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

Sammanfattning

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