In 2018, when YouTube’s official Instagram account posted a Mother’s Day tribute, the vlogger Ruby Franke was front and center. Over the years, 8 Passengers—the YouTube channel where Franke documented life with her husband, Kevin, and their six children—had amassed nearly 2.5 million subscribers and generated upwards of $100,000 in monthly income at its peak. In some ways, she was a vision of modern motherhood: photogenic, committed, successful. But six years after her Mother’s Day shout-out, Franke’s image had crumbled. In February 2024, she and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were sentenced to at least four years in prison after both pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse following the discovery that they had been starving, beating, and physically restraining Ruby’s two youngest children.
The influencer exposé is now a true-crime subgenre unto itself, and Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke—a new Hulu docuseries about the Frankes released at the end of February—is not the first public account of this one family’s ordeal. But the show is also one of two new documentaries that explore how the creator economy encouraged family vloggers to perform an ideal of perfect American motherhood, sometimes to the detriment of their children’s well-being. Their channels thrived by peddling maternal relatability, wrapped in palatable aesthetics, and helped usher in an era of digital culture promising that other women could earn money and praise just by turning a camera on their everyday lives. This social-media shift had tangible real-life effects: Not only did many unconsenting minors have their childhoods broadcast to the whole world, but their mothers also helped entrench—or, some might say, re-entrench—a broader view of the nuclear family as not just a worthy pursuit but a moral cause. 
Watching old clips from 8 Passengers, it’s easy to see that Franke was selling a lifestyle, not just monetizing random family footage. Devil in the Family frames Franke’s approach to motherhood and vlogging as a vehicle for her core mandate: evangelism, both religious and cultural. The documentary suggests that the vlogger—who is Mormon—saw her family’s success as a reflection of God’s satisfaction. But these same religious principles were also distorted to justify poor treatment of the Franke children. Early in the series, Kevin recalls Ruby remarking that the kids were “losing their light” when they complained about constantly being filmed for YouTube—evidence of a spiritual malaise, not simple dissatisfaction with the work of always being on camera.
Even before the gorier details of Franke’s conduct were made public, her parenting had drawn scrutiny from once-devoted followers. In one pivotal instance, 8 Passengers received a deluge of disapproving comments after Chad, the Frankes’ then-teenage son, revealed that his mother had been punishing him by forcing him to sleep in their basement for seven months, on a beanbag chair. “We saw it as an innocent religious family that’s being attacked unjustly by cancel culture, and cancel culture is winning,” Kevin says of the critiques in the doc, one of many moments in which he alludes to his and his wife’s belief that 8 Passengers was a vital beacon of traditional values. Some of the documentary’s most uncomfortable asides are those in which he appears to still be enamored with Ruby, even after she asked him to move out and cut off contact with the family, and after her abuse of their children had come to light. The dissonance is jarring to witness, especially in the final episode, which includes extensive descriptions (and some disturbing images) of the physical abuse that the two youngest children suffered.
But part of 8 Passengers’ appeal had always come from Ruby’s no-nonsense views on child-rearing. Her emphasis on discipline was as central to the channel’s appeal as the light-flooded home where the Frankes filmed. Ruby modeled strategies for how other parents might stamp out concerning behavior they witnessed in their own children, casting school-age rebellion as a matter of grave importance to the health of the family. On 8 Passengers, she mocked or castigated her children for infractions as minor as failing to wake up on time for preschool, forgetting to pack their own lunch for school, or inquiring which movie the family would be going to see.
The intensity of her approach escalated after Ruby shut down the Frankes’ original channel and began making parenting-advice content with Jodi: “Your woke child is a walking zombie,” Ruby says in one clip from Moms of Truth, a social-media group they started after 8 Passengers, imploring parents to assert control over the wicked forces taking hold of their kids. In this framing, children are not autonomous individuals worthy of respect, but future standard-bearers of their parents’ values—which means that the greatest sign of a mother’s success is producing obedient children. That view has tremendous societal implications: Researchers have found that the values survey respondents prioritize in their parenting often correlate with those they prioritize in their politics.
