Mom’s claim to fame funny family videos on TikTok

Virgil’s Krista London-Verticchio is finding online fame as the TikTok Mom. Her autismoma account on the social media platform has 260,500 followers and counting. 

She uses the account to document life as a mother with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), raising three children, including two boys both diagnosed with autism. 

London-Verticchio turned to the social media app near the start of the pandemic. The long-time Facebook user was becoming frustrated with the negativity, anger and vitriol she was seeing there.

“Everything was turning into COVID talk,” she says, “and it was really difficult to see that all the time. I noticed people posting funny TikTok videos onto Facebook, though, so I decided to check that out.”

Like many new to TikTok, she was originally inundated with the types of video content her own children were watching. That is, short clips of teens and young adults dancing to upbeat tunes. 

“But TikTok has an algorithm, and it quickly learns what you like,” she says. “Every single user has its own ‘for you’ page. When you react to someone’s video with a like, a comment or a follow, Tik Tok makes note of it. Today, I don’t see any kids anymore. I see teachers, police officers, it’s all adults now.”

She began to post short videos to make light of what the effervescent London-Verticchio says is the humorous chaos in her household of five, including 16-year old son Ryan, nine-year-old son Avery, Emma, six, and her husband Mike. 

“It ended up turning into talking about the reality of what it’s like, having children with autism here in Ontario,” she says today. “It’s a struggle all over Canada, the lack of resources for autistic people in general, but I focus on the humour of the whole situation. If you’re not laughing at it, you’re crying or upset. I try to keep it as positive as possible.”

Though she creates many of her short videos in the family’s open concept main floor living room, she often retreats into her car to escape the chaos. In fact, when The Local came calling that’s exactly where she chose for the interview.

Her followers quickly began to snowball last year. It was a bit of a shock for London-Verticchio to see how popular her posts were becoming. 

“The first one that went viral was when Avery was in a Zoom class, and the teacher asked a math question,” she laughs. “I wrote down the answer to the question on a piece of paper. He gave the answer to the teacher but she said ‘oh, sweetie, good try, but that’s not the answer’. It went viral because it highlighted the struggles of all parents with school in a pandemic. Then it got picked up by Yahoo and AOL and other news sites.”

Her following is such that today she has companies sending free products to her in hopes she will promote them on her account. She has become what is known as an influencer, and she’ll often choose to highlight local businesses with that influence for no reason other than to underscore how great Niagara-on-the-Lake is.

“When I first realized I had my platform, I started going to Old Town stores to shop, and I would put it on TikTok,” she says. “Whenever I would use #niagaraonthelake, I’d get hundreds of thousands of views. It’s so nice to know I am able to help small businesses because of the platform I’ve built.”

As a popular content creator, she was approached by TikTok in February with an invitation to apply to their Creator Fund, expected to be open to Canadians in mid-2022. It will allow her to earn money directly through the platform for her creation of original, entertaining, and engaging content.

Her many videos look slick and professional, though she admits the learning curve was quite steep at first. For help in the early days of her TikTok journey she turned to her son Ryan, a student at Holy Cross Catholic Secondary School.

Her two older children appear regularly in her videos. Ryan is often her go-to straight man, acting embarrassed and annoyed by his mother’s online fame, though she says he secretly enjoys the attention. When she was approaching 100,000 followers, a goal Ryan thought she would never reach, she made a deal that he would have to wear a T-shirt saying ‘My Mom’s funny on TikTok’ for a week. He lost that bet.

Last month, at a family breakfast at the Stagecoach Restaurant in NOTL, a waitress recognized Krista. Before she could respond, Avery removed his mask and said, ‘do you recognize me? I’m kind of TikTok famous.’

Despite the attention, she assures anyone who asks that she does guard the family’s privacy. Mike, an accountant for a non-profit whom she describes as a bit shy, has only appeared in a couple of her TikTok posts. And they all sat down and set the parameters for the posts. There would be no humiliation, no videos of the kids having meltdowns or sleeping.

“When I have the children on TikTok,” she says, “I try to keep their appearances very brief. I always ask first before I post, let them know what my plans are. If any of them ever asks me to set any of the videos to private, I would do that immediately.”

With her massive following, London-Verticchio feels a bit of added pressure to post up to three videos a day, as many as 14 a week. 

“If you don’t post for a few days,” she explains, “it slows down the algorithm. The views go way, way down. It sounds kind of silly to most users to worry about that. But I work with brands who pay me to do TikTok and Instagram posts. If I don’t post content that I’m not paid for, then I don’t get to work, if that makes sense.”

She’s reached a point with TikTok that she has to combine her online income with what she earns via her home-based business My Little Party, selling helium-filled balloons, for income tax purposes. 

Besides the money and free products, London-Verticchio is also rewarded with feedback in the form of messages from her many followers, most of whom thank her for making light of living in a household where ADHD and autism are present. With a waitlist of over 51,000 families for autism support services in Ontario, many could use her help.

“I really enjoy connecting with people, and sharing information about ADHD and autism,” she says. “A lot of people misunderstand both. I would love to get to the point where I’m maybe talking to people in larger groups to support them. I would like to continue educating people and sharing our stories.”