We’ve put together discussion questions for The House of My Mother by Shari Franke that you can use with a book club or a class at school. We include sample answers, book club activities that will help you get more out of what you’ve read, and recommendations for more reading if you like this book.
Table of Contents
Book Synopsis
The House of My Mother is a memoir by Shari Franke, the oldest daughter of Ruby Franke, whose family vlogging channel 8 Passengers gained 2.5 million followers before Ruby’s 2023 arrest on aggravated child abuse charges. Shari provides an inside account of growing up under her mother’s camera and increasingly abusive parenting, which she argues existed even before the family’s YouTube fame. The memoir traces the family’s journey from their early years through Ruby’s rise as a family influencer, her involvement with Jodi Hildebrandt’s cult-like life coaching program ConneXions, and the eventual breakdown that led to Ruby isolating and severely abusing her youngest children.
Shari describes her childhood marked by emotional neglect, her mother’s obsession with projecting an image of perfect Mormon motherhood, and the psychological toll of performing family life for online audiences. After Ruby became entangled with ConneXions and eventually imprisoned Shari’s youngest siblings—leading to her arrest and conviction—Shari began her own healing journey through therapy. She wrote this memoir to reclaim her narrative, expose the dangers of family vlogging, and set the record straight about what really happened inside the Franke home, ultimately advocating against the exploitation of children for online content.
Read Shortform’s comprehensive guide to this book.
The House of My Mother Discussion Questions & Sample Answers
Along with discussion questions for The House of My Mother, we include sample answers you can use as prompts.
- What do you think motivated Ruby Franke to start family vlogging, and how did it change her approach to motherhood?
- Sample answer: I think Ruby was already obsessed with being seen as the perfect mother, and vlogging gave her a platform to showcase that image to millions of people. It wasn’t just about sharing family memories—it became her identity and her business. Once money and fame entered the picture, her children stopped being just her kids and became content creators, props for her brand. The fact that she wouldn’t even let them decorate their rooms because it would ruin the aesthetic really shows how the vlogging took priority over their actual wellbeing.
- How does Shari’s experience illustrate the potential harms of children growing up in the public eye through social media?
- Sample answer: Shari’s story really highlights how violating it is to have your entire childhood documented and monetized without your consent. She couldn’t have private moments—even when she was sick in the hospital, her mom was filming. And, beyond the privacy issue, she had to perform happiness or sadness on command for the camera. I can’t imagine how confusing that must be for a child’s emotional development, never knowing whether your feelings are real or just part of the performance your mom is directing.
- What role did the Mormon community and LDS values play in the Frankes’s story, both in their initial vlogging success and their later involvement with ConneXions?
- Sample answer: It seems as though the LDS community really embraced family vlogging as a form of missionary work and testimony, which helped Ruby justify what she was doing and gave her an instant audience. But that same religious framework also made the family vulnerable to someone like Jodi Hildebrandt, who could use religious language about righteousness and sin to manipulate them. The emphasis on obedience, perfection, and patriarchal family structures in their religious culture seemed to create an environment where this kind of abuse could flourish under the guise of godly parenting.
- In what ways did Jodi’s ConneXions program function as a cult, according to Shari’s account?
- Sample answer: The cult parallels are pretty chilling. Jodi positioned herself as the ultimate moral authority, isolated families from outside relationships, and created this hierarchy where only she had the answers. The way she convinced husbands to leave their families for six months over minor infractions and how she moved into the Franke home claiming she was under spiritual attack—those are classic cult control tactics. And the superiority complex she fostered in members, making them think they were more enlightened than everyone else, that’s textbook cult behavior.
- How did Ruby’s parenting evolve from the early years to her time involved with ConneXions, and what remained consistent?
- Sample answer: The methods changed but the underlying issue stayed the same—Ruby always lacked empathy and was more concerned with control than with her children’s emotional needs. Early on, she used physical punishment and yelling. After ConneXions, she switched to psychological torture, which was more insidious. Making the younger kids watch their siblings open Christmas presents while getting none themselves? That’s calculated cruelty. But whether she was slapping them or manipulating them, she was always more interested in molding them into her vision than actually loving them for who they were.
