Lead
Posting a photo of your child on social media is something almost every parent has considered. The motivation is honest: sharing a child's growth with family, keeping a record of something wonderful. There is nothing to reproach in that impulse.
But alongside it, a quieter question tends to surface: What will this child think when they find this photo in fifteen years? The child cannot yet grasp the concept of consent, and yet the digital footprint is being laid down now, in their name.
Sharenting — the practice of parents sharing their children's images, information, and daily life on social media — has spread widely over the past decade. A growing body of research is beginning to examine the legal and ethical dimensions embedded in that practice.
The Legal Gap Steinberg Identified
Legal scholar Stacey B. Steinberg's 2017 article "Sharenting: Children's Privacy in the Age of Social Media" was the first systematic treatment of the collision between parental sharing rights and children's privacy rights [1].
The core of Steinberg's argument is this: parents may exercise consent on behalf of their children, but in shaping a child's digital footprint they are making decisions that the child may later wish to undo. In most legal systems, guardians hold broad custodial authority, and the extent to which a parent may disclose information about a child is largely left to parental judgment. This is not the same as saying the child has no privacy interests.
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR: the EU's comprehensive data privacy law establishing individuals' rights over their personal data, in force since 2018) includes a "right to erasure" — the right of individuals to request deletion of their personal data. A child who reaches adulthood and wants their early-life images and information removed from platforms has, at least in principle, a mechanism to seek that. In practice, however, the process is rarely simple, and complete erasure is not guaranteed [1].
Japan has not yet developed an equivalent statutory framework specifically governing minors' digital data, though the broader principles of the Act on the Protection of Personal Information apply. The legal picture remains unsettled.
Children's Capacity for Consent — A Developmental Perspective
At what age can a child meaningfully consent to information disclosure? The question has been debated at length in medical ethics and law, but it has received far less attention in the digital context.
The cognitive and social capacities required for consent — self-recognition, future orientation, and an understanding of social evaluation — are generally considered to come together in adolescence. Young children simply cannot grasp the long-term social consequences of having their image published. This is not a deficit; it is a feature of developmental stage. A four-year-old who says "yes" to a parent asking "can I post this?" has not provided meaningful consent in the ethical sense. The question's long-term implications — reputational effects, audience reach, persistence — are not accessible to that child in any real way.
Brosch (2016) surveyed parents on Facebook and found that 81.4% shared photos of significant events such as birthdays and graduation ceremonies, and 12.8% had shared information about a child's illness or surgery [2]. The latter figure is worth pausing on. Medical information — diagnoses, hospitalizations, surgeries — occupies a different category of sensitivity from birthday photos. Adults generally control who knows about their health history. Children whose medical information is shared widely before they are old enough to have a view about it may encounter that information in unexpected places later.
Marasli and colleagues (2016) documented similar sharing patterns in a Turkish sample [3], suggesting that parental sharing behavior is not culturally specific but cross-cultural — a relevant point for readers who might assume sharenting is primarily a phenomenon of English-speaking media environments. The motivation to share a child's moments with an extended social network appears to be widespread across quite different cultural contexts.
What Digital Footprints Do Over Time
Information posted to social media platforms persists unless actively removed. Policy changes by the platform, account compromise, and screenshot-based redistribution can all cause content to travel in ways the original poster did not intend.
Lazard and colleagues (2019) analyzed sharenting as an "affective achievement of parenting in a neoliberal context" — the process by which mothers use sharenting to make their parenting practices visible and legitimate to others [4]. When a post's motivation is tied to social validation and self-presentation, the child's privacy becomes a secondary consideration. This is not an indictment of sharenting parents; it is a structural observation about the incentive landscape of social media platforms.
In a world where digital information is searchable, the accumulation of childhood data creates a shadow biography that can affect future opportunities in ways the child is unaware of. Fox and Hoy (2019) argued that new mothers are particularly susceptible to sharenting from a place of emotional vulnerability, and that this susceptibility increases the likelihood that personally identifying information — full name, date of birth, photograph — is disclosed carelessly [5].
Children's Rights and the UNCRC
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC: a 1989 international treaty ratified by 196 countries that defines universal civil, cultural, and economic rights for children) protects privacy in Article 16 and the right to express views about matters affecting the child in Article 12. General Comment No. 25, adopted in 2021, addresses children's rights in the digital environment comprehensively and affirms that children's best interests must be considered in the processing of their personal data online [6].
This normative framework varies in legal force across countries, but it serves as a reference point for the question of how parents should handle information about their children. The appropriate reading is not "the UNCRC prohibits sharenting" but rather: the UNCRC is an invitation to ask what it means to respect a child's future right to self-determination — now, while that capacity is still developing.
What Parents Can Choose
What research points to is neither prohibition nor indifference but conscious choices about permanence and sensitivity.
Should an identifiable photo be public or restricted? How much detail about a child's medical history, school, or location should appear in a post? Would the child, reading this at fifteen, find it embarrassing or feel their trust had been violated? These questions put two things on the scale: the desire to share with people who matter now, and consideration for the person the child will become.
The desire to keep a record of childhood is legitimate. The issue is not the recording itself but the design decisions around it: where the record goes, and who can see it. Parenting apps like Memori can separate those two things — keeping a record for yourself and for the child's future without defaulting to public sharing. The value of recording and the risks of broadcasting do not have to travel together.
Summary
The argument here is not that sharenting is wrong. The motivations are sincere, and most of the problems do not arise when family sharing is distinguished from public disclosure.
What is worth doing, before posting, is pausing for a moment with one question: What will this person think of this when they find it in fifteen years? That is not an exercise in parental self-censorship. It is, in the language of both Steinberg (2017) [1] and the UNCRC [6], a form of consideration for a child's future right to determine how they are known.
Information persists. That is also a reason to choose carefully what gets kept, and what stays private.
References
- Steinberg SB. Sharenting: children's privacy in the age of social media. Emory Law J. 2017;66(4):839–884. https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/elj/vol66/iss4/2/
- Brosch A. When the child is born into the internet: sharenting as a growing trend among parents on Facebook. New Educ Rev. 2016;43(1):225–236. doi:10.15804/tner.2016.43.1.19
- Marasli M, Suhendan E, Yilmazturk NH, Cok F. Parents' shares on social networking sites about their children: sharenting. Anthropologist. 2016;24(2):399–406. doi:10.1080/09720073.2016.11892031
- Lazard L, Capdevila R, Dann C, Locke A, Roper S. Sharenting: pride, affect and the day-to-day politics of digital mothering. Soc Pers Psychol Compass. 2019;13(4):e12443. doi:10.1111/spc3.12443
- Fox AK, Hoy MG. Smart devices, smart decisions? Implications of parents' sharenting for children's online privacy: an investigation of mothers. J Public Policy Mark. 2019;38(4):414–432. doi:10.1177/0743915619858290
- United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. General Comment No. 25 on children's rights in relation to the digital environment. CRC/C/GC/25. 2021. https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-25-2021-childrens-rights-relation