What do you want to be when you grow up? For an increasing number of kids these days, the answer is influencer. According to a recent survey of 12- to 15-year-olds, more than 30 percent aspire to be YouTubers; 21 percent want to be TikTokers. And 42 percent of American teens under age 18 are already earning money through their digital platforms. So what’s the mom of an aspiring content creator to do? How do you navigate the highs and lows of parenting an influencer?
For Kara Mendelsohn, the answer was simple: encourage — and oversee with an eagle eye toward safety and age-appropriateness. Mendelsohn’s daughter, Ella, was just 12 when she started posting online — “I would take these awful photos, and I would post them on Instagram. I was trying to be an influencer,” Ella says — and garnered the attention of Who What Wear, which dubbed her “The 12-Year-Old Insta Girl You Should Probably Start Following.”
Today, Ella Mendelsohn is a 20-year-old TikTok star with nearly 3 million followers on the platform (and another half a million on Instagram), an Amazon shop, an apartment, and a bevy of big-time brand deals.
And Kara? The longtime fashion veteran and current grad student is now joining her daughter in the influencer world. After years of mindfully monitoring Ella’s career — there’s no ‘’momager’ energy here — Kara is building a TikTok following of her own, offering style and beauty tips for the 40-plus set, and working with Ella on a “my mom styles me” series where mother styles daughter for various occasions. (She even styled Ella for their SheKnows photoshoot!)
It’s a career pivot that makes perfect sense in the modern age: Kara’s fashion career influenced Ella, whose own influencer career in turn influenced her mother.
Following their SheKnows cover shoot, we Zoomed with Kara and Ella to talk about the unique challenges of parenting (and being!) an influencer, the power shift that comes from having a financially independent kid, and what it’s like to be a mother-daughter team in the influencer world.
SheKnows: Talk us through the beginning of the journey. Ella, how did this all start for you?
Ella Mendelsohn: I started when I was 12. My parents both work in the fashion industry, and I saw them always gifting products to people. I was like, ‘What are these girls doing? Why are they getting this free stuff and doing these cool things?’ And my mom explained to me, ‘Oh, they’re an influencer.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I want to do that. That sounds cool.’
I started taking my mom’s vintage collection, and I would take these awful photos, and I would post them on Instagram. I was trying to be an influencer. And then during quarantine, when we were all home, that’s when I discovered TikTok. The first video I posted was like a bunch of different summer skirts, and I would just stand there with a trending sound and the skirts would change. And that went viral. And in about a month, I gained a million followers.
SK: Kara, Ella was on TikTok and Instagram at a young age. Did you worry about that?
Kara Mendelsohn: I had a lot of concerns about it from the very beginning. When Ella said, ‘I want to start an Instagram,’ I was like, okay, we can do this, but we have to do it together. So I had access to the back end of her account; I was in control of it. I was afraid of predators on the Internet trying to contact her, you know? When she was 12, that wasn’t so much of an issue. But when she was 15 and she had millions of followers, it was. She had a lot of adult men trying to speak to her. She never engaged with any of that, but I was always there to block and delete and block and delete.
TikTok is definitely another thing; I could not have access to her TikTok, so I wasn’t able to control that in the way that I could the Instagram. But she was very good about maintaining a close watch on anything inappropriate; she just immediately blocked anyone who wasn’t there for the right reasons.
Ella was in a good position in that she had parents who worked in the industry and were able to help her navigate it. We were very adamant about having management, not negotiating deals on her own, always having an adult present… like with the events that she was going to, or photo shoots, she was not allowed to do any of that by herself.
A lot of young girls and boys see this path to success, right? It seems like an easy path — ‘I can make all this money, I can be famous. People will send me free things. I won’t have to work a 9-to-5 job.’ And that does exist, but it’s the same thing as saying, ‘I want to be a pro athlete.’ You really need to have a backup plan. That was also the case with Ella; she was always going to school, and she was working hard. But she was financially independent by the time she was 16.
“Ella was financially independent by the time she was 16.”
SK: Wow. What was that like for you, Ella? And what was that like for you, Kara? That has to shift the power dynamic…
KM: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. That’s very correct.
EM: It definitely gave me a sense of freedom. I could do certain things that I wanted to do, like trips or things with my friends, that you usually would have to ask your parents to give you money for. I didn’t have to do that. So that was really nice. But my parents always instilled in my head, ‘You need to save your money, you need to invest your money.’ And even now, I’m very careful about my money because of them.
