 But if I took my hand and like, hey. I'm only gonna say it one more time, you're gonna lose the privilege to eat dinner. My bedroom was taken away for seven months. Julie has asked that we not show her face. I said love everyone, treat them kindly too. When your heart is filled. Taking away a child's bed for seven months. My bedroom was taken away for seven months and then you give it back a couple of weeks ago. I don't think our viewers know that. Making a child cry by brandishing scissors and threatening to cut off the head of one of their stuffed animals. If you cut one more thing in my house, I'm going to take the scissors. Look at me, and I'm gonna cut its head off. Because I love you so much. These are just some of the things that Ruby Frank of the Eight Passengers family channel has filmed herself doing on the Eight Passengers channel. I'm only gonna say it one more time and then you're gonna lose the privilege to eat dinner. And yet Ruby Frank sees nothing wrong with the way she films and posts her parenting methods. I have made my content around my children for years and my children are getting older. Before you know it in a handful of years, all of my children will be gone and I have a real powerful message. And has even gone on to lecture others on how to properly parent. I have grown in wisdom, I've learned, I have shifted and changed and I have so much to offer other moms. For the last seven years, Ruby and her husband, Kevin, alongside their six children, Sherry, Chad, Abby, Julie, Russell and Eve have been the stars of the Eight Passengers family channel. Which was once one of the most popular family channels and now one of the most controversial. The YouTube channel has been clicked on more than a billion times and shows the Frank's daily lives, sometimes mundane and sometimes dramatic. Russell, it's okay. What happened? It's okay. Everyone's safe. It's okay. The channel has attracted millions of subscribers, garnering the Frank family lots of YouTube ad revenue. The fans see the channel as a way to peek into the lives of a loving devoutly Mormon family as they deal with common household issues like forgotten lunches or sibling rivalry. But to many people on YouTube, the channel has a much darker side. To their critics, Ruby and Kevin Frank are abusive to their kids, hungry for fame, shameless in the exploitation of their children and overall grotesque examples of bad parenting. But a lot of these clips are concerning because it revolves around your child not being able to eat and not being able to be provided food. The Eight Passengers YouTube channel is a family channel. They would recall the kids when the kids didn't want to be on camera. They would remove their kids' beds and make them sleep on the floor as punishment. And they even sent one of their kids to like a behavioral wilderness camp to make a behavior. So what are the parents of the Eight Passengers family channel guilty of? Well, that's for you to decide yourself. Hello friends and internet acquaintances. Welcome or welcome back to another video on my channel covering internet controversies and people who have gone too far on social media. So if you like that kind of thing, then definitely subscribe if you want to. And if you like this video, give it a like if you want to. If you're wondering why my voice in this video sounds incredibly sexy, but I look a little bit more like death than usual, it's because I'm sick. I mean, I'm sick of family channels, but also just sick in general. But life happens and nothing's gonna stop me from continuing to live laugh love. So here we are. And in today's video, we're talking about the controversies of the Eight Passengers family channel and how that family channel completely fell apart and where they are today. There's a lot of people who are very concerned for the children of Eight Passengers because the children of the Eight Passengers family channel have had their most intimate and private moments filmed and posted online. They've had zero boundaries in their life, zero privacy. Julie has asked that we not show her face. Do you want to tell us what happened? I think I already, I may have already explained it. Her face looks very sore. On one side of her face, it's pretty rough, pretty swollen. All their childhood moments, whether embarrassing or special, have been blasted publicly. She's like, mom, I peed the bed, which is not like her. She pees the bed maybe like once every eight months. Can you see through this? Please don't look. Is it cozy? And worst of all, their parents have been monetizing all of these moments. And I'm telling you, I was making millions, and I left it. The story of the Eight Passengers family channel is like so many other family channels out there, not only a tragic story, but an incredibly large warning sign because this stuff is going to continue happening if more safeguards aren't put in place for family channels. And the real question throughout this entire story is do children have the ability and the right to consent to being filmed and posted for monetary gain on social media? I'd love to know what you think about that question after hearing the story of Eight Passengers. The Eight Passengers family channel started out with Ruby, the mother, filming pretty mundane and basic videos. One of the first Eight Passengers videos was their youngest daughter, Eve's gender