- Why do you think Kevin went along with Ruby’s increasingly extreme parenting, and what does his behavior tell us about his culpability?
- Sample answer: Kevin’s passivity is really frustrating to read about. It seems as though he had doubts all along (he was uncomfortable with ConneXions, he thought the women there hated men), but he just went along with everything to keep the peace with Ruby. When he ran into Shari on campus and avoided her because Ruby told him to, that showed he was choosing his relationship with Ruby over protecting his children. Even if he wasn’t directly abusing them, his failure to intervene makes him complicit. He was the adult who could have stopped this, and he didn’t.
- What impact did growing up with her mother’s conditional love have on Shari’s mental health and development?
- Sample answer: The effects were devastating. Shari developed this fawn response where she constantly tried to please her mother, suppressing her own needs and emotions to avoid conflict. She developed anxiety, picked at her lips until they bled, had religious scrupulosity, and even contemplated suicide. The fact that she thought she had to earn love by being perfect shows how warped her understanding of relationships became. It’s heartbreaking that she spent her childhood wondering what she did wrong, when really her mother was incapable of providing unconditional love.
- How did Ruby use her children’s privacy violations and personal struggles as content for her channel, and what does this reveal about her priorities?
- Sample answer: Ruby treated every aspect of her children’s lives as fair game for content. She filmed Shari in the hospital with mono and then asked her to act sicker for the camera. She deliberately gave Shari a bad eyebrow wax just to create a video. She even revealed Chad’s punishment of sleeping on a beanbag for seven months to millions of viewers. These weren’t just privacy violations—they were humiliations for profit. It shows that, to Ruby, her children were primarily valuable as content generators, not as human beings with their own dignity and rights.
- What warning signs did people outside the family notice, and why do you think interventions by authorities failed to protect the children earlier?
- Sample answer: There were so many red flags! Viewers were petitioning the government to investigate, Chad sleeping on a beanbag for seven months went viral, and Shari called Child Protective Services when her siblings were left alone. But somehow the system kept failing them. I think part of it is that Ruby was skilled at maintaining appearances when authorities came around, and part of it is that the system isn’t set up to recognize emotional and psychological abuse as readily as physical abuse. It’s really disturbing how many chances there were to save these kids before it got to the point of starvation and confinement.
- How does Shari’s description of her mother’s journaling about the abuse reveal Ruby’s mindset during the most severe period of abuse?
- Sample answer: The fact that Ruby documented everything she was doing in her journals (describing the torture as cleansing her children from evil forces) shows how completely distorted her thinking had become. She genuinely believed she was doing something righteous. That’s almost scarier than if she’d known it was wrong; she had convinced herself that starving and confining her children was an act of spiritual salvation. It shows how dangerous Jodi’s influence was and how Ruby had completely lost touch with reality and basic human compassion.
- What do you make of Ruby’s behavior at her trial, particularly her claim that she was also a victim of Jodi?
- Sample answer: I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it does seem like Jodi manipulated Ruby and destroyed her relationship with her family, her husband, and her own sense of reality. But, on the other hand, Ruby had been abusive long before Jodi came into the picture. Shari makes it clear that her mother was emotionally neglectful and physically abusive throughout her childhood. So, while Jodi may have enabled and escalated Ruby’s worst tendencies, Ruby can’t hide behind being a victim. She made choices, and she hurt her children for years.
- How did Shari’s relationship with her faith and scrupulosity (excessive guilt and anxiety over moral or religious issues) reflect her attempts to understand and cope with her mother’s treatment?
