After photographs go viral, your child becomes a social-media influencer and a celebrity on Instagram. Should you step in? Parents reveal the contrasting conflicts of instant fame

When Charlotte D’Alessio was 16 she accidentally became a social media influencer. The Canadian-born teen had recently moved from Toronto to Los Angeles with her family when, in the spring of her first year in LA, she attended the music festival Coachella with a few of her new mates.

While at Coachella, Charlotte and her friend Josie changed outfits several times, taking a few pictures of themselves in bodysuits, bikini tops and jean shorts (the typical Coachella nouveau-boho uniform) and posted them on social media. So far so normal. But when the successful LA photographer Bryant Eslava took some photos of the girls and tagged them on his account, their images began to go viral. Soon the girls were seeing themselves everywhere, featured in roundups of the festival and in the “popular” galleries of Tumblr and Instagram. They were gaining hundreds and thousands of followers by the minute and being followed by strangers who’d comment “I found them!” and then tag their image to their followers in turn.

For Charlotte, a quiet, studious girl from Canada with ambitions to attend UCLA, it was entirely surreal. “I was honestly freaking out,” she says. And given what happened to her life after that, it was an appropriate reaction.

I felt I’d lost my daughter completely, yet suddenly she was everywhere

BuzzFeed picked up the story with the headline: “Meet the 16-year-old whose Instagram made her Coachella famous,” and by the time Charlotte returned to high school on Monday morning, she was officially a new media It Girl. Her following on Instagram soon hit 100,000 – placing her firmly in the category of “micro-celebrity” – ie someone who is famous for being famous on social media. Today, her following is more than half a million and climbing.

A modelling contract with Wilhelmina Models followed soon after and within a couple of months Charlotte had decided to drop out of school to pursue a career as a professional model and social media “influencer” (the line between the two professions can be blurry at best), and continue her studies by correspondence.

She was not the only one to be surprised by this sudden turn of events.

Watching from London was her mother, Christina Ford, a former commercial producer who had recently moved there with her new husband. Now in her early 50s, Ford had some experience with the world of show business and had always been determined to keep both her daughters well out of it until their education was complete. After years of carefully managing Charlotte’s homework and activities back in Toronto, she found that one trip to Coachella with a smartphone had rerouted her daughter’s entire life journey. “I was stunned,” says Ford, “I tried to talk her out of it. I flew to LA, but she wouldn’t see me or talk to me. She was absolutely determined to follow it through. We didn’t speak for more than a year.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I tried to talk her out out of it’: Charlotte’s mother, Christina Ford. Photograph: Pal Hansen/The Observer

Ford recounts how during this time she couldn’t bear to monitor her daughter on Twitter or Instagram, where her following continued to grow. Tensions also arose with her ex-husband, a commercial director with whom Charlotte lived, who was much more encouraging about their daughter’s new career. Friends would alert Ford to events in her daughter’s life (like the time she got a tongue piercing), all of which were being documented forensically by way of a long series of glamorous, often scantily clad, selfies. These photos, in turn, would be instantly “liked” by tens of thousands of people, the majority of them anonymous strangers.

Then one day Ford walked into a London clothing boutique and saw a floor-to-ceiling in-store advert featuring her daughter. Her eyes well up remembering the moment. “I felt like I’d lost her completely and yet suddenly she was everywhere.”

So how much do these influencers actually get paid and how do their “brand partnerships” work? It’s complicated. According to the influencer analytics platform Captiv8, the numbers range from very little or contra (in exchange for free stuff) to fairly impressive – at least at the top end of the business.

YouTube is the pinnacle, with the highest earners – 7m subscribers or more – able to demand $300,000 for an ongoing video brand-partnership.

On Instagram and Facebook, the biggest influencers are taking home anywhere between $150,000 to $187,000 per post. And even smaller “micro-influencers” with followings around 100,000 are able to command up to $5,000 per sponsored post – a pretty good living when you add it up at the end of the day.