In Devil in the Family, two of the Franke children speak for themselves. Shari and Chad, now ages 21 and 20, discuss the psychological toll of having their adolescent years mined for content. Their commentary is striking, in part because it defies the idea that children tend to be eager collaborators in their parents’ blogging business. The entire infrastructure of family vlogging relies on the labor of minors, but their participation has only recently been recognized as work. Although family vloggers have been making a living online for more than a decade, Chad and Shari are among the first children of influencers to comment publicly as adults. (The younger children, who are still minors, are not interviewed, and their faces are blurred out in the old footage.)
The two relay how their mother’s desire to project blissful domesticity had strained the family well before news of her abuses turned the internet against her. These remarks echo some of the criticism in Shari’s new memoir, The House of My Mother, which challenges the notion that parent-child relationships are unbreakable bonds. Shari’s disinterest in rekindling a relationship with her mother, and her insistence on referring to her parents by their first names, pushes back against the expectation that children express unconditional gratitude for the parents who raised them. This cultural belief leaves children particularly vulnerable to abuse at home, the memoir suggests, because it reinforces a hierarchy in which parents hold absolute power.
By Shari Franke
The events detailed in An Update on Our Family, a recent HBO documentary inspired by a New York magazine article, are less straightforward than the Frankes’ story. But the dynamics that propelled Myka Stauffer, another controversial “momfluencer,” to social-media fame share some connective tissue with the Frankes’ early vlogging days. Though the Stauffers were subject to a sheriff’s-office investigation after viewers called to report suspicions of child endangerment, authorities found no evidence that the couple had committed any crimes. Instead, their predicament illustrated something more difficult to pinpoint as an obvious moral failing—the tragic dilemma of parents who’d taken on more than they could handle, seemingly motivated at least partly by the promise of a large following.
Not long into their own social-media careers, Myka and her husband, James, realized that viewers responded enthusiastically to the reveal of a new child, the ultimate proof of a couple’s stability and closeness. When the Stauffers recorded their path to adopting a young boy from China with special needs, their subscriber count grew exponentially. Once the child arrived in the United States, the Ohio couple made him a fixture of their channel, documenting him alongside their three biological children. That included their sponsored content, such as a baby-detergent ad in which Myka claimed that the product helped her bond with the 3-year-old—whom the Stauffers had renamed “Huxley”—because “I can still feel like I’m snuggling that brand-new baby, and I get that baby scent that I never got from my son.”
The Stauffers visibly struggled with Huxley’s developmental needs, tearfully describing his diagnoses for the camera. Still, they assured viewers that they were steadfast in their commitment, because to reject him would have been to deny God’s will for their life. Followers praised the couple for their ostensibly selfless, Christlike decision to give a foreign child a chance at a better life, and the Stauffers leaned into the idea that God had chosen them to adopt Huxley in a show of faith. But the Stauffers seemingly failed to deliver on the ideals that had helped attract roughly 1 million subscribers to their various accounts: An Update on Our Family takes its name from the title of the last video that Myka and James uploaded to their joint YouTube channel, in which the two 30-somethings admitted to their subscribers that they had placed Huxley with a new family that was better suited to the child’s needs. In a written statement, Myka denied having adopted Huxley for financial gain: “While we did receive a small portion of money from videos featuring Huxley and his journey, every penny and much more went back into his care,” she said.
The dizzying montage of social-media reactions to this decision, which is presented in the documentary, shows how angrily viewers responded. And the storm of vitriol that followed the Stauffers’ joint decision was directed almost entirely at Myka, just as Ruby Franke, before the extent of her abuse came to light, bore the brunt of public critique for her parenting style. In each case, part of what enabled the husbands to bypass the overwhelming criticism hurled at their wives is the widespread notion that fathers are less responsible for child-rearing than mothers are. The image that Ruby and Myka sold to their viewers relied on the veneration of motherly authority—the idea that the domestic sphere is where women hold court and exert quiet control.
Years after the dramatic crescendos of the women’s controversies, family vlogging no longer has the same uncomplicated, aspirational allure it once did. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the work of balancing motherhood with professional demands has become significantly more difficult for a lot of American women, making some types of lifestyle blogging feel less like cheerful entertainment or useful resources and more like optimized artifice. Of course, the Stauffers’ and the Frankes’ extreme experiences don’t represent the average vlogger’s. But as family bloggers begin to speak up about moving away from states with laws intended to protect their children, the medium’s tricky ethical and economic considerations are becoming more transparent to viewers. For many women who rose to prominence by turning their children into stars, saying goodbye to the profits—and the power—may still be even harder than logging off.
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