.

Family and child influencers, which grew from the original online network of mommy bloggers in the 2000s, are constantly finding their way onto For You pages. The influencer economy is worth $250 billion, and parent and child influencers claim a sizable slice of that pie. Top earners like Ryan's World — the channel of a YouTuber who rose to fame at age 3 unboxing toys on camera — have raked in as much as $35 million a year. In a 2023 Morning Consult survey, 57% of Gen Z respondents said they wanted to be influencers.

The trend of kids playing influencer has gotten so unwieldy over the past two decades that lawmakers across the country are stepping in and attempting to regulate it. The trend started in 2023, and since, California, Utah, Minnesota, and Illinois have passed laws that mandate kids receive compensation in a trust if they appear in about one-third of someone's monetized content or if the poster hits a certain income threshold from their content. Some give the children the right to demand the content be deleted when they become adults. Half a dozen or so more states are drafting their own bills. It's a move that recognizes content creation as labor and not amateur home videos capturing kids being kids.

The laws are bolstered by the most heinous examples of parents abusing the children they force to perform in monetized videos. Shari Franke's recently published memoir, "The House of My Mother," is a look inside one of the most insidious cases of a parent exploiting children in a drive for online fame, one that involved abuse and the introduction of an abusive life coach into their family in Utah (her mother, Ruby Franke, is serving prison time for four counts of aggravated child abuse). Their family's story became a major driving force behind the Utah law, which is set to take effect in May. Some parents have sold photos of their children in revealing outfits to men online, running Instagram accounts for their young daughters. A new Netflix docuseries, "Bad Influence," alleges that the "momager" Tiffany Smith became verbally and physically abusive and forced preteens to work alongside her daughter for long hours to create YouTube content. (Some of the other former stars involved in the content settled a $1.85 million lawsuit with Smith last year. Smith's daughter, Piper Rockelle, has denied the claims that her mother was abusive, and Smith said the docuseries showed a "false narrative.")

For all the good intentions the laws bring, they lack teeth. There's no enforcing body, critics say: The kid-fluencers would need to first know the laws exist and then have the resources to sue for their money once they turn 18 if their parents didn't set up trusts. The laws require people to keep records of the content they created, compensation received, and what they deposited into accounts for their children. Even if there's recourse to sue your parents, it's likely to make coming home for the holidays more than awkward, and grown children of influencers may take these steps only in the most extreme circumstances. Even as the trend shows lawmakers want to do something about child influencers, they largely don't address questions about whether children can or should consent to spending hours in front of a ring light or unboxing toys.

"It's so tricky because on the one hand, these children are engaged in labor and deserve to be compensated for their labor," Sara Petersen, the author of "Momfluenced," tells me in an email. "But on the other hand, should these children be engaged in such labor?"

Petersen says the laws could normalize child labor and pave the way for children to be seen as employees of their parents, which could lead to more harm. As natural as influencing may look to the viewer, Petersen says, it's really "the performance of a self," which blurs the line between public and private aspects of life, even for adults. "I don't think children are capable of the kind of psychological compartmentalization necessary in professional influencing, nor do I think they should be asked to be," she adds.

Illinois was the first to pass such a law, which took effect in July, quickly followed by California. They take similar approaches: Content creators must set aside portions of earnings from content in which children appear and put it into a trust for when the kids turn 18. They're modeled largely on the Coogan Law, which mandates child actors' employers keep 15% of the kids' income in a trust their parents can't touch (some of the state laws use this 15% figure, while others require more income to be set aside). Utah passed its own law in March, which stipulates children receive pay for the time they're featured if the accounts rake in more than $150,000 in a year. Utah has been a hub for mom influencers and tradwives. Women there, many of whom are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, show an idealistic version of home life and traditional gender norms, sometimes as a way to subtly evangelize their faith online, but also to monetize their roles as homemakers. Now the state is pivoting toward regulating how children use and are seen on the internet — both with the new kid-fluencer protections and with a new ban on smartphones and smartwatches in schools.

The biggest swing among the laws comes from Minnesota, where children under the age of 14 won't be able to "work" in content come July. The new law there defines working as appearing in more than 30% of compensated content; if parents break this rule, children are entitled to sue for all the money made from the content. Those 14 and older who make their own content get to keep all the money under the law. The feasibility of the laws will be put to test in the courts if children grow up and do bring lawsuits, but Allison Fitzpatrick, a partner at the New York law firm Davis+Gilbert who represents brands that hire influencers, says "parents better start following these laws," adding: "At some point, their child can sue them if they do not take these steps."

Influencing has ballooned in the past decade and become a way to get work outside the traditional market. Before the last century, children always worked — first in agriculture or as apprentices to family businesses, and then in factories. Then we decided as a society that they shouldn't be clocking in and out. Aside from carve-outs for child actors, some top-tier athletes, and after-school gigs, the US mostly outlawed child labor. But in recent years, there's been a rise in states attempting to roll back some child labor regulations, and child labor violations have jumped. The proliferation of family influencers created a harder industry to regulate because so much of it takes place at home, in cars, or during daily life. "You went to the factory, you went to the coal mine, and you got the kids out of there," Hilary C. Robinson, a professor of law and sociology at Northeastern University, says of past child labor crises. Now "work is kind of everywhere and nowhere," she says, adding: "Anybody with a device has already been experiencing that since the era of the smartphone."

There are shocking stories of exploitation, but most families don't have anything close to a horror story unfolding out of frame. There are kids and teens who want to express themselves online and have broken through, connecting to their peers in huge ways. There are others pushed by their parents to do so. "It is difficult for any brand, or for any agency, to really understand what goes on in the four walls of a family home," says Nick Walters, the president of SuperAwesome, a firm that represents brands and child influencers. Walters says his firm stays in close contact with families and will sever ties with those who don't put children's best interests first, perhaps by prioritizing content creation over schoolwork. He says he largely doesn't see the regulations as a hit to the influencer business: "Sensible, common-sense regulation that recognizes that young people are going to be in these spaces, and make sure they are dealt with fairly and responsibly and in a way that is in their best interest — we are a huge supporter of that."

Even as more people question whether and how children, or even themselves, should appear online, there's a massive demand for family vlogging content. People simply can't look away. "I don't see these laws stopping the momentum that has taken place in the industry with respect to child influencers," Fitzpatrick says. Some of the viewers are fans, but some are rage-watching. After several big-name influencer families moved out of California in quick succession, viral rumors circulated on social media that they were fleeing to avoid the state's new law in February. It was largely a hoax, Rolling Stone reported at the time; some influencer families had left California but did so for personal reasons. "TikTokers' outrage at parenting influencers isn't actually about protecting children or ethics in content creation, it's about pushing a moral panic for clicks and views — ironically the exact thing that they criticize influencers for," the tech journalist Taylor Lorenz wrote recently in her newsletter, User Mag.

All this regulation is focused on the concept that influencing is labor and the kids doing the work deserve a slice of the pie. There are still questions for all of us to answer about how children appear online, and what can be done to protect their privacy. In Europe, there are stronger protections, like the "right to be forgotten," that allow people to demand their images and data be removed from platforms (France passed a child influencer law in 2020, becoming a global pioneer in regulating the hours kid-fluencers worked and what happened to their compensation and enshrining a right for them to demand the deletion of videos they appear in).

For now, most Americans don't have those privacy luxuries against Big Tech. These laws are one of the first steps in recognizing that people are going to post. If they're lucky enough to strike gold, at least the kids propelling them to the top will see a cut.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.