Before You Post: Tips for Sharing Your Child’s Life Online

Even casual, well-intentioned sharing of content about children carries risks for children, say many experts. Liselot Hudders, PhD, Professor in Marketing Ethics at Ghent University in Belgium, identifies three key concerns parents should be aware of:

Identity development. When parents document a child’s life online from an early age, they are creating a digital identity on the child’s behalf, without input from the child. As the child grows, they may find a large public archive of parent-posted images and personal information that could make it harder for them to define themselves on their own terms, says Hudders.

Child well-being. Content that reveals a child’s difficult or sensitive moments, such as eating or medical issues, or behavioral challenges, can follow them into their later social lives. “The information you post online, especially if it’s about the struggles your child has, can be used by other children to bully them on the school playground or online,” warns Hudders. Children may also encounter this content themselves, causing stress and embarrassment.

Privacy violations. Sharenting exposes intimate details about a child’s life to a wide and often unfamiliar audience, usually without the child’s knowledge or consent. This can be uncomfortable for the child, as they don’t know how much others know about them. “They can walk on the street and others might recognize them, know everything about them, while the child doesn’t know that person.”

Before sharing content containing your children, experts recommend pausing to reflect on the potential consequences of doing so. Hudders suggests asking yourself:

• • Would I show this picture or video to a stranger on the street?
  • What could the long-term consequences be?
  • What if my child encounters this image when they’re older? Could it be used to embarrass or bully them?

Sharenting at its best is a meaningful way to build lasting memories and celebrate milestones with friends and family, says Hudders, and thinking through consequences before posting helps keep it that way.

Whether children can meaningfully consent to their pictures being posted online is a new question modern parents have to grapple with, says Fortesa Latifi, MA, a journalist who covers families and technology. “What does it mean to give our children a digital footprint that maybe they can’t consent to, even if we change it later?” Latifi asks.

From a legal standpoint, children have limited protection when it comes to controlling what parents share about them. “Children do not have a lot of rights within the family unit. They might have a right to be free from harm. But they don’t really have rights to control that parent-child dynamic,” says Stacey Steinberg, JD, Legal Skills Professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. 

Children are capable of engaging with ideas of consent earlier than parents often think, Hudders says, and even young children have a right to know what is being shared about them, who will see it, and why it was shared. Starting consent conversations in toddlerhood builds a child’s understanding of consent early and creates a foundation before their own media use. Introducing these concepts in a playful, age-appropriate way helps children develop media literacy and a sense of digital autonomy early that will serve them well as they get older.

Just as parents teach children about bodily autonomy, experts encourage extending that type of thinking to helping youth understand autonomy over their digital presence. “Giving kids language is always a really good place to start,” says Steinberg. “A lot of times I think that kids don’t even have the agency or the autonomy to recognize that they could say ‘No’.”

For very young children, parents can put that into practice by acting as their child’s mouthpiece in moments of discomfort. If a child seems upset, naming the feeling and providing them with the words – e.g. “You seem uncomfortable. You can say, ‘I don’t like that’” – teaches them their reactions are valid and saying no is allowed, says Ryan Allen, MS, LPCC-S, a Licensed Professional Counselor at Preschool Therapy & Consulting.

Give children genuine input in what gets shared about them online, including the right to refuse, suggests Hudders. Even young children can express how they feel about a picture, she notes, and that reaction deserves to be taken seriously.  

“When our kids become social media users themselves, they are going to be the ones deciding whether to post pictures of us, of their peers, of other people,” says Steinberg. “It can be helpful to model good consent by asking our kids and valuing their consent before we post about them.”

A child’s relationship to their digital footprint changes as they get older, and parents’ sharenting practices must change with it, say many experts. Early on, children have little awareness of what it means to be shared online, which places the responsibility on parents to make thoughtful choices on their behalf, says Allen. But as children get older, so does their capacity to understand the consequences of sharing online, which can contribute to things like anxiety and depression, he cautions. Staying aware of where your child is developmentally is key for keeping these conversations about consent meaningful.

Periodic check-ins can provide a helpful structure for re-evaluating child consent. A child who was comfortable with a particular image at six may feel very differently at twelve, notes Hudders. What matters, she says, is revisiting these decisions regularly and together.  

Sit down with your child once a year to review what you’ve shared and give them a genuine opportunity to weigh in and to ask for content to be taken down if it makes them feel embarrassed or uncomfortable, recommends Steinberg. “As kids get older, it’s important to recognize that the parent’s interest in expressing themselves has to be minimized and made way for the child’s competing privacy interests,” she says.

Sharenting rules aren’t one-size-fits-all. Children within the same family can feel very differently about being shared online, and what works for one child may not work for another, says Latifi. “I don’t want the takeaway to be: ‘I can never, ever share anything about my kids,’” she stresses. The goal isn’t to stop sharing altogether, but to let each child’s comfort level help guide the way – within a structure of understanding consent. 

