Evan Lee was in elementary school when he became the linchpin of his family’s business. With his neatly combed hair and dimpled smile, he was a charm bomb, conveying on camera both the cheerful sincerity of a Boy Scout and the precocious charisma of a whiz kid. Evan, eventually known to 7 million YouTube subscribers as EvanTube, was one of the earliest kid influencers, internet-famous for playing with toys.

EvanTube blew up by accident in October 2011, when a freelance videographer named Jared Lee sculpted the entire cast of the Angry Birds video game out of modeling clay for his 5-year-old son. Evan and Jared decided to make a home video, like a show and tell. Situated at the family’s dining table, Evan earnestly explained each character’s special powers, according to the video game.

“Yellow Bird goes super fast,” he said, in a halting voice, glancing occasionally toward his father, who was filming. He picked up a lumpy pale bird. “This is White Bird. It flies and drops white bombs and looks like a lemon when he dies.” A tiny smile revealed baby teeth.

Evan is 19 now and looking back at his life. “My brain was still developing when I was that young,” so he doesn’t remember every detail of how it all happened, he said at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he is finishing his first year. He can’t recall why he wanted his own YouTube channel, only that he and his father sat at the computer and chose the name “EvanTube.” Evan and Jared uploaded their video. Within several months, it had 70,000 views. Ultimately, it reached 11 million.

At Christmas that year, Jared bought a haul of Angry Birds merch and recorded as Evan showcased them, one by one, in front of the family’s dazzling Christmas tree. Since the show-and-tell video, his patter had become polished.

“Thank you for watching my video,” he said in his outro. “Happy New Year. Please subscribe.” The video has nearly 13 million views. It was obvious how, before the camera, Evan “came alive,” as his mother, Alisa Lee, put it recently.

Toys began arriving at the Lee family doorstep, boxes and boxes and boxes of them. Mash’ems, Lego and Nerf products. Barbie Dreamhouses, Skylanders games, anything “Star Wars.” Jared bought lots of toys too. Evan unboxed, reviewed, explained, built and played with toys and games after school while his father recorded him.

Soon Evan’s younger sister, Jillian Lee, who was almost 4, began to appear as Evan’s foil and sidekick. As they grew older, they would do “challenges,” drinking gross smoothies and dumping dog food, ketchup and sauerkraut on each other’s heads. Jared would stay up late editing, layering in sound and special effects. Making money on YouTube was a new frontier, and in 2012, Jared enlisted a creator network to help him maximize advertising rates and make brand deals. Views converted to income. Some months, EvanTube was grossing $100,000 from Google ads alone, according to Jared.

In 2014, it reached 1 million subscribers. Evan was 9.

“I don’t really know what my parents’ thought process was, putting me on the channel,” Evan said. “I didn’t think it was a big deal because I was living it.” By the time he was 10, EvanTube had enabled the Lees to establish a family trust, savings, 529 college funds and Coogan accounts. Both children already had Roth IRAs. Accountants said the Lees needed more write-offs and a bigger mortgage, so they purchased a $3 million six-bedroom, seven-bathroom modern villa inside a gated community in a Northern California suburb.

When it came to parenting, Jared and Alisa trusted their instincts. They never wanted to chase views by shocking or humiliating their children, as other YouTube parents did. And they didn’t want to vlog every day.

Jared was careful not to show his kids burping, picking their noses or in their underwear. The goal, he said, was always to come across as normal and wholesome: “Be likable. Get people to enjoy your presence and relate to you. That’s the thing.”

So when in middle school other kids began to tease and bully Evan, saying that his channel was “cringe” and that he was too old to be playing with toys, Evan was taken aback.

Around that time, “there was another thing I had to deal with,” Evan said. He recalled that in middle school, haters in the comments called him “spoiled,” and people told him things he had never considered before. His parents were “taking advantage” of him, they said, or “using you for money,” Evan said. “That definitely made me feel sad. Like, sad-angry.” He started telling his parents he didn’t want to review toys anymore and withdrew to his room.

