Parenting is hard enough with managing day-to-day schedules and activities. But the digital era has introduced a new set of challenges, both for children and parents.
The biggest concern surrounds kids’ use of digital devices and platforms. But what about parents? With social media use, many kids are effectively ushered into the digital world the moment they are born.
The average parent shares more than 70 photos and about 29 videos of their children each year.”
Most parents post photos and updates with the best of intentions. The main motivation is simply to share these special moments with a wider network of our friends and family. Sometimes there’s an element of convenience, as a single privately shared image can replace a handful of WhatsApp messages. And more often than not, we’re also chasing an endorphin high from the Likes and comments we get back.
All of which is great, but all of which also comes at a cost. According to UK regulator Ofcom, the average parent shares more than 70 photos and about 29 videos of their children each year. Over a third of parents (41%) report engaging in sharenting, and according to the Children’s Commission, the average young person will have a digital footprint of approximately 70,000 posts about them by the time they turn 18.
There’s a fine, almost invisible line between sharing your family’s joyful moments and protecting your kids’ privacy in today’s complicated digital world. Here we’ve combined our experience as parents with our online security and privacy expertise to create a guide to sharenting. Whether it’s setting up parental controls, enabling filters, or using tech tools like a Chrome VPN extension, here’s everything you need to know.
What is Sharenting?
The term “sharenting” is a portmanteau, or combination, of two words: sharing and parenting. Its usage can be traced back to a 2012 Wall Street Journal article by Steven Leckart. Ten years later, it became cemented in modern culture when it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, with the definition “The action or practice of sharing news, images, or videos of one’s children on social media websites.”
Content being shared can range from photos of a summer vacation posted privately to a social network, to parent vloggers essentially promoting their children as influencers. The spectrum is wide, which adds to its complexity.
The Benefits of Sharenting
Hop on to certain platforms and it’s easy to forget that social media can actually be a force for good. The ill-tempered rants and clickbait are just one (admittedly large) piece of the puzzle. There’s also plenty of useful, interesting content, plus social media serving one of its original purposes of allowing people to stay connected to their loved ones.
Even sharing about your children online can be beneficial to everyone involved. Here are the main reasons why:
Build New Connections and Fostering Community
Say you’ve just moved to a new neighborhood in the middle of summer. School hasn’t started yet, so you’ve got a couple of months to kill. Meeting people organically at the park is great, but you can accelerate your sense of belonging and friendships by selectively sharenting with your new neighbors.
Some areas might have WhatsApp or Facebook groups you can join to introduce your family and highlight a few of your interests. Such communities also often promote cool activities you can join, which can help you feel more connected.
In fact, building these connections can positively impact the mental health of your family. A 2024 UNICEF report found that 63% of parents struggle with mental health issues, often due to a lack of support and feelings of loneliness. Engaging with your community, even online, can help alleviate some of these challenges.
In other cases, it might simply be about following folks you meet in passing, hoping a digital connection blossoms into a meaningful real-world one.
Nurture Existing Relationships
As well as helping you build new connections, sharenting is a great way to nurture existing relationships. Many of us have friends and family scattered across the country, or even around the world. Keeping in touch with loved ones isn’t easy when you’re raising a family, which is where privately sharing photos or video clips on social media can come in handy. A single post can do the work of a dozen FaceTime calls, letting those closest to you share in the joy of Junior’s first steps.
The Other Side of Sharenting: Where Things Can Go Wrong
While sharenting has its benefits, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Sharing content about your children online can have unintended consequences, especially when it comes to your child’s privacy and their right to control their own digital identity. What starts as a harmless post could end up affecting them in ways you might not have anticipated…
Personal Consent and Ownership
Sharenting can have some serious, far-reaching consequences for the children involved. For example, in 2016, an Austrian teenager had finally had enough of her parents’ online exploits. After they posted over 500 photos of her over the course of seven years without her consent, she made international headlines when she threatened to sue them. At the time, she claimed the pictures had made her life a misery.
It’s not just regular parents who are guilty of such missteps. Gwyneth Paltrow, the queen of wellness and mindful living, managed to commit the ultimate sharenting faux pas. Despite her presumed social media expertise, she found herself on the receiving end of an infamous dressing down from her then 14-year-old daughter, Apple. Paltrow posted a photo without her permission, and when called out, she didn’t back down. Instead, she hit back with a classic parent move: “You can’t even see your face!”– a response that somehow managed to overlook the crux of the issue – Apple’s right to manage her own digital presence.
