Being a child actor, model, or social media influencer can come with huge opportunities for the future, and set someone up with a fortune from a young age. However, there have been many instances of oppressive parents—who do not value their child’s best interests—using their control of their child’s earnings to only benefit themselves. This can happen due to the immense financial discrimination that young people face, making it so they do not have the right to control their own money, property, or even open independent bank accounts. Along with this, most of the labor decisions of a child’s life are controlled by their parents—making it so that while the child is the one bringing in the revenue, they are reliant on their parents for their career.
This unfair control of the child’s earnings and management decisions empowers oppressive parents to financially exploit their children. This happens when they take control of the earnings and use it for themselves rather than giving their child access to the money they rightfully earned. This can vastly damage a young person’s life, as they can then become pressured by the family into working, while receiving none of the benefit for it. Several states have created protections against parental financial exploitation, by ensuring that the minors’ earnings go into a trust account that they can access when they turn 18 years old. However, these laws are inherently ageist and do not prioritize youth financial autonomy.
In the following webpage, the National Youth Rights Association explains Parental Financial Exploitation, how it happens, the harms it can have on youth, and the ways to prevent it while still prioritizing youth financial independence.
Table of Contents
- In Which Jobs Can Parental Financial Exploitation Occur?
- Other ways Parents can Financially Exploit their Children
- How does Parental Financial Exploitation Happen?
- Harms of Parental Financial Exploitation on Children
- High Profile Cases of Parental Financial Exploitation
- States with Protections Against Parental Financial Exploitation
- Ageist Flaws in State Laws Against Parental Financial Exploitation
- Ways to Prevent Parental Financial Exploitation while Prioritizing Youth Financial Autonomy
The National Youth Rights Association
If you’re interested in Youth Rights, consider volunteering with us. We are always looking for new members and would love to have you on board. If you have a personal story to share, of being a victim of parental financial exploitation, parental theft of money, parental property seizure, or about a general youth rights violation, consider sending us an email at nyra@youthrights.org. We’d love to help get your story out to the world.
In Which Jobs Can Parental Financial Exploitation Occur?
Child Actors – This is one of the most widely recognized forms of parental financial exploitation. A child actor may earn money from starring roles, commercials, background work, voice acting, or recurring television appearances, but because the child is underage, the parent usually controls the contracts, the bank account access, and the spending decisions. Exploitation happens when the parent treats the child’s earnings as household income for the parent’s lifestyle rather than money that belongs to the child. That can include spending the child’s earnings on the parent’s personal shopping, debts, travel, luxury purchases, or unrelated expenses, while the child has little say and may not even know how much they earned. Even when some spending is framed as “for the family,” it can still be exploitative if the child is being worked heavily and the financial rewards are not actually being given to the child directly or preserved for their future.
Child Social Media Influencers and Family Content Creators – This is an especially important modern category. A child in social media may be the main reason a family’s content gets views, sponsorships, ad revenue, gifts, affiliate sales, or brand deals. In many cases, the child’s image, personality, private life, emotions, and daily routine are what make the content profitable. Financial exploitation happens when parents build a business around the child, but keep the money for themselves, especially when the child has no meaningful control over being filmed or how the money is used. This can include parents constantly recording the child, pressuring them to perform for content, staging emotional moments, sharing embarrassing or invasive details, or making the child’s everyday life into monetized entertainment. The child may effectively be working every day without formal labor protections, wages, privacy, or savings set aside in their name.
Child Models – Child modeling can involve fashion shoots, catalog work, brand campaigns, runway appearances, beauty campaigns, or online retail advertising. Because parents often serve as the gatekeepers to the child’s opportunities, they can also become gatekeepers to all money the child earns. Exploitation can happen when parents chase modeling income aggressively, push the child into frequent shoots for the parent’s financial benefit, or spend all of the proceeds themselves. It can also happen when the child is forced into an appearance-centered lifestyle that primarily benefits the parent’s ambitions, social status, or finances. In some cases, the parent may justify all the spending by saying they are investing in the child’s “career,” while in reality the parent is profiting off the child’s labor far more than the child ever will.
