Protecting Underage Influencers

Prof. Naomi Cahn (University of Virginia School of Law) recently posted on SSRN her article entitled Trusting Remedies for the Child Influencer Space: Blocked Trust Accounts and Child Beneficiaries.  Here is the abstract of her article:

Child influencers-or digital entertainers-can generate millions of dollars each year. These children are unprotected by federal labor laws, and they receive little oversight from any other source. A number of scholars have proposed remedies to both the privacy and financial exploitation problems, and states are beginning to enact legislation in this area. In the financial context, these remedies typically take the form of recommending “blocked trusts,” or a similar mechanism, essentially trusting parents to serve as the primary financial custodians for their children. The model for these laws is the decades-old economic protections for child actors, so-called Coogan accounts. Coogan statutes generally require that “blocked trusts” be set up for child actors to protect their earnings. In this context, the term “blocked trusts” refers to trusts that cannot be accessed until a child reaches the age of majority or is emancipated.

Coogan accounts have been explored in the child labor context, and, building on that scholarship, this symposium Essay instead analyzes Coogan accounts from the perspectives of trust law and children’s rights as beneficiaries pursuant to trust law and wealth inequality. Accordingly, the Essay examines the fiduciary obligations of the settlors and trustees and the rights of the beneficiary-children, briefly comparing and contrasting the trusts to the more conventional Uniform Transfers to Minors Act accounts. The Essay then provides suggestions for future direction to protect children who are actors as well as those who appear in the child influencing context. While this Essay is limited to an exploratory survey of the financial issues involved in child influencing, the solutions to prevent child exploitation must involve the broader context that frames the existence and practice of sharenting—and, even more comprehensively, the challenges to recognizing children’s interests and rights.

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/trusts_estates_prof/2025/06/protecting-underage-influencers.html