Sharenting is the sharing of your child’s image and information online for any reason, though it is most commonly associated with social media and the ethics surrounding it. Sharenting is a portmanteau of the words “share” and “parenting” and refers specifically to the sharing of material related to one’s own child. The etiquette required when one is a godparent, a grandparent, or a parent of a child’s friend should perhaps be guided by the attitude of the parents of that child. Concerns about the risks of sharenting have grown over the last decade, as both parental knowledge of how our information is gathered and used online and the number of platforms through which one can share content have increased. As with all things parenting, judgement, worry, and requests for more information abound. So, what are the benefits and risks of sharenting and which is weightier?

Privacy concerns

The most obvious concern is your child’s right to privacy for everything from what they look like and do as toddlers to where they spend their time and who is around them most often. Data collection results in targeted ads and other content that could be termed exploitative when your child is not the person who gave the initial consent to share their information.

Safety concerns

Predators and fraudsters are a risk to anyone sharing information online, and sharenting exposes your child– or at least content related to them and their identity– to these bad actors. In 2018, Barclays Bank warned the British public that sharenting is making parents the weakest link in the online privacy measures that protect their children from financial fraud. We may unwittingly reveal our child names, ages, and dates of birth in messages, give an indication of home addresses, birth locations, mother’s maiden names, and other information that can be used for scams and fraudulent loan and credit card transactions, the bank said.

Your child’s freedom of choice.

We all have choices about how much of a digital life we want to lead, including when it should begin. The current generation of children (those born after 2010, known as Generation Alpha) will be the first to inherit their parents' social media as a record of how they lived. Making the choice that your children’s lives should be documented while you do this for yourself is both accelerating the beginning of their digital lives and taking the choice to do so away from them. This should raise ethical concerns for the companies that operate social media platforms as well as parents. Platforms do not allow children to become account holders before the age of at least 13, but does this protection really matter if their image and other information are being shared by a parental user?

The potential impact of sharenting on your child’s future: unintended consequences?

Children raised in a post-socials environment may have had news and images about their lives made publicly available from the time their mother became pregnant. Given how much of our online information is gathered for legitimate Know Your Customer Information reasons by institutions today, as well as by retailers who want to predict and profile our tastes and buying habits, it’s not unreasonable to speculate that “sharented” information will contribute to an aggregate of data on your child that they cannot control but can affect everything from their admission to university to which ads they see and whether they are approved for a bank account.

Who is sharenting really for?

There’s nothing wrong with being delighted by and proud of your children and wanting to share that with others. Parenting can also feel isolating at times, and sharing your experiences on social media can give us a warm sense of community far faster than organising a coffee morning. Simply asking yourself why you want to share your child’s images and information online may be enough to shape your choices in a healthier way. What sort of personal information does the content you want to post share? Why do you want to share it on this platform and in this way? If it’s to keep people you love and trust aware of how family life is going, is there another way to do this that does not put your child’s safety or privacy at risk?

How much sharenting is too much for a child’s mental health?

The impact of sharenting on a child’s mental health is a relatively new area of child psychological study, but experts suggest that it can promote shame, self-comparison, and insecurity in kids. On the flipside, some children may view constant posting as a sign of validation, parental love, and pride and wonder why you don’t devote more of your social media content to them. Ultimately, the decision of how much (as well as what) to post is the responsibility of individual parents, and as long as you do not know what the mental health fallout will be from what you’re posting, perhaps the safest decision is not to post at all.

But isn’t sharenting OK if my social media accounts are private?

One could argue that no social media account is truly private. As soon as you upload something, it belongs to the company that owns the platform, and even if you know everything about every one of your followers, anything you post can be screenshotted from their accounts and shared elsewhere. There really is no way to be certain anything you put on social media is completely private.

Are commercial reasons for sharenting good enough?

Social media has helped people to generate or expand careers in a way that may involve their families. Again, there is a choice issue—how much consent is a child giving when they are involved in a reality star or influencer parent’s content? On the other hand, one could argue that every child is impacted by a parent's professional decisions to some extent and that parents who involve their children in their work are spending more time with them and teaching them transferable skills earlier than parents who separate work from family. Old media—parenting columns in newspapers, for example—also involved the sharing of children’s personal information by parents for professional purposes in the name of entertaining and potentially benefiting other parents, but the scale and availability of online information makes social media implications more concerning.

Making money from your child’s image and information online is such a cause for concern in Italy that legislation was proposed in 2024 that would require parents to register such activities and prove that funds earned were being held until a child turns eighteen. A French anti-sharenting law passed last year is tougher, urging parents to take responsibility for their children’s online privacy and safety and giving judges the right to ban parents from posting their children’s images for entirely commercial reasons entirely. At time of writing, there are no UK laws specifically related to sharenting, though a legal scholar might point out that Articles 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child—to which the UK is signed—protect kids right to expression of their own image and information, while sharenting could be termed interference with their privacy, as defined by Article 16. A sharenting-adjacent court case in the Netherlands in 2020 was held after a grandmother refused to remove images of her grandchild from Pinterest and Facebook despite multiple requests from the child’s mother. The judge ruled that the grandmother was indeed infringing on the child’s rights and ordered her to remove the images or be fined.

What is “sharenting syndrome”?

Sharenting syndrome is defined by some researchers as the practice of oversharing of content related to one’s child to the extent that the child is at risk of neglect or abuse. However, it has not yet been so widely adopted as to constitute a recognised condition.

How do I make mindful decisions about sharenting?

Ultimately, the answer to the question “Can I engage in sharing safely?” depends on the risks that concern you most. There is so much potential for dangerous or unintended consequences with sharenting, especially in the fast-evolving online world, that one can see why the benefits seem pretty scant by comparison. We don’t know what we don’t know. In the future, and in most cases, the only person a parent will have to answer regarding sharenting decisions is their child. The best way to make a mindful decision is to consider them first.

For more information on ensuring your child’s safety and wellbeing, check out Unii’s Toddler and Development Journey with Dr. Nisha Patel.

What is sharenting? Why is sharenting bad?

Can you engage in sharenting safely? Is sharing your child's image and information online ever safe?