However, it might soon become harder for kids to take control. In some countries, like Australia, kids under 16 might soon be legally banned from logging into platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok (although feasibility of blocking them is another matter). But at the same time, their parents could share their images, thousands of them, before they hit that age.
Meanwhile, in most other countries, the minimum age set by these platforms’ terms of use is 13 – yet, the digital presence starts practically at birth for many, thanks to sharenting.
This makes one wonder: When does a parent’s right to share tip over into invading their kid’s privacy? And what happens when your little one isn’t so little anymore and suddenly doesn’t love that digital trail you’ve left behind?
Ethics and Long-Term Consequences
A growing number of parents are starting to ask these questions, too. In fact, one survey indicates that 66% of people think sharing about children on social media negatively affects their privacy, while 87% regard excessive sharing about a child as a form of neglect and abuse.
Supporting this concern, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says that kids should have a say before their parents post anything about them online. Now, while this isn’t a legal requirement in most places, countries like France and Italy are already taking steps to protect children’s online privacy with actual laws.
Ultimately, your child will gain full say to how and when they appear online when they hit adulthood. Sure, they could take measures to erase some of their footprint, exercising Google’s Right to be Forgotten or removing their data from brokers. But as the saying goes, the internet is forever. Content can’t always be forcibly removed if it’s been produced or shared by someone other than yourself. Even when it can, it may involve tedious processes like DMCA takedown requests. Wouldn’t it be better if your kids didn’t want to erase their past in the first place?
The Dangers of Sharenting
Sharing photos of your kids might seem like innocent fun, but there’s more at stake than just a few likes or comments from Great Aunt Bea in Boise. Beyond the ethical concerns, sharenting has very real and practical dangers.
As Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons would say, “Won’t someone please think of the children?” – except this time, it’s not just a punchline. When we share our kids’ lives online, there can be real-world consequences, not just for them but for us as parents, too. While not every family that shares content online will face these issues, there are certain risks that all parents should be aware of.
Fueling the Cybercrime Beast
When you share content about your kids online, it can easily make its way from Grandma’s iPad into the wrong hands. Cybercriminals can take even the smallest nugget of information, such as a child’s birthday, and use it as the basis for a social engineering-based phishing attack. This is a type of scam that uses real facts to trick the victim into disclosing more information. Ultimately, the result can be fraud or identity theft.
In fact, data from Barclays reported by the BBC suggests that “sharented” information could be responsible for two-thirds (66%) of identity fraud cases reported by young people and cost as much as $885 million per year. The rise of GenAI further amplifies these risks as convincing scam emails have never been easier to concoct. Even voices, which would be easily extracted from a video clip shared on Instagram, are now being cloned and used in telephone scams, via deepfake technology.
If you choose to share images, videos, and other content about your family on social media, it’s best to do so privately. Most major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have settings that allow your posts to only be shared with the people you have allowed to follow you. As long as you know them personally, you at least know who is seeing your content.
Leaking Sensitive Information About Your Kids
As well as digital risks, there are also potential real-world dangers to consider before sharenting. Even a seemingly innocuous photo can reveal details about where your children are on holiday or go to school, as Britain’s Princess Eugenie recently found out when commenters on Instagram quickly pointed out that she was vacationing in a very specific part of Portugal. Some even claimed they could identify the exact beach from the snap.
A quick glance at the Instagram account of A-list celeb children, like Serena Williams’ daughter Alexis Olympia, reveals similar posts where you can easily locate her at famous landmarks in Paris, London, and The Mall of America.
These examples highlight that even when you turn off settings like location tagging, you can still leak sensitive information. Sadly, criminals and predators could exploit these details. While this may seem more relevant to children in the public eye, regular families face the same risks. A casual post showing your child in a school uniform or at a familiar playground can give away just as much information.
Bullying and Cyberbullying
There’s a more personal side to sharenting – one that could potentially affect your child’s self-esteem and mental health. According to the 2023 National Parent Survey, 37% of parents say social media and online abuse is their top concern for their children, with 20% specifically worried about cyberbullying.
It’s hard to imagine that sharing a cute photo could lead to trolling, but that’s the world we live in. What you post about your kids could invite rude, mean, or downright abusive comments. If your kids are old enough to read, they’re old enough to see what’s being said on social media. This can negatively impact their mental health, especially when they’re at a crucial stage of their development, potentially undermining the sense of self they are trying to build.
Then there’s the future to consider. Those amusing yet embarrassing family photos you shared? They could fall into the hands of “IRL” bullies. Even the fact that you post about your kids could become fodder for ridicule: “Mommy still posts on Instagram for you?” Sounds like just the sort of thing aspiring bullies would jump on.