Child Musicians and Singers – A musically talented child may earn money through performances, recording contracts, streaming revenue, touring, merchandise, or licensing deals. Because children usually cannot independently negotiate or manage these arrangements, parents often take control of the career and the finances. Exploitation can happen when a parent takes the earnings, uses them to fund the parent’s own life, or treats the child’s talent as a family cash machine. This can be especially harmful when the child is pushed into intense schedules, public exposure, travel, rehearsals, and pressure to keep earning, all while lacking access to their own money. In these situations, the parent may act more like a profiteer or manager than a protector.
Child Athletes – Young athletes can generate money or financial value in many ways, including prize winnings, sponsorships, endorsement deals, club exposure, media appearances, scholarships, and online sports content. Even before a child becomes a professional athlete, a parent may use the child’s athletic success to attract donations, free products, travel perks, reputation, or future financial opportunities. Financial exploitation can occur when parents control the child’s earnings or use the child’s athletic career to enrich themselves, rather than acting in the child’s best interests. In extreme cases, a child may be pushed into relentless competition schedules, private coaching, and publicity not because it is healthy for them, but because the parent wants access to the status or money attached to the child’s success.
Child YouTubers, Streamers, and Online Entertainers – A child who appears on YouTube, Twitch-like platforms, short-form video apps, or gaming channels may generate ad revenue, donations, subscriptions, sponsorships, or product income. Exploitation happens when the parent owns the channel, collects the revenue, controls the schedule, and uses the money for themselves while the child bears the burden of producing the content. Because digital work can happen inside the home and look informal, it is especially easy for parents to blur the line between “family fun” and unpaid child labor.
Children in Family Reality Television or Documentaries – Reality television and similar programming often depend heavily on children’s personalities, conflicts, vulnerabilities, and private lives. Parents may consent to extensive filming and public exposure on the child’s behalf, while also receiving payments tied to the show. Exploitation occurs when the child’s presence is central to the success of the program, but the parent treats the compensation as their own or makes decisions that prioritize income and exposure over the child’s dignity and well-being. This can be particularly troubling when deeply personal moments, emotional breakdowns, discipline, health issues, or family conflict are turned into profitable entertainment without the child’s meaningful consent.
Children in Pageants and Appearance Based Competitions – Child beauty pageants and similar competitions can involve prize money, appearance fees, sponsorships, gifts, and future opportunities that have real economic value. Parents sometimes spend heavily on costumes, travel, makeup, and coaching, then justify total control over any winnings or opportunities because they “invested” in the child. Financial exploitation can happen when the parent is using the child’s participation primarily to satisfy their own ambitions or to extract money, attention, and status, while the child sees little or no real benefit. Even if the amounts involved are smaller than in film or social media, the exploitative dynamic can still be very serious.
Children Running Small businesses or Branded Ventures – Some children earn money through crafts, books, speaking appearances, product lines, online stores, cooking brands, or other youth entrepreneurship. This is empowering for the youth under normal circumstances, but it can become exploitative if the parent takes over the business, controls all earnings, and uses the child’s brand for the parent’s personal enrichment. A parent may claim to be “helping” the child run the venture while actually absorbing the profits and making the child continue working for the parent’s benefit. This is especially concerning when the child’s identity is the core of the business and the parent controls both the money and the public image.
Other ways Parents can Financially Exploit their Children
Religious, community, or cultural settings that generate money – In some situations, children sing, speak, perform, or appear in settings tied to churches, ministries, cultural organizations, or community events. If donations, stipends, gifts, or revenue flow in because of the child’s role, financial exploitation can occur when the parent takes those funds as their own. This may be less formally documented than entertainment-industry work, but the same basic problem exists: the child is generating value, and the parent captures it. Because these environments are sometimes viewed as wholesome or noncommercial, exploitation can be easier to overlook.
Fake Fundraising campaigns – A parent may use a child’s story, illness or alleged illness, talent, hardship, or public appeal to raise money through crowdfunding, donation drives, sponsorships, charity events, or community support. Sometimes the fundraising is legitimate and genuinely benefits the child. But exploitation happens when the parent collects money supposedly raised for the child and then diverts it for unrelated personal expenses. This can happen in medical fundraising, talent-development fundraising, education fundraising, or hardship campaigns. The public may believe they are helping the child, while the parent uses the child’s circumstances as a vehicle for personal financial gain.
Forced agriculture work, family businesses, or informal labor – A child may work in a family business, on a farm, in a shop, at events, or in some other family-run economic activity. Not all family work is exploitative, but it can become exploitative when the child is doing significant labor that produces value and the parent keeps all benefits without treating the work as belonging partly to the child. This is especially true if the child is working long hours, being denied educational or social opportunities, or being told they are “helping the family” while the parent is actually using the child’s labor in a one-sided way. Because this work may happen inside a family structure, outsiders may not recognize it as economic exploitation.