- Sample answer: Shari’s religious scrupulosity—constantly fearing she had sinned—seems like she was trying to find a framework to understand why her mother didn’t love her. If she could just be good enough, righteous enough, sin-free enough, maybe she’d finally earn her mother’s approval. Religion became another avenue for self-blame. Instead of recognizing that her mother was the problem, she internalized it as her own spiritual failing. It’s a really painful example of how children will twist themselves into knots trying to make sense of parental rejection.
- What does the “cancellation” of the 8 Passengers channel in 2020 reveal about the relationship between family vloggers and their audiences?
- Sample answer: The beanbag incident shows that audiences do have some power to hold family vloggers accountable, but it also reveals how much has to go wrong before people actually intervene. Ruby had been displaying problematic parenting for years, but it took something that egregious and public for people to mass-reject the channel. And, even then, losing sponsors and subscribers didn’t stop the abuse; it just drove it underground. It makes me wonder how many family vlogging channels are hiding similar dynamics that just haven’t been exposed yet.
- How does Shari’s experience with therapy—both with Jodi and later with a legitimate therapist—illustrate the difference between genuine mental health support and manipulation?
- Sample answer: The contrast is stark. With Jodi, Shari was told to document all her positive thoughts as evidence of arrogance and was gaslighted when she caught Jodi in lies. That’s not therapy—that’s psychological abuse disguised as treatment. Her actual therapist helped her recognize that Ruby’s behavior was abusive, validated her experiences, and helped her understand her trauma responses. Therapy should empower you and help you trust yourself; what Jodi did was break people down and make them dependent on her approval. It’s scary that Jodi had an actual counseling license.
- What responsibility do you think social media platforms and audiences have in the family vlogging phenomenon?
- Sample answer: I think platforms need to have better protections for children whose parents are monetizing their childhoods. There should be regulations similar to what child actors have—limits on hours, money set aside for the kids, consent processes. And audiences need to think critically about what they’re consuming. When we watch and engage with family vlogs, we’re creating the market demand that incentivizes parents to exploit their children. Every view, like, and subscribe is essentially saying, “Keep doing this.” We need to question whether it’s ethical to be entertained by children who can’t consent to being filmed.
- How did Shari’s understanding of her own trauma responses (particularly the fawn response) help her begin to heal?
- Sample answer: Recognizing the fawn response was huge for Shari because it helped her understand that her people-pleasing wasn’t a character flaw—it was a survival mechanism she developed to stay safe in an abusive environment. Once she could name it and see where it came from, she could start making different choices. It’s like she could finally separate her authentic self from the defensive patterns she’d developed. That kind of insight is powerful because it shifts the shame from “I’m broken” to “I adapted to a broken situation, and now I can heal.”
- What does Shari’s memoir contribute to the broader conversation about “sharenting” and children’s digital rights?
- Sample answer: Shari gives us a firsthand account of what it’s actually like to be the child whose life is monetized online, and it’s damning. She makes a compelling case that family vlogging is inherently exploitative because children can’t meaningfully consent to having their entire lives documented and shared with millions of strangers. Her point about how their trauma became a commodity even after Ruby’s arrest (with media outlets sensationalizing their story) really drives home how these children are exploited at every stage. This memoir should be required reading for anyone who thinks family vlogging is harmless.
- How did Ruby’s isolation of her children from extended family and the outside world enable the escalation of abuse?
- Sample answer: The isolation was deliberate and devastating. ConneXions encouraged cutting ties with anyone who didn’t share their beliefs, so Ruby stopped talking to her own parents and siblings. She pulled the kids from school, got rid of the dog so they wouldn’t go outside, and exiled Kevin and Chad. Without outside eyes on the situation, there was no one to notice what was happening or to give the children any perspective that what they were experiencing wasn’t normal. Isolation is classic abuser behavior—it eliminates accountability and makes victims completely dependent on their abuser.
- What role did Chad play in the family dynamic, and how did his defiance differ from Shari’s coping mechanisms?