Some children prefer to be shared online more often than others. If a child expresses sadness about not being posted about, the solution isn’t simply posting more, it’s talking to them about it, says Allen. Ask about what specifically feels bad – are they feeling uncelebrated, or are they responding to pressure from seeing other peers’ parents share more freely? It’s a natural entry point into broader conversations about social media, peer pressure, and why your family makes the choices it does when sharing online.

Sharing your own thought process – why you posted something or why you didn’t – gives children a model for the kind of thinking you want them to develop, suggests Hudders. This personal framing can also start a conversation with your child about why having a choice matters. Draw on your own experiences to make these conversations feel relatable, she suggests.

If you’ve shared a lot in the past and are now reconsidering, it’s okay to tell your kids and model this honest self-reflection directly, says Allen. Lead with your own uncertainty, and explain to your child that you shared freely when social media was new and you didn’t fully understand the risks, but looking back now, you think you overshared, he suggests.

Setting expectations with other family members early, ideally before a child is born, can prevent uncomfortable situations down the road, says Allen. Most people simply need to be told directly: please ask before you post.

Let extended family know you are willing to share photos with them privately, but that posting them without asking first is off the table, suggests Allen. When a boundary hasn’t been set in advance and a violation occurs, the conversation is harder, but still worth having.

Sharenting isn’t only pictures – it’s also the stories parents tell, whether on social media, in group chats, or at the dinner table. “Anytime we’re sharing these stories, whether they be sweet or embarrassing moments, we’re basically writing their narrative,” says Allen. And that narrative, Allen suggests, is worth pausing over, even in casual, offline conversations with immediate family. Giving children those small acts of agency can really add up to a sense that their story belongs to them, he says.

In addition to thinking carefully before sharing, there are several steps parents can take to protect their child’s safety and privacy online, says Hudders:

Obscure faces in photos. Covering a child’s face with an emoji or sticker is a simple and common way to protect their identity.

Don’t post photos that reveal habitual locations. Images that show where a child regularly spends time, such as a sports field, school, or park, anything that might indicate where they do their hobbies, may be used to locate them.

Leave out sensitive or medical information. Sharing sensitive details, such as a child’s medical history or health struggles, can be equally, if not more, harmful than posting visual content.

Even content shared with a small, limited group can travel further than intended. Screenshots, re-shares, and workarounds mean that once something is shared, control over it is never promised. If you wouldn’t be comfortable with something being shared broadly, don’t share it at all, is a rule of thumb, Steinberg advocates. “I know that sounds kind of cruel because we want to think we can trust certain audiences,” she acknowledges, “but the life of a digital footprint can be really long.”

The sharenting conversation often focuses on what gets posted publicly, but Allen suggests the moment before the picture is taken deserves equal attention. Digital documentation has become a form of public evidence that we’re parenting well, and the likes and comments that follow are a form of validation, he says. This motivates many parents to use precious in-person moments to pressure children to pose or perform for the invisible future audience – which comes with a cost. “In an instant, that beautiful moment can become a battle over the performance of it, over the child’s independence,” Allen warns. When that happens, everyone tends to walk away feeling worse, and it is the relationship with your child that suffers most, he says.

When capturing a moment becomes a recurring priority, children might learn that their natural, spontaneous selves aren’t enough, and their emotions need to be produced rather than felt, notes Allen. When smiles, excitement, and even grief are used as content, it can create a psychological disconnect for children by having them question what they actually feel and what they think is expected of them, he says.

Before reaching for the phone at all, Allen recommends asking yourself: “Do I have to take this right now, or can I savor the moment with them first?” When you decide taking a picture is justified, consider turning it into a relationship moment rather than a performance – do a silly selfie together, or hand the camera to your child and let them take pictures of you, suggests Allen. If you tend to take a lot of photos, try negotiating with your child beforehand about how many pictures you get today, and then honor that number. 

No parent will get this right every time, Allen acknowledges, and that’s okay. The occasional picture power struggle won’t damage your relationship, but a recurring pattern can. The good news is that small positive moments add up as powerfully as negative ones. The most important thing is to keep the focus on connection, attunement, and play, he stresses. “Those are the things that last so long after the photo is forgotten, long after the likes stop. What remains is us in that relationship.”

When you feel the impulse to capture a moment, setting rules for yourself can help you refrain and protect the experience, says Allen. Try a “one photo or one ask” approach, he suggests: 

• • Ask once – if the answer is “No,” let it go. 
  • If you get one picture, take it and move on regardless of how it turns out. Try not to disrupt the moment by chasing a better shot, and remember candid shots tend to capture something a posed photo never can.

Parents shouldn’t assume that their child’s schools and other organizations have already worked through the complexities of digital privacy. In many cases they haven’t. “Especially with technology, there is so much coming at administrators at one time that these issues are very easy to fall through the cracks,” says Steinberg. Raising these concerns directly with schools, she notes, can be more effective than it might seem, as real change on this issue often happens at the grassroots level.