The Long-Term Effects of Sharenting are Unknown
Lastly, there’s the simple fact that we still don’t know the full effects of kids growing up in a fully connected, sharented world. The generation of children coming of age now will be the first to experience the full impact of being online before they were even potty-trained, especially with the rise of short-form media and platforms like TikTok accelerating social media exposure.
“Sharenting is one of those interesting things that we are not going to know the long-term effects of yet, simply because it’s such a new concept – just like how we can’t be sure of the long-term effects of social media usage for kids,” says Shenella Karunaratne, a licensed professional counselor with an MA in Clinical Psychology. “In the next five to 10 years, when young children today who are shared on their parents’ accounts get social media accounts of their own, then we may start to see more tangible outcomes of this phenomenon.”
With clinical studies and the long-term effects of sharenting on mental health still unknown, it’s best to err on the side of caution and undershare rather than overstep. The same goes for the rapid ongoing growth of AI, as we’re still unclear how the data being collected to train AI (including AI image generators) is truly being used.
How to Enjoy Sharenting Responsibly: Expert Tips for Parents
We’ve touched on some of the dangers of sharenting, but that doesn’t mean you need to stop sharing those precious moments entirely. With a few thoughtful tweaks and some honest conversations with your kids, you can still share responsibly. Here’s how:
1. Encourage Open and Honest Communication with Your Kids
Sharenting provides a great opportunity to have ongoing conversations with your kids about what’s appropriate to share online. By talking about what kind of content is okay to post —and with whom—you’re not only obtaining their consent but also starting a dialogue about social media, privacy, and healthy digital boundaries. You’re also building trust and modeling responsible behavior yourself.
“Sharenting certainly amplifies tricky issues around privacy and consent, but it also gives parents like me a chance to have important talks with kids about responsible tech use and healthy boundaries,” says Dr. Ralph Waldo (M.D., M.S.) “Having frequent, open conversations and modeling balanced social media use myself have built trust in our home.”
Helping kids build a healthy relationship with technology is one of the best things we can do as parents.”
He adds: “While sharenting gets criticized, approaching it responsibly teaches valuable lessons. Starting these talks early, setting guidelines, and walking the walk with your own online presence are key. Helping kids build a healthy relationship with technology is one of the best things we can do as parents.”
2. Set Some Ground Rules
What’s worth sharing and what should stay off the grid? That’s a conversation worth having. Milestones and funny moments might be Instagram-worthy, but keep health issues, school drama, and personal struggles private. Clear boundaries now mean fewer arguments later.
“I’ve worked with families where oversharing on social media caused conflict. We drafted agreements on what to post and what to keep private based on the children’s best interests. With my own kids, we set clear rules on sharing milestones or funny moments versus keeping health, relationships, and grades private,” Dr Waldo explains.
3. Limit Your Audience
Sharenting doesn’t have to mean sharing with the world. Keep your posts private and limited to close friends and family. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook let you filter who can see your posts. Lock down your settings so only people you know and trust can view your content. This reduces the risk of unwanted exposure or unwelcome eyes on your family moments.
4. Use Tech Tools to Keep Your Family Safe
There are plenty of tech tools out there to help you keep your family’s data secure. Here are a few that could make a big difference:
- Parental Controls: Most social media platforms and devices allow you to set up parental controls that help monitor and manage what your kids are sharing. This can give you added security and peace of mind.
- Blur Out Faces: Some apps like YouCam Perfect and Skitch let you blur out sensitive details, like your kids’ faces or school uniforms, to keep them safe while still sharing the fun.
- Photo Metadata Removal: Before you upload, use apps like Photo Exif Editor to strip your photos of hidden metadata (like location and device info) that can give away too much.
- Use a VPN: A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a great way to keep your family’s online activity and location private. Consider installing a Chrome VPN extension, which is easy to use and offers added privacy when you’re sharing content on a computer.
- Turn Off Location Sharing: Many platforms automatically tag your location when you post. Turn off location services to avoid revealing your child’s whereabouts.
- Encrypted Messaging Apps: If you’re sharing photos or videos with close family, stick to end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms like Signal or WhatsApp, so your shared moments stay between you and the people who matter most.
5. Lead By Example
Your kids learn from what you do. By practicing responsible sharenting yourself, you’re setting the example for how to engage with social media in a thoughtful and safe way. Modeling balanced social media use and healthy boundaries will help them build a better relationship with technology as they grow up.
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