Inside Charli D'Amelio's Relationship With Her Mom Heidi

When Charli D'Amelio's TikTok dances began amassing loads of likes, her mother, Heidi D'Amelio, wasn't quite sure what to make of the attention. But now, Heidi has her own account with 10 million followers, and she's considered the matriarch of the "First Family of TikTok."

According to Charli, her friends deserve some credit for her social media superstardom. She's a trained dancer, so when the app became popular with her peers, they turned to her for help learning the concise dance routines that were one of the biggest crazes on TikTok at the time. "And I said, 'I don't want to, it's weird, I don't even have my own account,'" Charli recalled to The Guardian. "But then I started making videos and I guess I started having a lot of ... fun?"

Heidi said that she and her husband, Marc, first realized that their then-15-year-old daughter was becoming TikTok-famous when they were at a restaurant and some young fans couldn't stop gawking at her. "We both thought, there's no way they know Charli from that weird app," she recalled. Heidi told The Guardian that Charli began receiving job offers, and this is when it hit home that TikTok could be so much more than a way for Charli and her older sister Dixie — who had since joined the app — to entertain themselves. To make the most of the girls' growing fame, the Connecticut natives uprooted their family and headed to Hollywood, but Heidi insists that she is no momager.

The D'Amelios are often compared to the Kardashians. Charli D'Amelio seems to be the Kim Kardashian of the bunch, and as the first D'Amelio to make it big, she shoulders tons of responsibility. Per Elle, Charli opened up about this on "The D'Amelio Show," the family's Hulu docuseries. "Every person who works for my family (D'Amelio Family Enterprises) puts pressure on me," she explained. "If I wanted to quit, well, now they don't have a job."

But Heidi D'Amelio doesn't want to be like Kris Jenner, whose decision to manage her kids' careers introduced the portmanteau "momager" to the lexicon. "We're never going to be their managers, bosses or anything. We're a family — we're the parents and they will always be our kids," Heidi told V Magazine. One way she reminds Charli that she's still her mom is by monitoring her TikTok account. In an interview for their family YouTube channel, Heidi revealed that she has made Charli remove some of her content. "But for the most part, she has good judgment," she added. Heidi told The Guardian that Charli is even the sole decision maker when it comes to the products she promotes.

But according to Charli, fame didn't help her get out of household chores. "My parents have always been, 'We don't care how many followers you have,'" she told HighSnobiety. "'You still have to do the dishes and take out the garbage.'"

Soon after Heidi D'Amelio and Charli D'Amelio made history as the first mother and daughter to join the same season of "Dancing with the Stars," Charli got the chance to take out one competitor before the first episode even aired. In an interview with Page Six, Heidi revealed that she was struggling so much during her rehearsals with pro dancer Artem Chigvintsev that she considered withdrawing from the competition. But instead of supporting this decision, Charli turned the tables on her mom. "She told me everything I used to tell her when she was a kid and in dance," Heidi recalled. "So to hear those words coming out of her mouth to me, I was like, 'Alright, I get it.' It was great advice." Per Insider, Heidi ended up finishing in the middle of the leaderboard during the premiere, so Charli's pep talk paid off.

Heidi used to be a personal trainer, so she's had to learn a thing or two about being an effective motivator. Clearly, she's passed this skill onto her youngest daughter, who is well aware that she wouldn't be where she is today without her mother and father's support. In an interview with V Magazine, Charli revealed that she knows she can always count on them when she needs her own pep talk. "My parents have definitely been my rocks throughout all of this," she said. "I feel like I can go to them with anything."