Pressuring children into repeated auditions, performances, or content creation for parental income – Sometimes the exploitation is not defined by the industry, but by the pattern. A parent may move a child from one opportunity to another: auditions, gigs, sponsorships, competitions, appearances, livestreams, or shoots, not because the child enjoys it, but because the parent needs the money or wants the fame. In this type of situation, the child’s whole life can become organized around staying profitable. The parent may become financially dependent on the child’s output, which creates a powerful incentive to overwork the child, ignore the child’s wishes, and keep the money flowing at the child’s expense.
Absorbing a child’s earnings into general family spending in an unfair way – One of the most common forms of exploitation is not flashy at all. A child earns substantial money, but the parent simply folds it into rent, bills, household spending, vacations, personal debt, or the parent’s lifestyle without meaningful safeguards for the child. Some family spending can be legitimate, especially where work-related expenses or shared necessities are concerned, but it becomes exploitative when the child’s income is treated as though it belongs to the parent by default. A parent may argue that raising the child costs money, so they are entitled to use the earnings, but that logic can easily become a cover for draining the child’s finances and leaving them with little to show for years of work.
Attempting to control trust fund money – Even when legal protections exist, a parent may still exploit the child financially by finding indirect ways to benefit from the child’s money. For example, the parent may pressure for “loans,” arrange purchases that are really for the parent, manipulate the child into authorizing transfers once they get older, or structure expenses so the parent’s lifestyle is funded through the child’s assets. In these cases, the parent may not be openly stealing in a simple sense, but they are still using their position of control and influence to divert the child’s money away from the child’s own interests.
How does Parental Financial Exploitation Happen?
Parental financial exploitation usually happens because children are the ones generating the money, but parents are the ones who legally and practically control it. A child actor, singer, model, athlete, or online personality may be the reason money is coming in, but the parent is often the one signing contracts, communicating with brands or employers, managing bank accounts, approving expenses, and deciding how the income is spent. That imbalance creates an obvious risk: the child does the work or provides the value, while the parent has the power to treat the earnings as if they belong to the parent or the household instead of the child.
This exploitation does not always look like a parent simply emptying a bank account. Sometimes it happens gradually through “management” decisions. A parent may claim that the child’s money is being used for travel, coaching, wardrobe, housing, equipment, or family expenses, but in practice the child’s earnings end up subsidizing the parent’s lifestyle or covering costs that mainly benefit the adult. In other situations, the parent becomes financially dependent on the child’s success and starts pushing the child to keep performing, filming, posting, or competing because the parent now relies on that income. The child may be told that this is all “for the family,” even when little of the money is actually being preserved for the child’s future.
This same problem has become even more visible in the social media era. When a child is the center of monetized family content, the money often comes in through sponsorships, ad revenue, affiliate links, platform payments, or brand deals paid to the parent-run channel or business. That makes it easy for a parent to argue that the income belongs to the family brand rather than the child, even though the child’s image, personality, labor, or private life is what made the content profitable.
At its core, parental financial exploitation happens when parental control over a child’s career or public image turns into a sense of ownership over the child’s earnings. The parent may start treating the child not just as their son or daughter, but as a source of revenue, status, or economic security. Once that happens, the line between helping a child manage opportunities and exploiting the child for money can erode very quickly.
Harms of Parental Financial Exploitation on Children
Loss of the child’s own earnings and savings – One of the most direct harms is that the child may spend years generating income, only to reach adolescence or adulthood and discover that very little of it was actually preserved for them. Money that could have gone toward college, housing, transportation, medical needs, future investments, or general financial stability may already be gone. This can leave the child in the deeply unfair position of having done real work, created real value, and sacrificed real time, while the long-term financial benefit was captured by the parent instead. In some cases, the child may have technically “earned” substantial sums on paper, but have no meaningful access to that money when they actually need it.
Financial instability in early adulthood – When a child’s earnings are taken or drained during their youth, the damage often follows them into adulthood. A young adult who should have had a financial head start may instead begin life with no savings, no safety net, and no compensation for years of labor. This can make it harder to move out, attend school, buy a car, pay for training, escape an abusive household, or recover from emergencies. While other people may assume the child was “lucky” to have earned money at a young age, the reality may be that the child enters adulthood financially stranded because the parent already consumed the benefits.
