Lead
Children born in the early 2010s, when Facebook and Instagram were becoming mainstream, are now approaching adolescence. They are the first generation of children whose lives were documented on social media from birth — what some researchers have started calling "the first generation of shareanted children."
Research on how these young people experience their parents' posts has been accumulating only recently. What it shows is not easy reading for parents who have been posting.
What Sharenting Was
Steinberg's (2017) landmark paper was one of the first academic treatments to frame sharenting: the practice of parents extensively sharing photos and details of their children's lives on social media — a portmanteau of "sharing" and "parenting" systematically as a violation of children's privacy rights [1]. The argument: when parents publicly disclose their children's information on social media without the child's consent, they undermine that child's future ability to manage their own digital identity.
Blum-Ross and Livingstone (2017) offer a more layered analysis of parental motivations [2]. Preserving memories, connecting with other parents, forming identity ("confirming oneself as a parent"), relieving loneliness — these overlapping motivations sustain posting behavior, and awareness of the child's perspective tends to be secondary [2].
Parents' motivations are sincere. The problem is not the motivation but the invisibility of who will see a post, and into whose hands it will pass years later. "Friends only" settings don't prevent a friend's screenshot. The structure that ties "likes" to a parent's emotional satisfaction has an inherent tendency to convert a child's image into content.
Testimony from the First Generation
Several consistent patterns have emerged from the research that has accumulated on young people's experiences.
Verswijvel and colleagues (2019), in a study of pre-adolescent and adolescent children in Belgium, found that approximately 40–50% had experienced dissatisfaction with a parent posting photos of them on social media without permission, and that discomfort was strongest for photos depicting failure, distress, or embarrassing situations [3]. A significant number also reported anxiety about peer consequences — friends seeing the posts, potential ridicule.
Lipu and Siibak (2019), in an Estonian study, found that requests from children to parents to delete posts peaked at ages 12–14 [4], indicating that awareness of and concern about one's own photographic record rises sharply in the years before adolescence.
Ouvrein and Verswijvel (2019), in a focus-group study, reported an association between sharenting experiences and reduced sense of trust toward parents [5]. Children who had experienced unauthorized posting were less likely to feel that their parents respected their privacy, compared to children who had not — a finding with implications for the long-term parent–child relationship.
Multiple studies also consistently show that "cute photos" are generally not a source of complaint [3,5]. The problem relates not only to photo content but to dissatisfaction with the process — whether the child was consulted before posting.
The Gap Between What Parents Intended and What Children Experienced
There is a discrepancy of context between the parent who posted and the child who was posted about.
For the parent, sharing a child's photo was an act of "recording and sharing growth." The warmth of receiving positive responses was tied to the social validation that parents need during the demanding years of raising young children.
For the child, the experience of her image being "consumed" on social media can carry an entirely different meaning. Knowing her image exists somewhere she has no access to, knowing someone is looking at it, possibly aware that classmates can see it — this anxiety grows and intensifies precisely when sensitivity to others' gaze surges in the years around adolescence.
As Blum-Ross and Livingstone (2017) note, actions that parents began with the intention of "keeping a record" can have unforeseen effects on a child's identity formation: the developmental process by which children build a sense of who they are, including how they appear to others and to themselves in digital space [2]. Those effects tend to surface as the child turns 8, then 10, then 12.
What Can Be Done After the Fact
Retroactively undoing past posts is not realistic. But several practical options exist.
One is retrospective dialogue. When a child reaches 10–12, a parent can create a one-time occasion to look back through past posts together. Making decisions about deletion or depublication jointly opens a natural conversation about privacy. As Chalklen and Anderson (2017) argue, the balance between a child's wellbeing and a caregiver's exercise of digital rights can only be adjusted dynamically — through conversation [6].
A second option is revising the criteria for future posts. Using the question "how would the 18-year-old version of this child feel seeing this?" as a pre-posting filter is not a perfect answer, but it functions as a workable reference point. What a child today finds acceptable and what a future version of that child will feel are not the same thing — holding both possibilities in view adds a degree of perspective to posting decisions.
Closing
The effects of sharenting remain invisible until a child is older. Now that testimony from the first shareanted generation is accumulating, what it suggests is not "I should never have posted" — it is "create an opportunity to revisit the past together once the child is old enough to have a view."
Past posts cannot be changed. But "what we do from here" and "how we handle what already exists" can be changed starting now. The day a child says "don't show anyone that photo" can be anticipated not with dread but with the preparation to receive it as the opening of a conversation.
References
- Steinberg SB. Sharenting: children's privacy in the age of social media. Emory Law J. 2017;66(4):839–884.
- Blum-Ross A, Livingstone S. Sharenting, parent blogging, and the boundaries of the digital self. Popul Commun. 2017;15(2):110–125. doi:10.1080/15405702.2016.1223300.
- Verswijvel K, Walrave M, Hardies K, Heirman W. Sharenting, is it a good or a bad thing? Understanding how adolescents think and feel about sharenting on social network sites. Child Youth Serv Rev. 2019;104:104401. doi:10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.104401.
- Lipu M, Siibak A. "Take it down!": Estonian parents' and pre-teens' opinions and experiences with sharenting. Media Cult Soc. 2019;41(5):710–726. doi:10.1177/0163443719847516.
- Ouvrein G, Verswijvel K. Sharenting: parental adoration or public humiliation? A focus group study on adolescents' experiences with sharenting against the background of their own impression management. Child Youth Serv Rev. 2019;99:319–327. doi:10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.02.011.
- Chalklen C, Anderson H. Sharenting: balancing the welfare of children and the privacy rights of parents online. Comput Law Secur Rev. 2017;33(6):831–838. doi:10.1016/j.clsr.2017.05.005.
- Brosch A. When the child is online: the sharenting phenomenon. Educ Sci. 2016;6(1):3. doi:10.3390/educsci6010003.