- Sample answer: Chad and Shari had really different survival strategies. While Shari tried to earn love through compliance and perfection, Chad pushed back and maintained his independence, even if it was secret—such as breaking into the safe to play Xbox. He got labeled as the problem child and was sent to Jodi first. But, in some ways, his refusal to be completely broken down was protective. Both approaches make sense as trauma responses, and both kids suffered terribly. It’s interesting how Ruby and Jodi seemed to perceive his outward compliance as genuine transformation while completely missing that he was just getting better at hiding his resistance.
- Now that Shari has found her “chosen family” and is working toward healing, what do you think the future holds for her and her siblings’ relationships with each other and with their parents?
- Sample answer: I think Shari’s path forward will be complicated. She’s rebuilding a relationship with Kevin, which shows she’s willing to work toward forgiveness if people are genuinely trying to change. But her relationship with Ruby seems irreparably broken, which is completely understandable given everything Ruby put her through. As for her siblings, they’ve all been through different versions of trauma, and I imagine their healing journeys will look different. The younger ones who were confined and starved will need extensive support, and it’s unclear whether they’ll be able to maintain relationships with each other or if their shared trauma will be too difficult to navigate together. I hope Shari’s strength and clarity can be a model for them, but ultimately each person has to find their own path to healing.
Book Club Activities for This Book
Discussing The House of My Mother can be just the beginning! Use these activities to get even more out of the book and create unforgettable experiences.
Media Literacy Reflection Journal
Keep a week-long journal examining your own social media consumption and the family content you encounter online. Each day, note instances where you view family vlogs, parenting content, or children featured in social media posts. Reflect on questions such as these:
- What assumptions do I make about these families?
- What might be happening off-camera?
- How does this content make me perceive my own life?
At week’s end, write a summary about how Shari’s story has changed your perspective on consuming family content and whether you’ll adjust your viewing habits.
Trauma Response Discussion Circle
Form a small group (three to five people) to discuss the four trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Have each person research one response and share examples from Shari’s story. Then discuss:
- How did you see these responses manifest in different family members?
- Can you identify these patterns in your own life or relationships?
- What does healing from these trauma responses look like?
This activity helps readers understand the psychological concepts Shari explores and apply them to their own experiences with difficult relationships.
“Breaking the Cycle” Action Plan
Create a personal action plan identifying one generational pattern or unhealthy dynamic from your own upbringing that you want to change. Write down:
- the pattern you’ve identified
- how it affected you
- three concrete steps you can take to break this cycle
- resources or support systems you’ll need
Shari’s commitment to becoming a different kind of parent can inspire readers to reflect on their own journeys toward healing and positive change.
If You Like The House of My Mother
If you want to read more books like The House of My Mother, check out these titles:
- Educated—This memoir by Tara Westover follows her journey growing up in a strict, isolated Mormon fundamentalist family in Idaho with a father whose extreme beliefs kept the children out of school and medical care. Like Shari, Westover chronicles her path to recognizing her family’s dysfunction, escaping their control, and ultimately pursuing education and healing. Readers will appreciate the similar themes of religious extremism, parental abuse disguised as righteousness, and the difficult process of breaking free from family loyalty while seeking one’s own path.
- Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect—This psychology book by Jonice Webb explains childhood emotional neglect (when parents fail to respond adequately to a child’s emotional needs) and its lasting effects into adulthood. Webb describes how emotionally neglected children often blame themselves and struggle with self-awareness and relationships. This would be particularly valuable for readers who connected with Shari’s descriptions of seeking her mother’s approval, developing anxiety, and learning about her fawn response in therapy. It offers practical strategies for healing that complement Shari’s personal journey.
- The Age of Influence: The Power of Influencers to Shape the World—This book by Sara McCorquodale examines the influencer economy, including family vlogging and the ethical questions surrounding children in social media content. McCorquodale explores how influencer culture operates as a business and its psychological impacts on both creators and audiences. Readers interested in Shari’s critique of family vlogging and the exploitation of children for content will find this a valuable exploration of the broader industry that enabled Ruby Franke’s behavior.
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23 The House of My Mother Book Club Questions & Activities