Difficulty building independence – Parental financial exploitation can trap a child in dependence for longer than they otherwise would have been. If the parent controls the child’s earnings and withholds access to them, the child may have fewer options to make independent choices later. They may be unable to afford housing, legal help, transportation, or even small costs that would allow them to separate from the parent’s control. In this way, the exploitation is not just about money being taken; it can also function as a tool of long-term power and control over the child’s life.
Emotional betrayal and loss of trust – When the person taking the child’s money is their own parent, the harm is not merely financial. It can create a lasting sense of betrayal, because the person who was supposed to protect the child instead used the child as a source of income. That kind of betrayal can affect the child’s ability to trust parents, caregivers, authority figures, or even future partners. The child may come to feel that love, support, and family loyalty were conditional on what they could provide. This can be psychologically devastating, especially when the child was taught to believe the parent was helping them while the parent was actually exploiting them.
Pressure to keep performing or earning – A financially exploitative parent may begin to view the child less as a child and more as an economic asset. This can create intense pressure on the child to keep producing content, booking roles, winning competitions, performing publicly, or otherwise staying profitable. The child may feel that rest, privacy, mistakes, normal development, or changing interests are not allowed because the family now depends on their output. That kind of pressure can cause anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, and a distorted belief that their worth depends on productivity or public appeal.
Educational harm – Parental financial exploitation can interfere with education in both direct and indirect ways. A child may miss school for work, travel, performances, filming, competitions, or content creation. Even if they remain formally enrolled, exhaustion, stress, or constant scheduling demands can interfere with concentration and academic progress. In some cases, parents may deprioritize education because the child’s earning potential feels more urgent or more valuable. This can leave the child with fewer future options, making them even more vulnerable once the income-generating phase ends.
Mental health consequences – Being treated like a source of money rather than a person can contribute to anxiety, depression, chronic stress, low self-esteem, dissociation, and identity confusion. A child in this situation may feel used, overexposed, trapped, or emotionally neglected. They may also internalize the idea that their value comes from performance, beauty, popularity, or financial output. If their parent also dismisses their discomfort or frames the exploitation as normal, the child may struggle to recognize that what is happening is wrong. Over time, this can make the psychological effects harder to untangle.
Psychological confusion about ownership and rights – Children in exploitative situations often grow up with distorted ideas about money and personal rights. They may be taught that whatever they earn automatically belongs to the parent, or that children are not entitled to control over the fruits of their own labor. This can make it difficult for them later to recognize theft, coercion, wage abuse, or other exploitative dynamics in adult life. A child who has been conditioned to think “my parent is entitled to everything I earn” may be more vulnerable to later financial abuse by employers, partners, or relatives.
Family role distortion – Parental financial exploitation can reverse or distort the normal parent-child relationship. Instead of the parent supporting the child, the child becomes a source of support, status, or income for the parent. Even if the child is not literally paying household bills, they may still feel responsible for maintaining the family’s lifestyle or public image. This can create an unhealthy burden in which the child feels more like a worker, brand, or provider than a dependent family member. That role reversal can have long-term emotional effects and may make the child feel responsible for problems that should never have been theirs to solve.
Increased vulnerability to further abuse – Financial exploitation often does not happen in isolation. A parent who feels entitled to a child’s money may also feel entitled to the child’s time, privacy, labor, decisions, and emotional life. This means financial exploitation can overlap with emotional abuse, coercive control, neglect, educational deprivation, or other forms of mistreatment. Once a parent starts viewing the child as an asset, the child may become more vulnerable to broader patterns of control and exploitation. The money issue may be only one visible part of a much larger abusive dynamic.
Lack of legal or practical recourse while still young – Children often have limited ability to stop the exploitation while it is happening. Because the parent may control the contracts, accounts, transportation, housing, and communication, the child may have little practical power to object. Even when laws exist, the child may not know about them, may not understand what is happening, or may fear retaliation for speaking up. This means the harm can continue for years before anyone intervenes. The inability to stop it can itself be traumatic, because the child may feel trapped inside a system that treats their labor as someone else’s property.
