When the Family Living Room Is a Workplace

A few years ago, "sharenting" was a faintly mocking word for parents who posted too many baby photos. It is no longer that. It is a global content economy. Family channels on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram now generate sponsorship deals, advertising revenue, and brand partnerships measured not in dollars per post but in annual incomes that rival professional salaries. The children at the centre of those channels, including toddlers in unboxing videos, school-aged kids in scripted skits, and teenagers in confessional vlogs, are the engine of that economy.

The legal framework around this phenomenon in Canada is still emerging. In a recent paper published in the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, my co-author UnyimeAbasi Odong and I set out how international law approaches it and where the Canadian framework currently sits.

This piece distils the argument for the audience that needs it most: parents who are building family channels, brands and agencies that sponsor them, in-house counsel whose companies use influencer marketing, and platforms operating in Canada. The legal frame turns out to be more developed than most people assume. It just lives in places lawyers have not yet been asked to connect.

01.This is labour, not just sharing

The instinct of most regulators, and most parents, is to treat sharenting as a privacy question. Did the parent consent on behalf of the child? Was the data handled lawfully? Did the platform comply with its terms of service?

Those are real questions, but they are the wrong starting point when a child is the protagonist of a revenue-generating channel. The right starting point is labour.

Consider what monetized family content actually involves: upload schedules ("three videos a week"), retakes when a child's performance does not land, scripts and prompts adapted to brand briefs, audience-driven storylines, sponsored content with deliverables and deadlines, and a household income materially dependent on a child appearing on camera. Strip away the domestic setting and you are describing a workplace.

The International Labour Organization's Convention No. 177 (Home Work) defines homework by three elements: work carried out at home or another self-chosen location, performed for remuneration, resulting in a product or service specified by an employer. Monetized family content fits all three. The child is the on-camera talent. The parent is the producer, director, and beneficiary. The brand sponsor or the platform's monetization programme is the specifier.

Canada knows this principle well. It ratified ILO Convention No. 138 (Minimum Age) in 2016 and Convention No. 182 (Worst Forms of Child Labour) in 2000. The principle is in the law. How it applies to digital home production is still being worked out.

02.What Canadian law currently says

Three layers of Canadian law touch sharenting. Each operates in its own register, and the way they interact with the family-channel context is still being worked through.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child

Canada ratified the CRC in 1991. Article 3(1) requires that the best interests of the child be a primary consideration in all actions concerning children, including by private actors. Articles 16 (privacy), 32 (economic exploitation), and 36 (other forms of exploitation) are directly engaged by commercial sharenting. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, in General Comment No. 25 (2021), made clear that these obligations extend to the digital environment and require states to regulate businesses whose design choices profile children. The treaty obligation is in place; the domestic instruments that implement it operate across several different regimes rather than through a single dedicated framework.

Quebec image-rights law

The leading Supreme Court of Canada authority on a person's right to control their image, Aubry v. Éditions Vice-Versa Inc., [1998] 1 SCR 591, involved a 17-year-old whose photograph was taken in a public place and published without her consent in an arts magazine. The Court held that the right to one's image is an element of the right to privacy under the Quebec Charter, and that unauthorized publication can give rise to liability. Aubry itself was not a commercial-monetization case, but its underlying principle, that consent is required before someone's image is published, is the doctrinal foundation on which a monetization claim in Quebec would be built. Articles 3, 35, and 36 of the Civil Code of Québec codify these protections, and Quebec's Law 25, fully in force since September 2024, strengthens consent rules for personal information, including that of minors. A child whose image is monetized without their meaningful participation has, in Quebec, doctrinal tools that other Canadian jurisdictions have not yet developed to the same extent.

Common-law privacy torts

Outside Quebec, the picture is thinner. Jones v. Tsige, 2012 ONCA 32 established the tort of intrusion upon seclusion in Ontario. Subsequent cases have recognized public disclosure of private facts as an emerging tort. None of these was designed with children's monetized digital identity in mind, but each provides a doctrinal foothold for litigation in the right case.