Children as ‘commodities’

Evan Lee is coming of age when all parents, it seems, post videos of their children online, an untold number in the hopes of making money. The current titan of the kid influencers, inspired by EvanTube, is a 13-year-old named Ryan Kaji who started unboxing toys when he was 3. His Ryan’s World brand has had advertising deals with Lunchables and Legoland, a line of merch and a Nickelodeon television show. Conservative estimates put Ryan’s family earnings at $25 million annually. And though posters on Reddit rally around Ryan, saying he’s being exploited by his parents and deserves a shot at a normal life, his business associates disagree.

In an influencer economy, a breakthrough kid or family brand can be life-changing. In the cases of the most successful child influencers, “their great-grandkids are set for life,” said Chris Williams, CEO of PocketWatch, which partners with both Ryan’s World and EvanTube to make content and licensing deals.

A coalition of law professors, attorneys general and university students concerned about children’s rights is at work drafting language for state bills safeguarding the finances of minors who are also influencers. Laws have already been passed in Illinois, California, Minnesota and Utah, largely because of the efforts of an advocacy group called Quit Clicking Kids, which aims to “combat the monetization of children on social media,” according to its website.

But the activists’ concerns extend far beyond legal and financial protections. There is no ethical route for parents to trade on a child’s image online for profit, many say. Such transactions violate the child’s privacy — now and into the future, because a digital record is permanent. They stunt a child’s psychological development, replacing a sturdy identity with an idea of self “as a commodity for public consumption,” as former child actor Alyson Stoner said in a webinar recently. In Stoner’s view, the child influencer economy does damage by blurring the lines between work and home: In an influencer setting, a child’s director, scriptwriter and publicist is also the parent.

In the best-case scenario, what are the effects of a life lived online? When Evan was in middle school and living in the new house, he started asking his parents about money. Where was it? Wasn’t it his? Why couldn’t he spend it? The way his parents explained it, the money was for the family’s future and they were a team, Evan said.

“If I didn’t work on YouTube, we probably wouldn’t have been able to afford” private college, he said. Eventually, “I realized there is no way we would have made that much money unless my parents were involved,” he said. “An 8-year-old, 10-year-old, does not have the mind to keep a successful YouTube channel, generate that profit, work with brands.” He continued: “But if I was removed from the equation, there wouldn’t be a star.”

‘A pretty shy kid’

Even before Evan was born, Jared videotaped everything. For work, he shot weddings, corporate events, infomercials. He recorded Evan’s birth.

Clean-cut and well-spoken, Jared, an amateur bodybuilder, has long been a collector of mass-market toys and merchandise. In his basement he keeps his extensive comic book collection, neatly preserved, labeled and mounted on a long wall.

When Evan, at 5, became infatuated with Super Mario video games, his parents got him a Mario costume and photographed him grinning and holding a Mario plushy, an image that still hangs in the family home. In the Lee household, it was not unusual for the father to film his son playing with Angry Birds toys.

Also, “Evan was a pretty shy kid,” an “ ‘I’m-here-but-don’t-pass-me-the-ball’ kind of kid,” Jared said. So, from his and Alisa’s point of view, EvanTube initially served a pragmatic parenting purpose. The channel was like an extracurricular activity, “a way for him to just talk,” he said. “He didn’t have to talk to strangers. He was just talking to me.”

In the earliest days of YouTube, creators earned money in two ways: through a portion of the revenues from ads placed next to the videos and through sponsorships and brand deals. At the peak, the Lees were earning $1 million to $2 million a year, Jared said.

The magic was Evan. His audience was mostly kids his own age, who considered him, as one agency executive put it, their cool friend who got all the best toys for Christmas. Young viewers felt as if they were at Evan’s house, hanging out with him and his fun family, eating candy and experiencing the ecstasy of an avalanche of toys.

Evan didn’t mind being super- famous when he was 8. He hardly noticed it. If kids at school were watching EvanTube, they probably just thought, “Hey, this is my friend that I watch on my phone,” he said in a video he made later.

It hurt Evan when in the comments, a viewer called EvanTube “poopy pants,” and he didn’t like it when people at school called him “EvanTube” instead of his name. What he liked least was when his father wanted to record in public, especially when people he knew were there. In those instances, Evan felt “just shy and embarrassed,” he said. Starting when he was very young, Evan told his parents when he needed them to turn the camera off.

“I’ve told them, like, I just don’t want to record right now,” he said. “I want to play with my friends on the playground. And they got it.”