Normalization of exploitation – One of the quieter harms is that the child may grow up believing this treatment is normal. If exploitation is framed as family teamwork, sacrifice, discipline, or parental entitlement, the child may not immediately recognize that they were wronged. This can delay recovery and make it harder for them to assert themselves later in life. A person who has been trained from childhood to accept exploitation may struggle to identify unhealthy dynamics in work, relationships, or finances because exploitation was built into their earliest family experiences.
High Profile Cases of Parental Financial Exploitation
The following list describes some of the highest profile incidents of parental financial exploitation (usually involving child actors), where they ended up suing their parents for the large amount of their earnings that had been lost. However, it is important to note that parental financial exploitation can happen to any minor earning money, not just extremely famous actors and performers. Accessing the courts and even suing in your own name is extremely difficult while being a minor, dissuading most young people from actually suing their parents for their lost earnings. Because of the fact it requires a certain level of financial privilege to access the courts, minors who experienced similar exploitation, but weren’t famous, and had no ability to sue due to not having control of their own money, never got a chance of receiving compensation. Therefore, there are likely many more stories of minors who experienced the same type of financial exploitation by their parents, but were unable to ever sue for recourse.
Jackie Coogan – Jackie Coogan is one of the most famous examples in American entertainment history. After becoming one of Hollywood’s earliest child superstars, Coogan later sued his mother and stepfather after discovering that most of the fortune he had earned as a child had already been spent. According to the Library of Congress, he sued in 1938 and, after legal fees, was left with only about $126,000 of what had once been a much larger fortune. His case directly helped spur California’s Coogan Law, which was created to protect part of child performers’ earnings from being taken or depleted by parents or managers.
Gary Coleman – Gary Coleman, the child star of Diff’rent Strokes, sued his parents and business manager after accusing them of taking or mismanaging large amounts of his money. Public reporting and later court coverage said a judge found that Coleman’s parents and manager had wrongly taken more than $1 million in excessive commissions, salaries, fees, and pension contributions. The case became one of the best-known examples of a child star fighting family members over lost earnings and financial exploitation.
Macaulay Culkin – Macaulay Culkin’s case is another especially well-known example because it centered on control over a massive child-star fortune. During his parents’ custody dispute, Culkin sued to remove them as the legal guardians controlling his money. People reported that he was 15 at the time and that the case involved control over roughly $17 million. Even though this case is often described more as a struggle over financial control than a simple theft claim, it is still a major example of how a parent-child financial relationship can become exploitative when parents treat a child’s earnings as something to fight over or control for themselves.
LeAnn Rimes – LeAnn Rimes sued her father and former co-manager when she was still a teenager, alleging that they had taken more than $7 million of her earnings. Reporting at the time said the lawsuit accused them of diverting funds and taking unusually large percentages of her income. This case is one of the clearest examples of a young performer publicly accusing a parent not just of over-control, but of major financial misconduct tied directly to the child’s career earnings.
Aaron Carter – Aaron Carter publicly alleged that his mother had removed more than $100,000 from his bank account without permission. Later reporting also noted Carter’s statements that his parents had failed to preserve money that should have been protected for him as a child performer. His situation is frequently cited in discussions about how legal protections for child entertainers can fail in practice when parents still control access to accounts and financial decisions.
Mischa Barton – Mischa Barton sued her mother, who had also acted as her manager, alleging that her mother withheld earnings, concealed royalties, lied about how much Barton had been paid for at least one film, and bought a Beverly Hills home using Barton’s earnings while giving herself an ownership stake. AP reporting described the case as another example of a child or teen star later challenging a parent who had controlled the business side of the career. This case is important because it shows that parental financial exploitation can also take the form of hidden accounting, self-dealing, withheld royalties, and property purchases made from the child’s earnings.
Ariel Winter – Ariel Winter’s case is a well-known example of how financial control can become part of a broader pattern of parental exploitation, even when the public dispute is framed mainly around abuse and guardianship rather than a straightforward theft lawsuit. In 2012, ABC News reported that Winter’s mother lost temporary control of her daughter’s finances and career amid allegations of emotional and physical abuse, while Ariel was removed from her mother’s home and placed with her older sister. Later reporting on the guardianship outcome stated that Winter’s father, not her mother, would maintain control of her finances, while her sister became her permanent guardian. This case is significant because it shows that when courts believe a parent’s conduct is harmful, they may remove that parent not only from custody, but also from financial control over the child’s career and earnings.