Child-performer legislation

Ontario's Protecting Child Performers Act, 2015 sets out hour limits, education requirements, trust accounts, and other safeguards for children employed as performers. It assumes a third-party employer, such as a film studio, a producer, or a theatre company. When the parent is the de facto employer (as is the case in virtually every family channel), the statute's protective architecture does not cleanly attach. Researchers in British Columbia and at Simon Fraser have observed similar interpretive questions across most provincial frameworks.

PIPEDA and Quebec's Law 25

Both apply to personal information handled in the course of commercial activities. Once a family channel monetizes through ad revenue, sponsorships, affiliate links, or merchandise, the data-protection regime is plausibly engaged. But these statutes regulate data processing, not working conditions, and rely on consent as the operative lever.

Federal proposals in limbo

Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, would have imposed duties on platforms to protect children, including through child-protective design defaults. It died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued on January 6, 2025. Some of its hate-speech provisions returned in Bill C-9 (the Combatting Hate Act); the child-protection design provisions did not. The proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act met the same fate when Bill C-27 lapsed. At its April 2026 convention, the Liberal Party of Canada passed a non-binding grassroots resolution endorsing a minimum age of 16 for social media accounts. Whether that becomes legislation, and on what terms, remains open.

The picture that emerges is a layered one. Canada has ratified the international instruments. Quebec offers the most developed doctrinal tools through its Charter and Civil Code. Ontario has a child-performer statute oriented to the traditional entertainment industries. The federal government has tabled, and has not yet enacted, dedicated online-harms legislation. Comparator jurisdictions are taking varied approaches: France passed legislation directed at children in monetized online content in 2020, Illinois followed in 2024, and California and Minnesota have since adopted their own statutes. The Canadian conversation on this is active and ongoing.

03.What this means in practice

Three audiences should be paying attention.

Parents running monetized family channels

The absence of bespoke legislation does not mean the absence of legal exposure. A child whose image, voice, or labour materially drives household income has, on a serious reading of the CRC and (in Quebec) the Civil Code, interests that the law already recognizes. As that child grows older, civil claims of various kinds (including claims for accounting, for the patrimonial value of their image, or for invasion of privacy) are not hypothetical. Several adult children of family vloggers in the United States have already pursued public and private remedies against their parents. The legal architecture for similar claims exists in Canada, particularly in Quebec.

Brands and agencies sponsoring family-influencer content

Read your contracts more carefully than you typically do. A sponsorship agreement signed by a parent on behalf of a minor is not the end of the analysis. Where the child is the on-camera talent, the brand is buying labour, and a meaningful compliance posture requires asking whether minimum-age, schooling, and earnings-protection standards are being respected. The Competition Act and Ad Standards disclosure obligations apply in their usual way. What is changing is the additional layer of child-protective due diligence that international norms (and a growing body of comparator legislation) increasingly expect.

Platforms operating in Canada

You sit in the regulatory space that Bill C-63 was meant to occupy. The duty-to-protect-children design obligations that would have applied under that statute did not become law, but the underlying international expectations, articulated in General Comment No. 25 and increasingly reflected in EU and UK regulation, have not gone away. Platforms designing for the Canadian market are advised to act as if a child-protective duty exists, because in the international human rights frame, it does.

04.Where Chressa Law sits

We work at the intersection of employment law, immigration law, public international law, and technology. Sharenting is one of the places where all four meet: a private-law privacy question on its surface, a labour question one layer down, an international human rights question one layer below that, and a platform-governance question shaping every layer.

Chressa Law's advisory work in this area includes:

• reviewing influencer and family-channel sponsorship agreements with attention to child-protection considerations;
• advising brands and agencies on diligence questions that arise in campaigns involving minors;
• advising parent-creators on contract structures and earnings-protection arrangements; and
• advising platforms on emerging international standards for child-centred design.

If your business sits anywhere on this map, whether you are building a family channel, signing one, or running the infrastructure that hosts both.