reveal party. The Frank's youngest daughter has spent her entire life growing up under a camera with millions witnessing her every developmental milestone. But even before Eve's birth, the couple, Ruby and Frank, were filming and uploading random videos from their life to YouTube. Ruby and Frank, who met in college in Utah and married in the year 2000, have been sporadically posting videos since at least 2012, when they taped themselves at a rally supporting fast food chain Chick-fil-A's anti gay marriage crusade. Okay, this is us waiting in line to eat at Chick-fil-A because we're supporting marriage between man and woman. And for the most part, Ruby has always been the one running the show. Kevin, her spouse, plays more of a supporting role in the vlogs and mainly focuses on his job as a professor of civil engineering at Brigham Young University. In the early years, and also, let's be real, kind of in general, Ruby's vlogs are a little rough around the edges. Ah! Before you think this is picture perfect. Especially in the early years, it seemed like Ruby was just collecting home videos and posting them online, not really thinking or maybe considering that people were watching them, even though she was making these videos public to the entire world. Let's take your temperature. Do you know what that number says? It says 100.7. Yes. But like many family channels out there, people loved watching the adorable children of the eight passengers. Like I've said before, children have this certain likability when it comes to social media because they're not really aware of what social media is. So they're more of their authentic selves when they're being filmed. And of course, children are adorable and cute. Does that mean that we should post tons of videos of children online for the entire world to see? In my opinion, no. But because Ruby's children had an adorable charisma about them, the channel gained a small group of devoted followers. And before long, Ruby was posting three to four videos a week of her children's daily lives. By 2019, the channel was nearing a million subscribers. And the Franks received tons of sponsorship opportunities. You ever! They were well on their way to becoming one of the most successful family vlog channels on YouTube. But this success didn't last too long as really negative and concerning clips that Ruby had posted began to resurface on YouTube. And people started creating entire complications of some of the really concerning and strange ways that Ruby would parent and discipline her children all while filming this and uploading them onto YouTube. What if I took my hand and I hit you like that? Would that be crossing the boundary? Yeah. I have a really, really good reason for just getting in your boundary. I think the thing that really blows my mind with what Ruby filmed and posted isn't just her methodology of parenting, but also the lack of concern for giving her children any privacy. Everything that comes into this house belongs to her. It belongs to me. Honey, I'm not gonna make you go. I thought you just didn't wanna go, but like if it's gonna make you cry. The things she was willing to post and share about her children, just to me feels incredibly disrespectful. Like if this is what she's filming and posting online publicly, what is she doing behind the scenes? That is the question that comes to mind for me personally. So here are some of the most concerning things that Ruby posted that caused the eight passengers family channel to get into a lot of controversy. The first major eight passengers scandal broke out at the height of the channel's success. Ruby was filming herself sitting in her car and responding to a text message from Eve's kindergarten teacher who was very concerned about the fact that Eve had been sent to school with no lunch. I just got a text message from Eve's teacher and she said that Eve did not pack a lunch today and can I bring a lunch over to the school? This happens quite often when you're having raising children because I know that her teacher is uncomfortable with her being hungry and not having a lunch. And it would ease her discomfort if I came to the school with a lunch. But I responded and just said Eve is responsible for making her lunches in the morning and she actually told me she did pack a lunch. So the natural outcome is she's just going to need to be hungry and hopefully, hopefully nobody gives her food and nobody steps in and gives her a lunch. I mean, obviously this would concern any caring person watching as Ruby is ignoring the concerns of a teacher who's saying, hey, your daughter is not eating today and also saying that she hopes that no one gives her daughter any food. It seems extremely harsh and an odd thing to be so strict on, at least to me personally, I'm a big believer that adequate nutrition at a young age is so, so essential for the building blocks of your health. So people were just really upset and concerned by this clip. So during this first part, Ruby flat out says that this happens often where her kids don't have a lunch and teachers call to ask her to bring one in for them because they don't want their students going hungry, obviously, because also statistically speaking, it does have an effect on how they learn. But you know, apparently a tiny, tiny child is responsible for making and bringing her own lunch to school every