In what now looks like a state of prelapsarian innocence, I hadn’t heard of Joelle Joanie Siwa – or JoJo Siwa, as the five-year-olds know her – until my daughter asked for her on Alexa a few months ago. “Play JoJo Siwa,” she said, and has been saying ever since. At my kids’ birthday party in January, they received JoJo Siwa-branded diaries and accessories. In the local pharmacy, there is a whole rack of JoJo Siwa hair guff next to the milk. This week there was a book fair at their school, where you’d think you’d be safe, but no. In among the volumes of Pete the Cat and shark books, there she was – JoJo & Bow Bow: The Posh Puppy Pageant, one of a series of books “written” by Siwa.
There are worse kids’ internet phenomena out there, but the breadth of the Siwa franchise, and the glittery hold she has on kindergarten-age girls, makes her one of the most annoying. Siwa, who is 16 and comes from Nebraska, sprang to fame on the back of the Lifetime TV show Dance Moms. But it was her YouTube channel, JoJo Siwa vlogs, that launched her pop career and everything that came afterwards: a 52-city US tour, endless spinoffs, and her presence in our house every day.
Siwa’s image is brash and cartoonish, and the songs are horrible – ostensibly they’re all about standing up to bullying (a typical line from her 2016 single Boomerang runs “I don’t really care about what they say / I’mma come back like a boomerang”). But, as with a lot of stars in that space, the cost of Siwa accessories has probably done more to encourage bullying than diminish it.
Still, I tell myself she’s harmless, particularly since my kids don’t understand what celebrity is yet. “Is JoJo Siwa real?” they ask, and I have no idea what to say. “I mean, she exists,” I say. “But she’s acting.” They have no interest in this. And when they ask, “Can we go on a playdate with her?” I’m actually relieved. I’d rather they thought of her as a girl in the neighbourhood than as an unreachable star they aspire to be.
I’m also trying to stay open-minded. Even though Siwa looks like a Matt Lucas character and sounds like someone doing an impression of their own tinnitus, going the full out-of-touch judge doesn’t help anyone. I once overlooked the terrible gravitational weight of parental disapproval and bad-mouthed Ryan’s World – a multimillion-dollar YouTube channel based on a kid called Ryan playing with toys – telling my daughter his mother’s voice was annoying and the videos were dumb, and she burst into tears of sorrow.
If I’m going to get them off Siwa, it will have to be through stealth. It’s tough to compete with the kind of marketing precision that throws unicorns, hair bows and “gems” at five-year-olds. But last week, after watching videos of the astronaut Chris Hadfield on the international space station, we put on David Bowie. You’d think they’d never heard music before. One of my kids stopped in her tracks and looked as if she was about to cry. Every day, since then, she has asked for “the space song”. The fightback has begun.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
