North West got her own Instagram account in December, a few weeks after turning 12. Her brother Saint got his in August, at 10. Kim Kardashian’s kids are growing up with a public presence most adults never have to think about — and by the time North had her own profile, she’d already been on camera for years. She and her mother have run a joint TikTok account since North was small, and Kardashian mentioned at a 2024 conference in Hamburg that it had crossed 19 million followers, which is a strange number to say out loud about an eight-year-old’s dance videos.
Kardashian was on stage at the OMR Festival when she said it. Asked how she thinks about her kids and social media, she gave an answer that could apply to any parent handing a kid a phone, she mentioned,
Well, I would always think as a parent first, no matter what. – Kim Kardashian
Then she got specific — no devices at breakfast, none during meals, none in the car. Ordinary rules, except the account on the other end of them has an audience most adults would kill for.
She’s described what actually happens with those phones in more detail than you’d expect. North and her friends make short films. They do special-effects makeup tutorials. It sounds less like doomscrolling and more like a kid with a camera, which is its own kind of normal — until someone hits post.
The 2022 Fight Nobody Fully Explained
That’s roughly what happened in 2022. North was eight, and Kanye West said publicly that he didn’t want her on TikTok at all. Kardashian didn’t back down.
I am doing my best to protect our daughter while also allowing her to express her creativity … with adult supervision -Kim Kardashian
The account bio said an adult ran it. It didn’t say which one, or what “supervision” meant in practice, and the argument between North’s parents happened mostly in public while whatever they actually agreed on happened somewhere else.
North’s own career has started tangling with her father’s catalog in ways that are hard to untangle. She has a feature credit on “Talking,” a song with West and Ty Dolla $ign, and she’s performed it live with him. Last March she announced something called Elementary School Dropout — a title that only means anything if you already know West’s first album was The College Dropout. That’s the trade-off of being his kid with a platform: the work gets read through him whether or not that’s fair to her.
Money is somewhere in the background of all this, even if it’s not really about the kids. SKIMS raised $225 million last November at a $5 billion valuation — Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the round and said the company was on track for over a billion dollars in sales for the year. None of that touches North or Saint’s accounts directly. It’s just the scale of attention that follows anything with the family name on it, including, apparently, a 24-hour Instagram outage. North’s profile went dark in January and came back the next day, and nobody ever said why. A blip like that would be nothing for most families. For this one it became a news cycle.
Saint’s Account Raises Questions Nobody’s Answered
Saint’s account is where the open questions get harder to wave off. People reported, citing people close to the family, that Kardashian personally reviews and approves what he posts. Fine — but that’s one fact standing in for a lot of unknowns. Who’s answering his DMs? Who has the password? What happens the first time Saint wants to post something she says no to?
Instagram technically requires users to be 13, though Meta has started extending some of its Teen Account safety features to adult-run accounts built around younger kids. That’s a policy, not a window into any specific household. North turned 13 this year, which puts her on the platform legitimately in her own right now; anyone under 16 still needs a parent’s sign-off to turn off certain safety settings. What none of that governs is the actual judgment call — what photo gets uploaded, what stays in a permanent public record a 13-year-old didn’t ask for.
What Happens as Kim Kardashian’s Kids Grow Up Online
The Wests have had one fight over this in public already. The next one, if it comes, will look different, because North and Saint aren’t eight anymore. A parent can make every call for a kid that age. It gets messier once the kid has opinions about who she’s supposed to be online — and there’s no indication yet of what happens when North decides an old post doesn’t represent her, or wants something taken down that Kardashian once approved.
Kardashian hasn’t laid out the family’s actual rulebook, just pieces of it in interviews and statements years apart. What’s missing is the connective tissue: how much say North has now, whether that changes as she gets older, what happens to any money her account eventually makes. Every family with a kid in the public eye deals with some version of these questions. Few are dealing with them at this size.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is North West’s Instagram actually run by her, or by her parents?
Her bio reportedly said the account was parent-managed when it launched, which is standard for Meta accounts featuring kids under 13 — but nothing in the public record says how much day-to-day control North herself has over what gets posted.
Did Kanye West’s TikTok objection change anything?
Not publicly. North’s TikTok account is still active with her mother, and the argument doesn’t appear to have led to any announced change in how it’s run — just a public disagreement that was never fully resolved on the record.
Does the family make money directly from the kids’ accounts?
There’s no public reporting confirming any brand deals or paid content tied to North or Saint’s personal profiles specifically. The SKIMS numbers sometimes cited alongside this story are a separate, unrelated business.
