Now 15, Gracie, who is homeschooled and lives in Colorado, uploads several videos a week to her YouTube channel, Gracie K. (The kids in this piece, and their family members, are being identified by their first name only to protect minors’ privacy.) Sometimes she whispers diarylike updates about what’s going on in her life. Sometimes she shows viewers her artwork. Sometimes she puts paper clips on her fingers and taps on things (she’s not allowed to get acrylic nails). She talks to her viewers about recovering from anorexia, often in a soft, quiet voice.

Gracie made her first ASMR video just before she left home to go to rehab for an eating disorder. It was a 10-minute whispered makeup tutorial. When she left for treatment, she had about 7,000 subscribers to her channel. When she returned a month later, her video had garnered thousands more views, and her subscriber base had doubled.

Kid ASMR videos have a slightly different feel than their adult counterparts. Though both have elements of comfort and creativity, many kid ASMR videos skew playful and silly. Kids seem less likely to make videos featuring massage, for example. Many popular kid ASMR videos involve slime, eating snacks such as seaweed or sour candy, or variations on the theme of “mean older sister does your makeup.” Some kids seem like they’re just playing a pretend game with a camera trained on them. Others have the polished charisma of a grown-up TV personality. Some are teenagers, such as Gracie K. and Makenna, 13, of Life With MaK, a channel with more than 1 million subscribers. Others are much younger—such as the 4-year-old Aoki, the star of ASMR Toddler. These channels all have parental involvement—Makenna even got her mom to create her own ASMR account, Life With Momma MaK.

There are also scores of lower-tech videos made by children, many of whom appear unsupervised. In one, titled “Asmr doing your hair and realization,” a girl who looks to be 8 or 9 years old sits in a bathroom or closet filming herself whispering a hairstyle tutorial. (It wasn’t until I scrolled through the comments that I realized she had confused the word realization for relaxation.) In another grainy video, a young girl does a lengthy, rambling librarian role play at what seems to be a family desktop computer. During the video, someone offscreen calls “10 more minutes” and she freezes momentarily, as if the viewer has caught her in the act of something forbidden.

Read: Raised by YouTube

With smartphones and iPads at their fingertips, it is easy for many minors to surf the web—and it’s also simple for them to upload content without adult help. Gracie’s mother, Cori, knew her daughter had a YouTube channel, but she just assumed that it was for her friends. “I had no idea she had so many followers, until she asked me for my bank-account number so that she could have a place to put her earnings!” she says. (YouTube allows users with 1,000 subscribers or 4,000 hours of viewings to run ads on their videos and make a profit.) Nichole, Makenna’s mother, says that Makenna told her she was making ASMR videos online. Though she thought it was strange at first, Nichole encouraged the hobby, and got more involved as the channel grew.