Christina Ford and her daughter have since made up. Charlotte flew back to Toronto for her maternal grandfather’s funeral and, after many months of stormy relations, mother and influencer were reconciled. But the whole experience has still been deeply strange for Ford. She recounts how, just last summer, she picked up Charlotte and a teenage girlfriend at Toronto airport. Unbeknown to Ford, the friend was also a social media star – the YouTube singing phenomenon, Madison Beer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I do sometimes think about all the money and time I spent on her education’: Christina Ford with her famous daughter, Charlotte D’Alessio

“They were in the back of the car, chatting away and checking in on social to say they were in Toronto just like normal teenagers, and then suddenly Madison was like, ‘Oh God, it’s Drake Facetiming us. Should I answer?’”

As Ford drove on, listening to her daughter and her friend chatting away in the back seat with one of the biggest hip-hop stars on the planet, she felt the world as she knew it shifting under the wheels of her car. “I thought: OK, she’s hanging out with Drake. I guess this is for real.”

Ford is not the only influencer parent to have found herself flummoxed by the reality of her child’s new status. John Rivera, father of the American YouTuber and Instagram star Brent Rivera (who has more than 10m followers on the two platforms combined) tells the story of how, before he knew Brent was famous, he took his son and his brother to a local hockey game. They were watching the game when a mother approached and asked if Brent could look up and wave at her daughter a few rows back. “My daughter’s having a birthday party,” she reportedly explained. Brent obliged and all the girls started screaming.

It was then that his father knew something was up. But with overnight – even accidental – fame comes responsibility and for many influencer parents navigating the murky waters of new media, show business can be confusing at best and terrifying at worst. What sort of advice can you give your kid about building a career in a world you barely understand? And how do you protect them from the legion of creepy “manager” types who are keen to get a cut of their earnings without offering much in return?

Kelly Eastwood, a London-based influencer who started her style blog the London Chatter nearly 10 years ago, says parents should be wary of anyone offering their teen representation without a proven track record. She says she has an experienced manager herself now, but that’s only after almost a decade of building her following. “It’s actually the hard work of my generation of early bloggers which has paved the way for the new wave of Instagrammers coming up overnight. We worked for many years for no money at all and these new kids are just exploding on to the scene.”

It makes sense, of course. As recently as five or six years ago, Eastwood’s job description was almost a laughable concept – and now it’s industry standard. “I remember once, years ago, going to a brand luncheon and all the women there were working at magazines and when I said what I did they literally looked at me like I’d just poured toxic waste in the salad. Now those same luncheon tables are mostly filled with bloggers like me who are big on Instagram.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Family affairs: American teen influencer Logan Paul with his parents, Greg and Pam. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Fox/Getty Images

Eastwood says her parents have been supportive of her work, even if they don’t always fully understand it. And she’s glad she found success as a social media star later in life (in her ripe old 30s), rather than in her teens. “Everyone in this world talks about their ‘brand’, but the truth is I know my brand because I know myself. You can fall into things when you’re young because it seems fun and free stuff is on offer, but you need to actually know who you are and what you want and what you like. Also, you should see the number of offers for free plastic surgery I get – it’s terrifying.”

Most adults have a pretty linear notion of what “achievement” looks like: money, power and influence. But with children, the concept is far more ambiguous. Is a child who gives up their education in favour of making money or amassing a following actually more successful than the child who thrives in school? Moreover, what sort of values does a child actually learn from experiencing overnight success – and could you even shelter them from it if you wanted to? (Answer: only if you locked them in their room without a phone until they became old enough to vote.)

As Tiff Lewis, the mother of Madison Lewis (a singing star on Musical.ly with more than 2.6m fans), recently mused in an interview: “You think you’re doing right by your child, but it’s hard when you don’t know what you’re doing. She’s just on here having fun as a kid, but then you realise, well, she could make a lot of money off this. Is that a smart thing we should do? It was scary as a parent not knowing who to turn to. Then, a little over a year ago, she let management start to take over, and again I had to wonder whether that was the right move. How do you know if any of this is what’s really best?”

