My 16-year-old wants to become an influencer. How should I respond?

My 16-year-old wants to be an influencer and share her life online. How do I balance her digital freedom with my responsibility to keep her safe?

—Responsible Parent

You may unsubscribe from any of our newsletters at any time.

Dear responsible parent,

There is something recognizable in your teenager’s desire to be seen and to leave a mark on the world — to say, “I was here, and I meant something.” The longing to share one’s life with others is deeply human.

And yet, when we speak of growing a platform, cultivating followers and becoming an influencer, we are speaking a language shaped by a particular temptation: to become a curated self, packaged and offered upward for the world’s approval, while mistaking the crowd’s attention for meaning. At its core, this is often an act of acquisition shaped by vanity.

However, the movement Christ invites us to perform runs in precisely the opposite direction — not by acquiring attention, but by practising it. French philosopher Simone Weil understood this clearly: the most sacred act available to any human being is the full, unhurried and uncalculating turning of oneself toward another in their reality, suffering and particularity. To attend truly to another person, Weil believed, is a form of love.

More on Broadview:

In this sense, we must be honest about what the digital world, for all its reach, cannot give us. A medium designed to produce information for the purpose of consumption cannot sustain the kind of attention Weil defines. The click, the like and the subscription from an adoring crowd are gestures of appetite, not acts of presence. They train us toward the self and its desires, rather than the neighbour and their needs.

So here is my perspective for you both: influence, rightly understood, bares the way of Christ precisely as it bears the burdens of others. We should encourage each other to become attentive neighbours who ask not “How can I be known?” but “What do you need?”

That is a life worth sharing. And it cannot be reduced to online content.

Of course, this doesn’t fully address your question. I understand the desire to keep your child safe, but to turn toward another person in their need is to accept a kind of vulnerability that cannot be managed or made comfortable.

The question, then, is not how to avoid risks altogether, but which risks are worth facing. Should your daughter continue to pursue this path, guide her to be thoughtful about what content she creates: to resist self-commodification and instead favour work that centres the lives and stories of others, so that her audience might learn to hear a call for care and justice.

***
Ashley Moyse is a Canadian ethicist, theologian and associate professor of bioethics at Baylor University in Texas.

This article first appeared in Broadview’s July/August 2026 issue with the title “Should I Let My Teen Be an Influencer?”