The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Mayci Neeley made a conscientious decision to stop featuring her children on social media.
“I had slowly been taking them offline a year prior to the show coming out,” Mayci, 31, wrote via her Instagram Stories on Sunday, July 26, referring to Mormon Wives’ season 1 premiere. “I was just seeing the negative side effect of having kids online that I just didn’t understand before. Kids aren’t content, and I guess I didn’t grasp that when I was first doing social media.”
Mayci, who worked as a social media influencer before landing a spot on Hulu’s hit reality TV series about young Mormon moms, is a mother of three. The MomTok star shares daughters Harlow, 5, and Charli, 12 months, with husband Jacob Neeley, in addition to son Hudson, 10, with late ex Arik Mack, who was killed in a car accident during her pregnancy at age 19.
Before marrying Jacob, 30, Mayci worked as an analyst with Goldman Sachs. She eventually pursued her passion for content creation full-time, well before Mormon Wives was greenlit. Hudson and Harlow would occasionally be featured in Mayci’s early uploads.
“I never forced my kids to do anything, but kids should not be the focal point of the content in my opinion,” Mayci stated on Sunday. “I just thought it was fun and silly, and I loved making videos until I started seeing that there were predators online.”
She continued, “I guess, being naive, I didn’t realize that there were creeps online probably watching the content.”
Mayci further realized that an onslaught of “haters came” in the wake of Mormon Wives’ highly-anticipated 2024 series premiere.
“I got some really nasty DMs about my kids and some weirdos were making fun of the way that they looked, which was absolutely vile and disgusting,” the Told You So author claimed. “In that moment, I was, like, ‘I’m done done.’ I also started seeing more about AI and [pedophiles] using kids’ faces specifically for explicit material, and that freaked me out.”
Overall, Mayci stressed that she opted to keep her kids offline out of “safety and privacy” concerns.
“I don’t want people coming up to my kids or recognizing 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 that [in] the next month or so, it just sucks because I LOVE sharing my kids and I kinda wish I could because they bring me the most joy.”
Mayci concluded, “They are my greatest accomplishment, and I just want to share some of the amazing moments. That’s why I still share them in a muted capacity. They are my world and the biggest part of my life, so it would also feel weird not sharing anything about them or sharing photos that they are in that I love.”