day. And Ruby really had to add that she hopes that nobody gives her kid any food and that her kid basically goes hungry throughout the day, which leads me to wonder where I'm supposed to begin with this because it's not good. First of all, why are you relying on an elementary school student to make and pack their own lunch every day? Then not long after Eve's lunch debacle, if you wanna call it that, I guess, the Franks threw more gasoline to the fire when they posted a sit down video in 2019 about the absence of their oldest son. They said he had been expelled from school the reasons why were never fully revealed. And as punishment, they sent him to 10 weeks at the Anasazi Foundation Wilderness Therapy Program, an outdoor intervention camp that, according to its website, was designed to help 13 to 17-year-old troubled youth as well as young adults up to 25 with depression, substance abuse, and other emotional or behavioral concerns. This is a chance for a reset, like a start over, like a do-over, like a fresh beginning. Yeah, so the idea is with wilderness therapy is if you can survive with these peers in the wilderness with nothing more than a close on your back and a couple of field supplies, then there's nothing in this world that you can't tackle. Maybe if your child is acting out enough to get expelled, you should examine your parenting methods and the fact that you're shoving a camera in your child's face 24-7 and posting embarrassing moments of them online. I mean, I feel like that would make any child act out. Maybe just me though, I'm not a child psychologist. But Ruby and Kevin stood by, even though their child got expelled. Sorry, I'm laughing, but just like, come on, you know, come on. But even though Ruby and Kevin's child got expelled and was dealing with these behavioral issues, they stood by their incredible parenting method. So you're probably wondering, what did Chad do? Okay, we're not even going to entertain that stuff, but it's an accumulation of things over years, well before we ever started YouTubeing or well before we ever got on the social media. And it's reached a point where Chad needs to develop some very basic maturity and skills that he's going to need as an adult. When Chad was finally sprung from Anasazi, I'm sorry, I'm roughing, it's not funny, I just sprung from him. There was a mainly positive reunion episode. Oh my gosh. But this positivity in the family would not last for very long. In general, the audience started finding clips showing that Ruby treated Chad a little bit differently than the other children in the family. So every Tuesday, the alumni services come out to take pictures of you and send them to your parents. And every single time the alumni services would come out, they would say, people keep calling the office saying free Chad, they get constant calls to the alumni service, and people are telling them to free Chad. And worst of all, about a month later after Chad got back from this wilderness therapy program, he landed in hot water again after pranking his younger brother Russell by waking him up in the middle of the night and telling him the family was going to Disneyland. I mean, I feel like it's kind of an adorable prank, like it's kind of funny, sorry, I mean, you know. But because he pranked his younger brother by saying that the family is going to Disneyland, Ruby decided that the adequate punishment would be to take away Chad's bed for seven months. My bedroom was taken away for seven months and then you give it back like a couple weeks ago. I don't think her viewers know that. He's just sleeping on a beanbag. He's just sleeping on a beanbag. I can't believe he survived this. Chad survived? It just feels like the punishment does not fit the crime here. And so, I mean, people were again upset about this because what, you're having your 14 year old child sleep without a bed for seven months? So at this time, a lot more people started talking about the things that Ruby was posting on the eight passengers family channel and stories questioning the eight passengers' parenting started popping up in mainstream press as well. But the Franks tried to fight back, sending out cease and desist letters to many of YouTubers who were criticizing them. Numerous defamatory statements about my clients. By way of example, and without limitation, your videos falsely claim, among other things, that my clients are starving their children. The reason I said that was because you literally would not go and give your five year old daughter lunch when Ruby's sitting at home all day and the daughter's at home, oh, I forgot my lunch, mom, please, I'm so hungry. Ruby's like, great, I hope you stay hungry. At first, the controversy was seemingly, in some ways, kind of great for business. The more people filmed, the more subscribers initially the Franks collected. At their height, the eight passengers family channel had 2.5 million followers. Nowadays, that number has dipped to 2.3 million followers. At its peak, eight passengers was pulling around 200,000 views a day, generating by some estimates $1,600 a day in advertising revenue, or over $500,000 a year. But by the spring of 2020, clicks finally started to slip as the heat continued to rise on the family and nervous sponsors began to back away. Clorox, Norton, Sargento, Narwhal, and Rugable all canceled their deals with eight passengers. By