Fans Of TikTok Mom Say They 'Miss' Her Kids & Insist On Seeing Them After She Stops Showing Their Faces Online
Fans aren't owed anything.
TikTok Over a decade on from the rise of the mommy blogger, conversations about the ethics of sharing kids' lives, for profit, online have begun to evolve.
On TikTok, a new generation of mothers is documenting the trials and tribulations of parenting, generating millions of views on multiple short-form videos of their kids each day.
One popular creator on the app is Maia Knight, a mom to twin girls, Violet and Scout.
Now one of the most popular and prolific creators on MomTok, Knight rose to fame in early 2021 for highlighting the struggle of raising twins as a single mother.
With 8.6 million followers and 1.1 billion likes, Knight and her daughters have a lot of supporters — supporters who have been left unhappy with a recent decision the mom made.
Why does Maia Knight not show Scout and Violet's faces on TikTok?
In December 2022, Knight began blurring her kids' faces or only showing the backs of their heads in videos on her page.
She also removed almost all of her older videos with her daughters in them from her page.
Knight is far from the first influencer to do this, several moms on TikTok made a similar choice of the course of 2022 as debates about child protection ramped up on the app. But, thanks to her devoted, almost cult-like following, her decision was met with backlash.
Knight explained that she stopped showing her daughters' faces online to 'protect them.'
"They're toddlers now and I've decided to not show them. I'm not being forced to do anything" Knight explained, shutting down rumors that a lawsuit from her children's father was the reason behind the decision.
"I'm making a choice for my daughters to protect them."
Fans quickly began to turn on the mother, saying how worried they were about the children because they couldn’t see them anymore and some even expressing they felt entitled to see the children because they practically watched them grow up.
Knight decided to blur her children’s faces after fans began to overstep their boundaries.
In a video before Knight’s final decision, she highlighted an encounter with a fan that left her speechless.
While in a restaurant, Knight explained that a fan came up to her and began taking photos of her and the children.
“All these people started screaming at me and then they started taking photos of me without asking,” she explained.
The video above also showcases just some of the comments Knight has had to deal with after making a decision like this.
“How could you keep us from our kids?” one fan wrote. “We were all worried!”
When Knight first revealed that she was raising her daughters alone, it became an inside joke for her fans to say that they were Scout and Violet's dad.
However, what started as harmless support for a single mom turned to entitlement veering on obsession.
Fans even went so far as to make videos to highlight how much they ‘missed’ Scout and Violet.
Comments weren’t enough for fans to express their dismay with Knight.
TikToker Sarah, under the username @mom.uncharted—a popular user discussing the strange parasocial relationships between mommy vloggers and their fans—highlighted one video of a fan explaining how upset they were over Knight’s decision.
“I just miss my babies,” a fan says about Knight. “And I know that now we get to see sneak peeks of the boyfriend—which is great, I’m so happy for her. But where are my babies? Can we start seeing them again? Can we get an explanation as to why?”
The fan even goes so far as to highlight why she thinks she has a right to see the babies, saying that followers have seen them grow up and go through the different phases a growing child goes through.
“This is weird. It’s not funny,” Sarah explains. “It’s not cute. But it articulates how deep and uncomfortable these parasocial relationships are, specifically ones that adults are developing with people’s children.”
It’s not up to the fans how much an influencer decides to share their children on social media. The only person who matters in that decision is the parent and only the parent.
Victoria Soliz is a writer with YourTango who covers news and entertainment content. Her work explores pop culture trends, film and TV, and celebrity news