Negotiating Children’s Digital Labor Parental Justification and Ethical Discourse in Vietnamese Child Influencer Culture on TikTok

Abstract

In Vietnamese TikTok child influencer culture, parent-managed children's accounts generate revenue through commercial monetization, yet how parents discursively respond to audiences' ethical criticism remains understudied. Using a single-case design and Critical Discourse Analysis, this study examines 33 exchange units in the comment section of a Vietnamese child influencer account. The findings show that parents deploy four discursive strategies (proxy speech, de-laborization, kinship domestication, and selective silence) which operate in concert to form a self-validating closed loop that frames the child's commercial participation as voluntary, natural, family-embedded, and ethically uncontested. The study also identifies three dimensions of systematic absence: privacy rights, the right to refuse, and an independent future. This paper reveals that parental justification discourse operates differently from how existing research has characterized content production, identifies a distinctive form of agency construction enabled by the Vietnamese kinship pronoun system, and calls for structural interventions that go beyond awareness-raising.