some estimates, the sponsorship money that the eight passengers channel received has raked in about 2.5 million dollars from Ruby's point of view. The channel's backlash is a classic case of cancel culture run amok. Very many people have accused me of exploiting my children. Now I am very aware of people online who hate me, who would like to cancel me, who would like to see me either burn in his eyes, and told or disappear off the face of the earth, and I'm not going anywhere. I think that a lot of the downfall of the eight passengers family channel is because Ruby had no ability to take any accountability for where she may have gone wrong and try and make changes to her parenting methods or at the very least what she showed online and posted. Instead, it seemed like the more people that criticized her parenting methods, the further she would kind of dig into it and become more and more strict. And because of that, they eventually lost a lot of their fans and most of their sponsors. I always try and be cognizant of not judging someone's parenting based on snippets that they post online. But I have to say for these family channels, you post so much of your parenting online that you really are leaving it up to the masses to judge and interpret your parenting how they choose to. And then you get mad at people for judging and interpreting your parenting when you are posting so much of that content online. I mean, what is anyone really supposed to do? And a lot of people just blatantly disagree with the way that eight passengers choose to parent. And I also think for a lot of the adults who watched and were horrified by eight passengers, it reminded them of really traumatizing parenting methods that they may have experienced, that they know didn't work for them and caused them trauma. So of course people are going to be concerned. In May of 2020, a change.org petition was created demanding that Utah's division of child and family services investigate the Franks. It quickly drew more than 16,000 signatures and other concerned audience members opted to call CPS directly. Meanwhile, these children have zero privacy on the eight passengers' vlogs. The cameras seem to be shoved in the children's faces around the clock. And the children have made frequent pleas asking their parents to turn the cameras off. Julie has asked that we not show her face. Do you want to tell us what happened? Do you know what mating is? Do you want to learn? Julie has a kind of poppy head. Do you want me to tell you? No. It's one thing to film a cute dance sequence with your family. And it's a whole other thing for your children to be saying, please don't film me. As you're filming them talking about extremely sensitive and embarrassing issues and posting it online. On camera, some of the older Frank children have complained that the show has left them bullied and friendless at school and at times publicly humiliated. Oh, I have no friends. You can play with friends? No, like I don't have friends. And that's only what they've been willing to admit on the show. With their mom taping them. Ruby has said in vlogs that she doesn't think anxiety is real or anxiety is a choice. Anxiety as horrible and debilitating as it feels. You still have choice. And that's one of the things that I am responsible for teaching my children. In a clip that resurfaced on TikTok when Ruby's daughter woke up and needed to go to the hospital because she was feeling extremely nauseous, Ruby filmed herself getting ready in the bathroom for the hospital. Kevin just came in. He's like, I think we need to take a shower. Do you mind getting to the room? I said, well, let me take a shower and then I'll be out. It's been an hour. And it seems like in general, Ruby is more concerned about appearing like a diligent mother than actually being one. Every problematic instance on the channel is from Ruby wanting to appear like an authoritative parent. And for Ruby, it's like every action has to be met with an extreme reaction. And Ruby has even threatened to take away food if they misbehave. I'm only gonna say it one more time and then you're gonna lose the privilege to eat dinner. The same could be said about a December 22nd, 2021 video titled Christmas with No Presence, Live Couples Workshop. The video was uploaded on the channel Connection, an online workshop that provides parenting advice. There has been a lot of reports that Connection is very cult-like. But straight up, the mom and dad have started a cult. I'm not even joking you. They have started a weird, weird cult. I have to say, there's nothing quite like Connection's out there. This is a place where you're going to get not advice, you're going to get principled feedback. A lot of people have said that Connection is just bad news, including those within Ruby's own family circle. The YouTube channel called Deru Crew Vlogs, which is actually run by Ruby's sister. And in the comments of their videos, they've been answering a lot of questions about Ruby and Kevin and why they no longer speak to the family. Does your family still have a relationship to Ruby and her family? I haven't seen her at any of your holiday festivities with all of your other family. Just curious if something happened. To which Julie, Ruby's sister replied, Ruby has chosen to distance herself. Hopefully one day she will come around. Then we've got enough of