Words by Tom Faber.
Parents of older children often fret over how to regulate their online presence. But for the vast majority of millennial offspring, social media begins much earlier, with images and anecdotes shared on their parents’ account. With a new generation of teenagers now discovering the digital footprint created for them, Tom Faber considers the dos and don’ts of “sharenting.”
Place your hand in front of a child’s eyes, and everything disappears. Take it away again—peekaboo!—and the world rushes back into existence like a wave filling a rock pool. This simple game has much to tell us about infant development. It underlines the omnipotence of the parent, who can dramatically shift their child’s horizons on a whim. It emphasizes, too, the slow dawning of self-awareness in children; they are six months old before they learn their bodies are separate from their mother, three years old before they recognize themselves in a mirror, and five by the time they understand they are fixed, perceivable selves—beings bounded by flesh and skin.
For centuries, this was the final stage of self-awareness, but today, for the first generation who are younger than Instagram, younger even than TikTok, there is a new final step: the first time the child Googles themselves, realizing they exist in a virtual public domain where their image is infinitely reproducible, shareable and indelible.
This epiphany of digital consciousness is now commonplace: Over 90% of American children have photos posted on parents’ social media by the age of two, with 23% making their internet debut pre-birth as a blob on a sonogram scan.1 Children’s reactions to first encountering their digital footprint vary wildly; some are horrified, others embarrassed, or even excited. Internet crusaders rail against the phenomenon of “sharenting”—parents feverishly uploading every walk in the park and mushy mealtime. They say this behavior infringes on the safety and privacy of our children and even hinders their development. This is terra incognita for the first generation of parents rooted in social media, and poses many tricky questions and uncharted terrain for today’s children, the first to grow up and realize that their whole life story to date has already been written for the public by someone else.
Latham Thomas runs Mama Glow, a maternity lifestyle brand, and has 130,000 followers on Instagram. She describes social media as “a powerful tool, but a cruel master”: It drives her business, but she reminds herself to be intentional about how she posts. She has shared images of her son, Fulano, since he was 10, and created an independent profile for him after he first received press attention as a child DJ. Since he was already in the public eye, she didn’t see her posts as a problem.
Fulano, now 17, reflects on those early photos. “I had about a thousand followers and I was like—Oh, this is really cool. I thought I was a celebrity.” He and his mother have since shared management of his public account without much trouble. When Thomas posted a photo of her son sleeping, which he viewed as “a violation,” she promised not to do that again (though, he notes, she never took that particular post down). These days he leaves his public account
mostly to his mom, “because I don’t remember to post much,” and instead uses his private account, just for friends, which is primarily used for messaging and browsing memes. His digital presence is divided into the professional narrative, mostly curated by his mother, and his private, personal outlet.
Not everyone can claim, like Thomas, thousands of followers and pictures at the pool with Gwyneth Paltrow, but regular parents can also benefit from sharing their family life online. It can help stay connected to geographically dispersed friends and relatives, not unlike a round-robin letter sent at Christmas. Having a child can be an isolating time, as new parents find themselves suddenly stuck at home, removed from their usual social circles, and the internet provides a way to connect. Those whose children suffer from health problems can find valuable support communities online.
Inevitably, every internet trend attracts its haters. The blog STFU, Parents was founded in 2009 to lampoon sharenting on social media, satirizing “the jaw-dropping, self-indulgent, and occasionally rage-inducing world of parental overshare.” It appealed to the venerable human tradition of judging others’ parenting: There’s nothing some people love more than to tut and murmur, “I would never do that to my children.” Leah Plunkett, a law professor and author of the book Sharenthood, remarks that while some parents do cross the line, such critiques also stem from a deep-rooted social judgment of mothers. “Throughout the generations, moms have been frequently targeted in public discourse,” she says, “from what movies they let their children watch to whether they bottle or nurse, or use cloth or disposable diapers. Parent-shaming is often mom-shaming, bound up in ongoing conflict and stereotypes about how we see the role of the mother.”
It is possible to acknowledge legitimate concerns about sharenting without shaming parents. One common issue is that parents post photos of their children without considering how their child feels about what is being shared, or how they might feel in the future. “We’re going to look back on our internet activity like bad tattoos,” comments Thomas, “wishing we hadn’t posted things and not being able to erase them.” A 2019 study by Microsoft showed that 42% of teens have a problem with their parents posting about them on social media. They may find photos of themselves embarrassing, which is no small deal when you’re a teenager, and an even bigger deal when their online footprint will one day be used to judge them as potential candidates for a college, a job, or even a romantic partner.2
More troubling is the fact that once posted, data such as photos are difficult to erase or even keep on one platform. In 2019, The New York Times reported about a woman who uploaded photos of her children to Flickr in 2005 and then found them being used by a military surveillance database to train facial-recognition algorithms 14 years later. “We should expect that both kids and parents will continue to be surprised over time about where their data has gone,” says Plunkett.
Considering the real benefits of sharenting and the deep penetration of social media into the weft of our daily lives, it is impractical to tell parents not to share any photos of their children. Rather the focus should be on sharing mindfully and making considered decisions about each post. “Every family is going to need to do this calculus on their own,” says Stacey Steinberg, a law professor and author of Growing Up Shared, “just like they decide when they’re ready to leave their teenager at home alone, or let their third-grader cross the street without holding hands. These are all calculated choices we make as parents. We do the best we can based on the information we have, and we hope we make the right choice.”
“We’re going to look back on our internet activity like bad tattoos.”
For Peter Lok, who with his wife, Amber, shares photos of their young children to over 300,000 followers on the Instagram page @leialauren, it’s a question of thinking carefully about the children’s future. “We are very selective of what we share,” he says, “and if there ever comes a day where they do not want to be in the public eye, we are always able to delete the account. The decision lies in their hands.” He is also open to transferring ownership of the account when the girls come of age. “Social media will be the way of their world,” he says, “and when they are ready, they will take over.”
If Lok ends up passing the account over to his daughters, he will be enacting a new digital version of an age-old rite of passage—the moment a parent lets their child grow up and acknowledges their agency to define themselves. Yet this is potentially a handover that the children will want before their parents are ready. Adolescence is a period of experimentation, and kids today try out versions of themselves online just as previous generations did when selecting the rock bands they listened to or the fashion labels they wore. If a parent posts about their child from a young age, or even makes and runs a separate social media account for them, are they robbing the child of their right to curate their own online presence, or even to decide whether they want to be on the internet at all?
Thomas gives the example of one of her son’s friends, who wanted to transition gender as a teen, but struggled to express this online because their parents had already created a social media profile for them using the gender they were assigned at birth. Thomas argues parents should not use children as “a prop for their storytelling,” or seek to define them before they have had a chance to define themselves. “My son today is a lot of who I assumed him to be when he was little,” she says, “but he is also someone who I never could have imagined.”