States with Protections Against Parental Financial Exploitation
California — Coogan Law; updated to cover online content creators – California has the best-known child earnings protection law. Under California’s Coogan framework, 15% of a minor’s gross earnings must be set aside in trust for the minor’s benefit, and the trust must be established promptly after the contract is signed. California also expanded protections in 2024 so that they apply not just to traditional child performers, but also to minors working as online content creators, and separately enacted protections for minors featured in monetized online family content.
Illinois — Child performer trust law and separate child-vlogger law – Illinois requires a trust account for child performers, with at least 15% of the child performer’s gross earnings deposited into the account. Illinois also enacted a separate law for minors featured in monetized vlogs, requiring that qualifying minors be compensated and that their share be placed into a trust account preserved until they reach majority. This makes Illinois one of the clearest states for both traditional entertainment work and family-vlogger style online content.
Louisiana — Child Performer Trust Act – Louisiana’s Child Performer Trust Act requires every covered contract involving a minor rendering artistic or creative services for compensation to place 15% of the minor’s gross earnings into a trust fund for the child’s benefit. The statute also says the funds must be placed in a blocked account and generally cannot be withdrawn before the child turns 18 unless a court finds necessary circumstances. If the trust account is not set up in time, the employer must send the money to the state treasurer to hold for the minor.
New Mexico — Child performer trust-account rule – New Mexico’s child performer regulations require a trust account whenever a child performer in the state has a contract of at least $1,000. The parent, guardian, or trustee must set up the account for the sole benefit of the child, and the child cannot access it until age 18 or emancipation. The employer must deposit at least 15% of the child’s gross earnings into the trust account, and if no account is established, the employer must withhold the money until the account is created or the court orders otherwise.
New York — Child performer trust account law – New York requires child performers’ employers to transfer 15% of gross earnings to a child performer trust account. If the account is not established in time, the employer must transfer the money to the state comptroller for placement into a holding fund. The child performer may terminate the account upon reaching age 18. This law is aimed directly at preventing a child’s earnings from simply being absorbed into parental control without a protected set-aside.
North Carolina — Minor entertainment contracts trust protections – North Carolina requires a trust to be established to preserve the minor’s protected portion of earnings, and the statutes tie this to court approval and financial safeguards for entertainment contracts. The trust must be established within seven business days after the contract is signed, and the beneficiary generally does not get access until turning 18 or becoming emancipated. North Carolina’s statutes also require a set-aside of at least 15% of gross earnings in many cases.
Minnesota — Protections for minors in monetized online content – Minnesota enacted a law protecting minors engaged in the work of content creation. It requires that qualifying minors be compensated, that gross earnings attributable to the child’s appearance be placed in a trust account for the child, and that the money remain for the child until adulthood. Minnesota also gives the minor a civil cause of action if the content creator knowingly or recklessly violates the trust-account requirement, allows additional damages and attorney fees, and includes a content-removal provision. Along with this, the statute states that “a minor who is under the age of 18 and over the age of 13 may produce, create, and publish their own content and is entitled to all compensation for their own content creation”
Virginia — Child content creation trust-account statute – Virginia now has an explicit statute for children engaged in monetized content creation. It requires that qualifying children be compensated and that gross earnings tied to content featuring the child be placed into a trust account available only to the child, to be accessed at 18 or emancipation. Virginia also requires recordkeeping and gives the child a cause of action, with potential compensatory damages, punitive damages, and attorney fees if the law is violated.
Utah — Protections for minors as performers and in social media content – Utah enacted a 2025 law that protects both minors employed as performers and qualifying minors featured in monetized social media content. The law requires trusts in those contexts, mandates recordkeeping, and creates private rights of action. Utah also added a mechanism allowing adults who were featured as minors to request deletion or editing of qualifying content, with damages and attorney fees available in some situations if the request is not honored.
Montana — Child Digital Protection Act – Montana’s Child Digital Protection Act applies to profitable family video content featuring minor children. It requires qualifying content creators to set aside a percentage of gross earnings in trust for the child, with the percentage increasing depending on how much of the compensated content features the child. Montana’s law also includes a right to request removal of content involving the minor child, which goes beyond simple earnings protection.