a comment here saying so sad to hear about Ruby distancing herself from the rest of the family. But honestly, I'm not surprised. She is absolutely brainwashed with the Connection's cult. Very scary, sending love to you. And Julie's actually liked that comment. In the video, Christmas with No Presence, Ruby talked about how her two youngest children had been showing long patterns of selfishness. Therefore, they would not receive any physical gifts for Christmas that year, but the gift of truth. Kevin and I, we have two, well, we have six children. The two youngest are showing long patterns of selfishness. So, Kevin and I have decided that we are going to give the gift of truth to them this year for Christmas. We are going to give them the gift of boundaries and we're going to give them the gift of repentance. I mean, I'm not going to judge every single individual choice that someone has for parenting, but once again, this is just so much information on their children's childhood that it feels definitely very invasive. Recently, in May of 2022, Ruby uploaded a meltdown to YouTube. Essentially, her 13-year-old daughter, Julie, came home from school and told her mother that her PE class would be doing a fun flash mob and performing a TikTok dance for the school. Ruby determined that this TikTok dance was far too inappropriate for Julie to be participating in, so Ruby went into the school and met with the assistant principal. She said, every, she said, in the fall semester and in the spring semester, we need to have a performance of flash mob. It's a great way to get in, it's efficient, if we can flood it, they have fun with it and they are able to check off their performance for their grade. I said, my problem is the choice of songs. And she says, well, all the songs were proved by me. You are not protecting them. You are not protecting them. You are introducing them to the world. And you're saying it's okay. You're saying that you support this. Crying there, I was, I was very strong at start, but no, I don't cry. In part two of this meltdown of sorts, Ruby storms out of the school shaking in red face. Once she gets to the car, she starts screaming, sobbing and verbally attacking the school officials. She spoke with. I am so upset, I am so angry, I can scream. So I went in and I had an appointment with principal and she had the assistant principal who never responded to me like he said he would. And then, I guess there's two assistant principals. So there was three of us. She invited me in, we sat down and she said, my head is shaking all over the place. This video, let's see if I can study you. In a later video, Ruby revealed she had taken the issue up with the school district board. Of course, parents can take issue with what's being shown to their children at school. In many ways, it's natural to worry about your children being exposed to bad things at school, but many found Ruby's concerns completely hypocritical. This is the same woman who has documented her children's lives since they were babies. Every single detail about her children, from birth to present day, is available publicly online for anyone to view, including pit files and graphic girls. Her videos are so detailed that many online viewers have figured out her address and the school her children attend. Not only that, but her daughters have public social media accounts, accounts with photos of them in their swimsuits, photos where you can capture snapshots of their feet or edit them however you please, unfortunately. Hard time filling out the bosom of a dress. Also find very mature, I even made her put on a sports bra. I'm like, you gotta put something on underneath this. And Abby found something that shuts her belly here. Something I've noticed personally about Ruby is she's very cognizant of controlling what her children view online. She doesn't let them have a phone. She doesn't want them doing inappropriate dances. And yet what she posts of them online is completely exposed with absolutely no limits. It seems like Ruby is very focused on controlling what her children view and how her children behave, but not as much interested in controlling how they're being exposed publicly on the internet. Recently, another video clip resurfaced where Ruby expressed her distaste at the idea of her eldest daughter moving out and leaving for college because she would not be able to control her anymore. I just keep saying, she's like 12 minutes away. And I work here, so. I know. For me, it's not the distance or the time. It's, I don't have that stewardship over her the way I have. Now that she's moving out and she's been on her own, I can feel that stewardship that revelation on her behalf has been like this mantle of power that I've had on behalf of my child. I can feel it lifting. Which leads me to the Frank family today as this statement would come full circle in September of 2022 when Sherry Frank, the eldest daughter of the eight passengers opened up about the dangers of connections. The website Ruby runs to share parenting advice Through an Instagram story, Sherry said, I know that there are many rumors circulating online about my family. While it is true that I am not in contact with my immediate family and I do not support the extreme beliefs of connections, please remember that this is my real family. Despite good intentions, speculating rumors and gossip