KM: We’re very fortunate that she is so frugal, because it would be very easy to have someone who’s 18 and just blowing through cash. We really tried to make sure she understood, ‘Your agent takes this percentage of your money. You think you made this much, but in the end, you made this much, and then you have to pay taxes, and after you pay taxes at this astronomical amount, this is what’s left.’ That’s a hard thing to conceptualize when you’re 12; by the time you’re 15, it’s still very abstract. But Ella really wanted to be in control of it. She wanted to know how much money she had and where it was going.
At the very beginning, I had to encourage her, like, ‘You had a great year. You worked really hard. If you want to purchase this special bag for yourself, you can do that.’ I want her to enjoy some of the hard work.
I also always said, ‘You want to have the option to get out if you don’t want to do this anymore.’ If in five years, you’re like, ‘I’m exhausted from posting content. I don’t want my personal life on the internet anymore.’ If you’re smart about what you’re doing with your money now, you can do that.
SK: Did you have moments like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe she’s making this much money’?
KM: Yeah, I have that moment every time she tells me about a new deal that she gets! I’m like, what? I’m constantly in awe and amazed at it. You had a good point when you said this shifts the power dynamic. Because if she really wanted to do something that I thought was a bad idea, there’s nothing I can do to stop her. It’s not hard now, because she’s 20. It was much harder when she was 15, 16. That was probably when she first realized, ‘I have the ability to do something I want to do on my own without you.’ If I took away her phone, she could just buy a new one, right?
She never really tried to leverage her financial situation to get what she wanted, because we were fairly supportive of what she wanted to do. But there were definitely times we struggled over those teenage years, and it was more my fear, my wanting to control things. A lot of it came from a place of wanting to protect her from an environment that could be dangerous on some levels. I was always worried about that, and always pushing her to be aware.
SK: Ella, do you remember the first big splurge you made?
EM: Oh my gosh. The Dior Saddle bag. I was freaking out about it.
KM: We were in Soho, and she was having a full-blown panic attack, making the decision. And I was the one saying, ‘You are allowed. You’ve worked really hard.’ I think you were 16 when you bought that.
SK: Kara, did you ever consider being Ella’s manager, or blending that relationship?
KM: No. My main goal for Ella, once she started being approached by a lot of brands and she had a sizable following, was to immediately find her a manager. I knew that was not my wheelhouse. To me, as a businesswoman, the most important thing is the people you surround yourself with to be successful. So we looked [for that] — that she had the right people surrounding her who were going to take her to the right path to build a long-term career.
SK: Kara, what advice do you have for parents who have a child interested in content creation and influencing?
KM: For me, I wanted to be supportive of Ella. It was a creative outlet for her. She didn’t mention it, but she had a blog, too, and she literally spent hours upon hours learning how to do a blog, how to do the writing, how to upload the pictures. And then that parlayed into YouTube, and she learned how to edit all her own YouTubes.
That was what her passion was, so I wanted to support that. If you have a child who’s creative, I would support them wanting to invest their time in something creative and interesting.
Depending on how old they are, I do think you really have to be involved. Certain children are very mature and can handle some negativity coming their way. The bullying that comes with a public account, the mental toll that that takes on a child… that’s where, as a parent, you really have to know your child and if they’re capable of being able to deflect that and not digest it and take it personally. That was the hardest thing for me to watch with Ella at different times in her life. Now, at 20, she gets very little of that. But when she was 15 and hugely popular all of a sudden, she had a lot of it.
So, as a parent, I would encourage a child’s creativity. I would encourage a child’s dream, but I would also balance that. Go for it, but you also have to continue working hard at school. And then, if something becomes incredibly successful and lucrative, you make those decisions incrementally as you get there.
SK: I love that you two are making mother-daughter content now. It seems like a really lovely and maybe unexpected bonus that this is something that’s allowing you to spend time together…
KM: Oh, it’s been so much fun. I love it. It’s great because it gives me an excuse to get to see her every week. It’s funny, because now I’ll get invited to events with Ella, and we’ll go together. And everyone’s like, ‘Oh my god, your mom’s here.’ So I’m like the internet mom that they all know.
It’s also been such a wonderful creative outlet for me. Having been in fashion for my entire career, and just having gone back for my Master’s two years ago, I missed getting to be creative. But also getting to do it with my daughter? What could be better?
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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