Ageist Flaws in State Laws Against Parental Financial Exploitation
The state protections that currently exist to protect minors from financial exploitation are a step in the right direction, however they still come with flaws. A large majority of state laws on financial exploitation of children attempt to rectify the issue using trusts: putting the money a child earns into an account that they cannot access until they turn 18 years old. This in and of itself is also financial discrimination against youth—and clear ageism within the law. These laws stifle and hinder the financial independence and autonomy of minors, because they enforce the idea that young people are not entitled to the money they rightfully earned until they are an adult. So while someone is a minor, they still have no control of their own money—which is wrong and blatantly discriminatory.
These discriminatory state laws exist because of the fact that Youth, in general, have extremely limited financial freedom. Most banks do not allow minors to open independent checking accounts, instead relying on “teen accounts”, which parents have complete control over. Along with this, minors also have limited ability to enter contracts, further decreasing their financial autonomy. It is also extremely difficult for minors to seek compensation when their parents steal their money or seize their property.
Because of this, it is important to recognize that the system needs to be changed, in order to create other solutions for protecting youth from parental financial exploitation—while prioritizing their financial independence.
Ways to Prevent Parental Financial Exploitation while Prioritizing Youth Financial Autonomy
Increase Youth Financial Autonomy – In order to address discriminatory state protections against parental financial exploitation, young people need to have more rights over their money, and more independent control over their own finances. First of all, banks should not be allowed to restrict people from opening independent checking accounts only on the basis of age—and should instead use the context of an individual. Once minors can have access to checking accounts independently of their parents, the money that the minor earns from their performance can go directly to them without fear of financial exploitation by their parents—eliminating the need for the trust account. Along with this, minors should be given an increased ability to enter contracts, so they can manage more of their professional affairs without being bound to their parents.
Increase Criminal Penalties for Parental Financial Exploitation and Theft – A lack of youth financial autonomy usually stems from the fact that parents are empowered by the law to have full, overbearing control over their child’s finances. Instead of laws mandating that the money a minor earns goes into a trust that the parents can’t access, the laws should focus on criminally punishing parents who financially exploit their children. Along with this, laws should be established to prevent parents from stealing their child’s money, under any circumstance (even if it is from a parent managed “teen account”). Parents should also never be allowed to seize legally owned property from their children that the minor purchased with their own money. Doing so should be automatically considered a form of child abuse, the minor should get a clear legal path to compensation for their income/property, and a parent doing this should also provide a minor with a clear path to emancipation. When parents exhibit this heinous, oppressive behavior, they obviously do not have their child’s best interests at heart, and should therefore no longer have parental rights over their child.
Lower the Age to Access Trust Accounts – Forcing the money to go into trust accounts should be avoided, but if the child is extremely young at the time of their performing work, then that may be necessary to prevent financial exploitation while the minor matures. The key aspect of this, is that the minor should not have to wait until adulthood to be able to access their money, instead, they should be able to access their money whenever they are capable of making independent financial decisions. While it is hard to put a direct age on this, since each individual person is different, a good first step would be to lower the age to access trust accounts to 16 instead of 18. There could also be more graduated access, with an increasing portion of the savings available as the minor approaches adulthood. This change would empower the minor to receive their earned income before they become an adult, giving them more financial freedom. However, in order for this solution to properly work, the minor would have to have an independent bank account, which their parents cannot access. This further implicates the need for increased youth financial autonomy, especially over checking accounts.
Limit Parental Control Of Children’s Social Media – Various social media platforms have begun increasing age restrictions and enforcing parental control over the social media accounts of minors. These restrictions are inherently harmful, but create a whole host of other problems when it comes to parental financial exploitation. When a minor wants to begin creating social media content that has the potential to be monetized, but has to rely on the parent to manage the account due to the discriminatory age restrictions of the social media platform, this opens up the child to exploitation. Once the parent is in control of the account, the parent is the one profiting from the earnings, and can therefore do whatever they want with the money—including refusing to give it to the minor, or spending it themselves. Some state laws, such as Minnesota’s protections against parental financial exploitation have addressed this, stating that “a minor who is under the age of 18 and over the age of 13 may produce, create, and publish their own content and is entitled to all compensation for their own content creation”. This is a good step in prioritizing youth control over their social media accounts and revenue. However, other states are enforcing harsher regulations on social media accounts involving minors—which forces the entire social media platform to increasingly restrict the amount of independent control a minor can have over their accounts—and therefore their revenue. Minors’ freedom to use social media unrestricted directly correlates to their ability to avoid parental financial exploitation while retaining control of the income they rightfully earned.
