Jessa Duggar is facing criticism following a video she shared on social media. Fans and critics call the video "exploitative" and accuse Jessa of taking advantage of her 3-year-old daughter, Ivy. Critics are also saying the video is "cringe," with some calling for protections to be put into place for situations like this.
It all starts with a video shared with Jessa's Instagram Stories.
According to the U.S. Sun, Jessa shared a video to Instagram Stories, which starts with her 3-year-old daughter talking about how she brushes her hair every day, comparing that task to brushing a horse's hair daily.
"Yeah, I like to brush my hair every day," she said to the camera.
Ivy, who looks to be sitting on her mom's lap in the video, then changed the conversation.
Switching away from her hair, Ivy changed the conversation topic to her earrings. She recently got her ears pierced, and in the Instagram Stories video, she talks about her new diamond earrings.
"Yeah, a few weeks ago, Ben took Ivy to get her ears pierced," Jessa shared, speaking of her husband, Ben Seewald. "She's loving her little pink diamond earrings."
And then, the video has a very abrupt jump cut into a different topic.
Seconds after talking about Ivy's pink earrings, the video's topic quickly turned into a sponsored skin care ad.
The topic changed to Ivy's skin, with Jessa sharing that the little girl has dry skin and touting a product she used to moisturize Ivy's skin.
"I've been using it a lot on Ivy's face. She's got a lot a couple of dry spots here, and I've noticed a tremendous difference," Jessa shared.
And that's where the criticism came in, which was discussed on a popular Reddit thread.
Posting to Reddit's DuggarsSnark, people found the video tasteless. They weren't shy about sharing their feelings in a thread titled "Poor ivy being exploited."
"This is so cringe," one person wrote. "She even showed photos of Ivy with red spots on her face. I would be mortified if my mom had done this to me as a kid."
"I'm not at all surprised if Jessa uses her kids to grift and sell stuff," another person shared. "It's exactly what her parents [did]."
"Sounds very exploitative," wrote someone else. "Jessa can sell whatever she likes but these kids have no choice about it."
'I really couldn't believe Jessa would use her three-year-old to shill skin care products,' another critic wrote.
"She even shared a before after pic of her little face as if the product helped! That is a classic scammy product advertising technique and she is using her poor child," the commenter continued. "As if she wasn't harmed by having her entire life exploited to the public for money."
"I think it should be illegal to use your kids like this," someone else wrote. "I mean there are so many sick people in the world. You should not put your child's face or anything like that on there. Me personally if I was a celebrity I wouldn't even release my child's name let them have the Privacy let them a normal childhood as normal as you can give it with a Duggar family."
Jessa is far from the only person who uses social media in this way with their kids, and it's become a very integrated part of life for many social influencers. She is unlikely to respond to the critics or concerns.
These stories are based on posts found on Reddit. Reddit is a user-generated social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site and can up- or down-vote the content. The accuracy and authenticity of each story cannot be confirmed by our staff.
