The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy

Preteen sisters Peyton and Lyla represent a growing number of children who, with the help and encouragement of their parents, are trying to leverage a social media presence into income. For the two, this means taking part in dance challenges, modelling a variety of outfits and endorsing everything from metal straws to exercise bikes. In her short documentary Christmas, Every Day, the US filmmaker Faye Tsakas captures the sisters at their home in rural Alabama as they move between the demands of content creation, passive scrolling on their phones and more traditional forms of play, including swinging and trampolining on their family’s sprawling property. In her portrait, Tsakas skilfully juxtaposes more conventional images of childhood with the hyperreal world of content creation for social media feeds. While Tsakas takes a nonjudgmental approach, looming in the background are forces of capitalism, digital technology and human psychology that are far beyond most people’s – and, surely, any preteen’s – understanding.