From birthdays to the first day of school to a new outfit, it’s only natural to want to share every accomplishment and special moment your child has on social media. But this parental sharing — or “sharenting” — could threaten your family’s safety.
Sharenting is the trendy new term for the behavior of parents who overshare their children’s lives online. Using social media as a digital photo album might seem like a good idea — all your friends and family can see the photos in one place after all — but exposing children online can be dangerous.
“Federal investigators believe there are more than 500,000 online predators active each day and they all have multiple online profiles,” reported KOAA in 2022.
Here are a few tips to keep your children safe online:
- Be cautious about personal information
When posting photos, don’t include too many details. Captions or the photos themselves could reveal your children’s school or church, or even your own street address.
“Sharing intimate moments of our day-to-day lives and the lives of our children has become so normalized that we don’t think about the fact that our children’s digital footprint often started even before they were born with scan photos and newborn announcements hitting the internet,” said Kimberley Bennett, a child psychologist and creator of The Psychologist’s Child, to Very Well Family.
- Be mindful of other children
Even if a parent shares their child on their platform, it doesn’t mean you can share their child on your platform.
“Shared photos can be easily traced back to the parent’s identity and social media account, offering data brokers the ability to discern the child’s identity and start compiling digital dossiers on your kids,” Mark Bartholomew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, told HuffPost.
The easiest change you can make is to keep your accounts private. In one now-famous case, TikToker Wren Eleanor — a 3-year-old whose mother shared various videos of her on the platform — accumulated more than 17 million followers, and often saw more than 1,000 saves of her videos. But it was later revealed that many of those followers were adult men.
“When you put something out there, you don’t have any control over it. You lose control over those photos,” said Jasmine Hood Miller, director of community content and engagement for Common Sense Media, to ABC News. “Anyone can easily copy the photo, tag it and save it and use it for things that you are not intending and maybe not even thinking of.”
To make sure only the people you know can see online photos of your kids, check out the privacy settings on your social media accounts.