doesn't help us. I'd like to ask for privacy for me and my family as we work through this very difficult situation. Please know that many are working on this situation and I hope one day we can be whole again. So it seems that major trouble is happening within eight passengers and the family has started to completely fracture. Sherry also responded to a woman who had some negative things to say about Ruby and connections. Sherry liked this post and commented by thanking the woman for her courage. So it's clear that Sherry does not support how her parents have brought her up or at least the more extreme turn they've taken recently with connections. Ruby's sisters have also come out publicly to confess that Ruby is no longer on speaking terms with the family. Ruby's sister Julie Drew wrote on her Drew Crew Vlogs channel, connections has torn families apart. It is not a good group to be affiliated with and hopefully one day she will realize it about her sister, Ruby. There have been more concerning rumors surrounding the eight passengers family. Most have stemmed from the subreddit eight passengers snark. I feel hesitant to bring these up because I don't want to dive too much into these rumors. First off, because Sherry has spoken out and said that rumors and all this speculation is not helpful. Also personally, I like to usually just speak on what has been public knowledge and not speculate too much just for the danger of being wrong. But since these are such strong rumors and possibly very dangerous rumors, I'll just mention them briefly. Allegedly at this point, Kevin has forsaken connections and has moved out and separated from Ruby. While Ruby has gone deeper into connections and the Moms of Truth Facebook page that she runs, the co-founder of Connections has also allegedly moved in with Ruby as well. And the most concerning allegation is that Ruby still has her youngest four children, Abby, Julie, Russell, and Eve and has supposedly pulled them out of school. She reportedly left them alone while at a connections conference for six days and CPS has reportedly been involved and called to the homes numerous times. Once again, I wanna mention that these are just rumors, but because they are so serious and could mean that especially the youngest four children are in a dangerous situation, I did feel it was important to mention them, though I wouldn't usually mention rumors. As people feared, Ruby's brutal helicopter style parenting only scared away her children. Amid this family drama, Ruby has remained an active member of the Moms of Truth Facebook page for private Facebook group. I don't know how Facebook works. I haven't been on it in a long time. This group was co-created with Hilda Brandt after the two spent months uploading content to their Connections YouTube channel and Ruby has fully embraced this spokeswoman for parenting role, even though her children seemed to distance themselves from her and her methods clearly didn't work the best on the eight passengers YouTube channel. So I don't quite understand who's wanting to trust her as an authority figure, but okay. For Ruby and the rest of the Frank family, the eight passengers family channel is long gone and are simply now, in my opinion, receipts of the trauma that the Frank children had to endure and evidence as to why Ruby Frank shouldn't be trusted as an authority figure on parenting. Ruby has announced plans to release a book to help guide those who choose to listen. And now these exact methods that she filmed and posted herself doing on the eight passengers channel, she's passing on to other parents to continue replicating this methodology. Jodi and I are teachers. We are teaching you principles of truth. So if you are here to learn how to resolve your own conflicts in your life using principles, you're in the right place. If you are here to offer feedback that's not based in principle, but that is based in your own history, being politically correct, according to you as you interpret, if this is opinion, this is not the place for you. And as we come to an end on this video and an end on eight passengers, my main takeaway, honestly, is that Ruby's ego was the final downfall of eight passengers and that her ego fully took control of her. And in a desperate attempt to come across as the perfect mom, she showcased on the internet exactly why she isn't one and may have really caused severe damage to her children. They would recall the kids where the kids didn't wanna be on camera. They would remove their kids' beds and make them sleep on the floor as punishment. And it even said one of the kids to like a behavioral wilderness camp to make a behavior. But I think just to focus on Ruby's parenting would be to disregard the larger story and the larger question, which is do children have a right to consent to being filmed and monetized? Let me know what you think in the comments and thank you so much for watching this video. Comment down below any other family channels you think I should cover as well. The more and more I look into the issues of family channels, the more heartbreaking it is for me and the more concerned I get. So I definitely think it's an important issue to continue talking about. And I hope you guys are all doing well and I'm not doing well currently, but I will be resting after this and trying to get well. And I'll see you in the next video. Bye.