Kayleigh L. Vantrees
It is difficult to imagine having every aspect of one's life broadcasted on social media for thousands of people to see, from before the day they’re born, all the way through young adulthood. This is a reality for many children in a phenomenon known as “Sharenting”. Sharenting is the practice of parents creating content on social media of their children, sharing their daily lives, achievements, events, personal records, and emotional and medical struggles. For parents, sharenting can be a way to build community with other parents, seek advice, receive emotional and financial support, and hold onto memories. For the children on the other hand, sharenting brings up a series of questions and concerns surrounding privacy, digital safety, self-image, and potential damage to parent-child relationships. As the world enters a more digitized age, the lines between private life and the life people show on social media become blurred. It is one thing to document one’s own life, but another to use children, who cannot consent to sharing their personal information posted online, to build a social media presence for attention and money. It is important that parents understand the dangers and negative long term effects of sharenting and respect their children’s right to a private life. When parents fail to recognize the dangers of sharenting, many important boundaries between parents, their children, and the public can be very easily crossed. While sharenting may be a positive support system for parents, creating content on social media surrounding children exposes them to online dangers, violates their privacy, and causes harmful long term effects on their development, and can damage the relationship they have with their parents. Therefore, consistently posting content of children is not something parents should be allowed to do, whether it be for financial, social, or entertainment purposes.
First, posting pictures or videos of children on social media exposes them to danger. Social media apps contain features that allow users to post pictures and videos that people can interact with through likes, shares, comments. However, these kinds of interactions are not always safe for young vulnerable users with public platforms.“The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families”, an article written by the American Academy of Pediatrics describes how youth-healthcare professionals can play a vital role when it comes to educating parents about the social and health related issues minors experience on social media, including cyberbullying, popularity, status, depression, social anxiety, risk-taking behaviors, and sexual development. The online world presents a wide variety of dangers to younger users who are not intelligent enough to navigate social media in a healthy way. Cyberbullying and online harassment can happen when minors with unrestricted social media receive negative comments or private messages that can negatively impact their self-esteem. Online popularity and status can also distort how users interpret their self-worth through the development of superiority or inferiority complexes. Toxic self-image problems can lead to mistreatment of others, risk-taking behaviors in an effort to gain popularity, or the development of social anxieties. Sexual and explicit content is also infamously difficult to regulate, which makes it easy for minors to gain access to content not suitable for them. Negative consequences of social media usage on young people can be seen whether or not a minor’s social media account is regulated by a parent. While parents can act as a buffer between their child and the negative comments strangers make about them, sharenting is still dangerous. Gotwald shares a study in her “Parental Perspectives on Sharenting: Attitudes, privacy concerns, and children’s digital footprint”, where it was found that “Majority of Polish respondents (76%) were aware of the consequences of sharing materials and possibility of mis-usage of them by others,”(1862) More than half of Polish parents involved in the survey were aware that even when an online profile is ran by a parent, there is always a possibility for other users to misuse their child’s content in negative or inappropriate ways. However, parents all over the world should be able to recognize the dangers minors face using social media. Children cannot consent to accepting these risks either, meaning parents should be held primarily responsible for their child’s online safety. Parents who post content of their children despite knowing the safety risks are negligent of their child’s wellbeing.
Additionally, sharenting is a one sided exchange in which parents can obtain online popularity at the expense of their children’s privacy. Parents posting content centered around their children can directly and indirectly expose private information. For example, a story shared in a study titled “Sharenting: Children’s Privacy in the Age of Social Media” goes as follows: “After posting a picture of her two daughters, Ashley found it was shared by another Facebook page that seemed to share many pictures of little girls…she realized that any of the thousands of followers could not only see the image of her children, but could also follow the link back to her own Facebook page and track down more information about her daughters,”(Steinberg 854) When creating a social media profile, creators often have a target audience they would like to present their content to. However, this does not mean their content stays within that target audience. This leads to people from anywhere on the internet being able to access someone’s content and be able to trace it back to the original profile. Photos, personal information, location, family members, addresses, birthdates, and medical history can all be traced back to a user if they make such information even slightly available to the public. This can run the risk of digital kidnapping, identity theft, and doxxing. Not only does this put the child’s privacy in danger, but the parent’s as well. The only difference is that adults can consent to making such information public online, while children can’t. Violation of privacy does not go unnoticed by the children themselves either. A research study that analyzes the trend of sharenting says “As reported in the articles…, sharenting infringes on the privacy of children and blurs privacy boundaries that, from the teenagers’ perspective, parents are expected to have for their children.”(Cataldo) Teenagers are aware that they and those younger than them have the right to privacy, and that there are certain boundaries parents should not cross. As children grow older, they will have experiences that they may not feel comfortable sharing. Parents who post vulnerable parts of their child’s life on social media put pressure on them by allowing thousands of people to view and comment on that particular moment. Anything posted on social media leaves a digital footprint that stays forever, meaning that a sensitive or embarrassing post will follow the child for the rest of their life. This can create social anxiety due to the child not being able to share their stories and build their own self image on their own time. Parents should not have the right to make content surrounding vulnerable information about their kids and dictate their child’s online image. When that child gets older, they will have issues developing their own identity due to thousands of people already having preconceived notions about them based on information shared by their parents without permission. This robs kids of the opportunity to share their lives from their own perspective when they feel comfortable doing so.
