Gallery
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 , 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.
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.
Discover Pinterest’s best ideas and inspiration for Ella mendelsohn. Get inspired and try out new things.