Personal security is another serious issue for the parents of teen influencers to consider. Christina Ford says she “went crazy with worry” when Buzzfeed published the name of her daughter’s LA high school. And she’s right to be concerned.

Last November, the Dolan Twins (two American teens with more than 5m followers on YouTube) tried to organise an informal meet-and-greet with fans in London’s Hyde Park. The day before, they jumped on Twitter and announced to fans where they’d be and when. Shortly after doing so, they realised it was Remembrance Day, so they cancelled the gathering and apologised – but it was too late. Thousands of teenage fans gathered at the park the following day, only to be disappointed. The angry adolescent mob then erupted into a mini-riot in which several people were trampled and injured, and the police were forced to intervene.

While some parents (like Ford) instinctively want to protect their children from the spotlight, others happily step into it themselves. Inspired by his daughter’s success, Charlotte D’Alessio’s father is reportedly starting his own Instagram magazine. Other parents leverage their kids’ fanbase even further, becoming professional influencers in their own right.

Greg Paul and Pam Stepnick, the super-gregarious parents of Jake and Logan Paul (two of America’s biggest teen influencers on the planet, with more than 28m followers combined), regularly appear in their sons’ videos and have amassed huge followings themselves on YouTube and Instagram respectively. Pam and Greg regularly make “reaction videos” to their son’s vlogs, take part in pranks and feuds, stirring drama into the vlogosphere – and, of course, adding to the family income. The result is an exhaustive, 24/7 archive of the minutiae of family life that makes the Kardashian clan look shy and retiring by comparison.

You won’t encounter many profound insights into the human condition watching the Paul brothers on YouTube, but you will find a certain amount of self-referential musing on just how strange it is to be a successful teen influencer in 2018. After moving from their home town of Westlake, Ohio, to Los Angeles, the teens branched out into other media, appearing in various TV shows and films, and even starting a company called TeamDom, which aims to be a “modern-day media conglomerate focused on building powerful brands, stories, celebrities and businesses around teen entertainment and media”. Or, as Jake Paul himself put it loftily: “I want to be the Dr Dre of social media.”

It’s hard to believe she’s 'famous' – she hasn’t really done anything yet

As time moves on, the first generation of under-age influencers is now coming of age. Today, Charlotte D’Alessio is 20, signed to a new management company and attempting to “monetise her brand”. Her first serious boyfriend, Presley Gerber, the model son of Cindy Crawford and a fellow influencer (Insta following: 601,000 plus) also helps to keep her in the public eye. Paparazzi regularly tail the teen couple around Los Angeles and elsewhere.

When Charlotte came to visit her mother in London over Christmas last year, she was stopped several times on the street for photographs by starstruck teenage fans. To Ford, who recently started a blog of her own about being a North American in London, her daughter’s overnight success is still difficult to grasp. “It’s hard for me to actually believe that she’s ‘famous’ because to my mind she hasn’t really done anything yet,” says Ford. “But she’s said to me: ‘Mom, I’ve got this window,’ and I get that.”

Today, Charlotte is doing some modelling, but mostly she exists in the nebulous new world of Instagram models – a global league of (mostly) attractive and uninhibited young women with a substantial online following which leverages the eyeballs of their audience in exchange for glamorous party invitations, free trips, designer clothing, accessories, make-up and beauty treatments – and, at the highest levels, actual cold hard cash.

How does her mother feel about it? Ford shrugs and smiles, her expression philosophical. “She’s an adult now and it’s her life, her choice, so I respect it. But I do sometimes think about all the money and time I spent on her education and, you know, carefully selecting her lessons and activities, all so that she could just become… famous for being famous. And that’s a job? It all seems so random.”

How do parents teach their kids values in the era of overnight influencers? Not very easily. But here’s to one mother for trying.