Moreover, sharenting is proven to have negative long-term effects on the children being broadcasted on social media. The long term effects of sharenting on the children are often overlooked by their parents. For example, a research study named “Sharenting Syndrome: An Appropriate Use of Social Media?” by Doğan Keskin and their fellow researchers, found that “Sharenting syndrome has been determined to be strongly associated with technology-based addictions, including internet addiction [39]. The dependency on technology, such as social media and internet addiction, can contribute to families or caregivers emotionally neglecting and abusing their children.” Parents who depend on social media can develop an addiction to the attention and interaction they receive online, causing them to neglect the important in-person relationships they have with their kids. When a parent reaches that point, they value their social media presence more than the safety, privacy, and mental well-being of their children. This can lead to long term negligence, which is a form of abuse. Sharenting among parents who develop social media addictions may push their kids to appear more on their social media platforms or make them do things for more views, completely disregarding their way the child feels about it. This creates a dynamic where parents see and use their children as props to get attention online, not as developing human beings with a sense of agency. Parents who emotionally neglect their children in this way can cause their children to develop people-pleasing tendencies, emotional struggles, low self-esteem, unhealthy coping mechanisms, toxic perfectionism, self-isolation, and depression that can follow them throughout adulthood. Children who have their feelings diminished or invalidated when it comes to addressing concerns over having their lives shown on social media are victims of emotional neglect by parents who do not see them as a priority.
Supporters of sharenting argue that sharenting helps parents seek advice, support, and connection from other parents not within their immediate communities. It is understandable why new parents or parents with children who have specific conditions would use sharenting as a way to network with other parents who could offer support and guidance. In an effort to investigate parental motivations behind parenting, “Elaborating motive and psychological impact of sharenting in millennial parents” by Latipah and other researchers conducted a study of parents who participate in sharenting. They concluded that “The motive for millennial parents to do sharenting is to receive affirmation and social support, to demonstrate the ability to take care of children, for social participation, and documentation.” Parenthood is not easy and new parents may use sharenting as a way to get feedback from other parents to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to do. Parents of special needs children may also use sharnting to seek guidance from more experienced parents who have children with similar issues. Positive social affirmation from other parents about the way they raise their children can incentivise some parents to continue doing things that make them successful. Demonstrating the ability to properly raise a child can serve as inspiration for other parents who are struggling with transitioning and adapting to parenthood. Parents who participate in sharenting for social participation may feel pressure to broadcast their children online because of how common it is for parents to do it now. This can give the parents a feeling of “fitting in”, and decrease feelings of isolation. Sharenting makes documentation very easy, as parents take photos and videos of important and unimportant events in their child’s life. Photos and videos posted on social media make it exceptionally easy to look back on different memories. However, the positive impacts of sharenting on the side of the parents should not cause people to overlook the negative effects of sharenting on children. While parents may want to post their children for a variety of good-intended reasons, it is important for parents to consider whether or not it's something the child actually wants. In “The dark sides of sharenting.” by Siibak, Andra, and Keily Traks, they found that “In many respects our interviews with mothers confirmed the perceptions of pre-teens – even though some mothers expressed the need to consult with one’s child before uploading an image or tagging them on social media, the majority of the mothers in our sample rarely considered the child’s opinion on the matter.” Since children are the main focus of the parent’s social media content, it should be important for parents to consider what their children are comfortable sharing or if they want a social media presence at all. Parents who do not receive permission from their children to share personal information impede on their privacy and expose them to online dangers for their own gain. Even if parents receive permission from their child to share something, children cannot consent to sharing personal information because they are not old enough to understand and deal with the repercussions. Children can be acutely aware of the boundaries their parents cross and have a right to express their concerns and refuse to have information about them shared. While parents have a right to raise their children as they see best, it is not an excuse to use their power to ignore how their child feels about their actions.
To sum up, parents should not be allowed to make social media content centered around their children because it negatively impacts children’s safety, privacy, self-image and relationship with their parents. Sharenting can run the risk of children facing online harassment, digital kidnapping, content misuse, doxxing, and several more challenges concerning online safety. Parents who share information about their children online violate their privacy and do not allow their kids to present themselves to the world when they're ready and in the way they want. This kind of boundary crossing with social media can cause long term harm on parent-child relationships, leading to social and emotional challenges that the child has to carry into adulthood. While sharenting can be a way for parents to bond and seek guidance, it is done at the expense of the child’s safety, privacy, and social and emotional wellbeing. There are several ways parents can get the benefits they get out of sharenting without harming their children. If a parent is seeking specific advice on how to deal with specific situations or special needs, there are child-behavioral/child-care professionals parents can reach out to who can help them meet their child’s needs. Not only does this give parents more accurate information about how to rear their children, but it does so in a way that doesn’t expose their child’s information to thousands of people. If a parent wants to document their children, they can create physical or digital photo albums that can be shared with close friends and families. If parents want to show their kids on their social media platform, they should avoid showing the child’s face or blur it out so their child’s appearance won't be memorable to strangers. Parents should also avoid discussing private information about their children online such as where they live, locations they frequent, physical or emotional struggles, medical history, and other sensitive pieces of information. When a child reaches their late teens to early 20s and gives explicit permission for their parents to share certain details about them to their audience, then it could be acceptable for parents to disclose their child’s information. Before that point however, parents should avoid sharing information about their children and respect the boundaries between their personal lives and what they post on social media.
Sources
header image used under the Unsplash License
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37239645/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2022/5607422
“Parental perspectives on sharenting: Attitudes, privacy concerns, and children’s digital footprint.” EUROPEAN RESEARCH STUDIES JOURNAL, XXVII, no. Issue 3
https://doi.org/10.13189/ujer.2020.081052.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333607170_The_dark_sides_of_sharenting
https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/emlj66&div=27&id=&page=
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