Is Ivanka using her children as props?
In 2016, Rocco Ritchie blocked his famous mother Madonna on Instagram because he had reportedly become fed up with the way she kept posting photos of him on social media.
The story goes that Rocco, then 15, bristled at his mother using his image to aggrandize herself as a great mom, or possibly to enhance her brand — as a global superstar who’s also relatable to fans because she goofs around with her teenage son.
Madonna certainly isn’t the first celebrity parent to face questions about how much she shares about her children on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. But no celebrity parent these days raises as many questions about parental choices around social media as Ivanka Trump.
It turns out that Donald Trump’s oldest daughter and senior White House assistant is very generous about sharing photos and news about her kids, 5-yearold Arabella, 3-year-old Joseph and 1-year-old Theodore.
Since her father Donald Trump was sworn into office, Ivanka has posted more than 150 kid-related photos of the three to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. This number appears to be somewhat higher than other famously over-sharing celebrity moms for this time period, including Kim Kardashian and even Madonna, who has turned her attention from Rocco to the young twin girls she recently adopted from Ethiopia.
Ivanka’s photos of her kids show them in the White House, at home, at landmarks around Washington, D.C., and at the family’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Arabella, Joseph and Theodore are undeniably cute and photogenic, but they also are snapped doing things (i.e. Arabella singing in Mandarin to China’s President Xi Jingping at Mar-a-Lago) that necessarily reflect well on their grandfather’s presidency, Ivanka’s role in the White House or Ivanka’s mom-entrepreneur persona and eponymous #WomenWhoWork fashion and life-style brand. Two separate shots of the kids in Palm Beach would make charming marketing collateral for Trump properties.
Given that many of Ivanka’s posts carry a sheen of self-promotion, it’s not surprising that the controversial first daughter faces pretty intense backlash on all of them, including those that feature her kids. A photo on Twitter of the kids visiting the U.S. Navy Museum in Washington, D.C., provoked people to accuse of her using her kids as “political props” or for “propaganda.”
The comments almost always steer clear of directly