Professor Naomi Cahn’s recent article, Trusting Remedies for the Child Influencer Space: Blocked Trust Accounts and Child Beneficiaries, exists at the intersection of centuries-old legal doctrine and the technology-based influencer economy. The family influencer, parent-facilitated influencer, and kidfluencer spaces are thriving (from TikTok sponsorships to YouTube ads), and these are spaces in which federal protections for children are arguably inadequate. Instead, we must rely on limited oversight provided by a patchwork of state privacy and labor laws. A parental conflict of interest is inherent when a child is unable to give informed consent, and parents are overseeing a child who is also a profit center. As with child actors, the question becomes: who is overseeing or regulating the parents? The exploitation of successful children, including actors and athletes, is not a new concern, but current legal infrastructure does not apply neatly to protect child content creators. In her essay, Professor Cahn considers the way the blocked trust account may be reimagined to better protect kidfluencers.
For over a century, the legal system has vacillated between empowering parents as guardians and constraining them as potential exploiters, from child factory labor to Hollywood stardom. The kidfluencer economy heightens this tension: the “workplace” is not a set or a studio but the family living room, and the “manager” is often a parent with a smartphone. The intimacy of this arrangement makes oversight uniquely difficult and the risk of abuse correspondingly high. Cahn draws a straight line from the Coogan laws of the early twentieth century (designed to safeguard child actors’ wages) to the relatively unregulated frontier of contemporary influencer culture.
The mandatory blocked trust is a central feature of modern-day Coogan laws, but most child-influencer work is not currently covered by these laws unless a state has explicitly extended Coogan laws to child-influencer labor. The mandatory blocked trust is a statutorily required financial account into which a parent (or employer) must deposit a fixed percentage of a minor’s earnings, with those earnings “blocked” and inaccessible to parents or guardians but later released to the minor upon their reaching adulthood. It is an approach that offers many advantages to protect the earnings of child influencers with the language of trusteeship and the imposition of fiduciary duties. One must also be mindful of disadvantages. First, the parent establishes the trust and ensures the appropriate flow of money into the trust in the role of settlor (or creator) of the trust. If money is not routed appropriately into the trust, there is no breach of fiduciary duty remedy available against the settlor of the trust. Second, a beneficiary may sue the trustee for breach of fiduciary duty, but this requires both knowledge and access to information that is often not realistic for a minor.
Cahn is concerned that influencer kids are generating substantial revenue while performing labor, and the line between parenting and financial exploitation becomes blurred. Protecting child influencers with a Coogan-style mandatory blocked trust is doctrinally grounded and administratively feasible, but Cahn nicely summarizes the tweaks needed to ensure that it operates as intended to protect child content creators. This essay stands out because of the timeliness of the subject matter (the meteoric rise of “kidfluencers” is a multibillion-dollar phenomenon), and also because of the clarity with which Cahn situates her proposal within existing trust and estate frameworks. This is not speculative law reform in search of a hook: it is a deeply practical intervention rooted in trust law’s core function—preserving assets for beneficiaries.
Trusting Remedies for the Child Influencer Space pushes us to confront the uncomfortable reality that the law often lags behind the development of new technologies. The essay also serves as an important reminder that the trust as a legal arrangement is so durable and flexible that dusty doctrine protecting landed wealth for roughly four centuries continues to endure and is able to once again respond to the cultural moment. Professor Cahn demonstrates that while trust law was never designed with TikTok stars in mind, its enduring principles of fiduciary duty and asset preservation offer a surprisingly powerful scaffold for reform. This essay bridges family law, labor law, privacy law, and fiduciary duties, showing us that trusts and estates scholars have a unique perspective to offer in debates over digital labor and content creation.
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