The Secret Lives of Mormon Women star Mayci Neeley made a conscientious decision to stop featuring her children on social media.
“I had slowly taken it offline a year before the show came out,” Mayci, 31, wrote on her Instagram Stories on Sunday, July 26 Mormon women‘Season 1 premiere. “I just saw the negative side effect of having kids online that I just didn’t understand before. Kids aren’t happy, and I don’t think I understood that when I first got into social media.”
Mayci, who worked as a social media influencer before landing a spot on Hulu’s hit reality TV series about young Mormon mothers, is a mother of three. The MomTok star shares daughters Harlow, 5, and Charli, 12 months, with her husband Jacob Neeleyin addition to son Hudson, 10, with late ex Arik Mackwho died in a car accident while pregnant at the age of 19.
Before Mayci married 30-year-old Jacob, she worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs. Long before that, she pursued her passion for content creation full-time Mormon women gave the green light. Hudson and Harlow were occasionally featured in Mayci’s early uploads.
“I have never forced my children to do anything, but in my opinion children should not be the focus of the content,” Mayci said on Sunday. “I just thought it was fun and silly and I loved making videos until I saw there were predators on the internet.”
She continued: “I guess being naive I didn’t realize there were creeps on the internet who were probably looking at the content.”
Mayci also recognized that there was an onslaught of “haters” as a result Mormon women highly anticipated series premiere in 2024.
“I got some really nasty DMs about my kids and some weirdos made fun of their looks, which was absolutely vile and disgusting,” he said I told you claimed the author. “At that moment I thought, ‘I’m done, done.’ I also started seeing more about AI and (pedophiles) using children’s faces specifically for explicit material and that freaked me out.”
Overall, Mayci emphasized that she chose to keep her children offline for security and privacy reasons.
“I don’t want anyone to come up to my kids or recognize them,” she said, acknowledging that she “still needs to go through her old Instagram posts” and delete the family photos. “I’ll be working on it for the next month or so, it just sucks because I LOVE sharing my kids and I wish I could because they bring me the most joy.”
Mayci concluded, “They are my greatest achievement and I just want to share some of the amazing moments. That’s why I still share them in a muted form. They are my world and the biggest part of my life, so it would also feel strange not to share anything about them or share photos of me loving them.”
