Sharenting is the widespread habit of parents posting photos, videos, and personal details about their children on social media, and it is far more common than most people realize. In one large survey, three-quarters of social media-using parents said they had posted content about their children online, with the majority starting before the child’s first birthday.1PubMed Central. Sharenting: characteristics and awareness of parents publishing sensitive content of their children on online platforms The practice sits at the intersection of parenting culture, digital privacy, and children’s rights, and the gap between what parents intend and what they risk is wider than most families appreciate.
How Common Sharenting Actually Is
Sharenting is not a fringe behavior practiced by a few overzealous influencers. Research consistently finds it is the norm among parents who use social media. In a study of Italian parents, 98 percent used social media and 75 percent posted content featuring their children. About a third of those parents began sharing within their child’s first six months of life.2PubMed Central. Sharenting: characteristics and awareness of parents publishing sensitive content of their children on online platforms Most of these parents were not posting obsessively; 44 percent said they shared less than once a month, and only four percent posted more than once a day. Still, even occasional sharing accumulates over years of childhood.
A U.S.-based study found that the strongest predictor of how often a parent shares photos of their child is simply how often that parent posts on social media in general. Parents did not treat “kid content” as a different category requiring different judgment. Larger social networks with norms that encouraged parental sharing, more permissive parenting styles, and the parent’s own confidence in their parenting all predicted higher sharing frequency.3Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. Sharenting and Children’s Privacy in the United States: Parenting Style, Practices, and Perspectives on Sharing Young Children’s Photos on Social Media In other words, for most parents, sharing a cute photo of their toddler feels exactly the same as sharing a photo of their dinner. The instinct to think twice about it just does not kick in.
Demographics play a role too. The Italian study found that parents who shared were more likely to be younger than 35, to have larger follower counts, and to have part-time employment compared to non-sharing parents.4PubMed Central. Sharenting: characteristics and awareness of parents publishing sensitive content of their children on online platforms WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram were the platforms used most often for sharing children’s content. This is worth noting because the privacy settings and audience visibility vary enormously across these platforms, and many parents do not adjust them.
Why Parents Share in the First Place
Dismissing sharenting as vanity misses what is actually going on. Research points to several motivations, and most of them are emotionally understandable. Parents frequently share to keep distant friends and family involved in a child’s life, to create a digital archive of milestones, and to seek social support during the isolating early period of parenthood.5Children and Youth Services Review. Sharing images or videos of minors online: Validation of the Sharenting Evaluation Scale (SES) For parents of children with disabilities or medical conditions, sharing can be a lifeline to communities that understand what they are going through.
There is also a feedback loop at work. Receiving likes and comments on a child’s photo serves as a form of social validation for the parent. Each positive reaction reinforces the behavior and prompts more posting.6Children and Youth Services Review. Sharing images or videos of minors online: Validation of the Sharenting Evaluation Scale (SES) This is the same engagement mechanism that drives all social media use, but with an added emotional charge because the content involves a child the parent is proud of. Comparing oneself to other parents, demonstrating pride, and staying connected to the outside world all feed into the habit. None of these motivations are malicious. The problem is that they make it difficult for parents to weigh the long-term costs of sharing in the moment they are doing it.
Researchers have also documented how commercial settings exploit this vulnerability. In one study, mothers participating in a branded Twitter chat hosted by a major children’s company not only expressed feelings of parental vulnerability but also posted personally identifiable information about their children during the chat, seemingly without recognizing the trade-off.7Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. Smart Devices, Smart Decisions? Implications of Parents’ Sharenting for Children’s Online Privacy: An Investigation of Mothers The social and emotional context of the conversation lowered their guard around data the child would one day own.
How Children Feel About It
One of the most striking findings in sharenting research is the disconnect between what parents think is fine and what their children actually want. A study of Estonian families found a major discrepancy between parents’ and pre-teens’ views on whether a parent should ask permission before uploading child-related content. Pre-teens were often frustrated by their mothers’ sharenting habits, and this frustration led to real conflict over privacy boundaries within the family.8Media International Australia. ‘Take it down!’: Estonian parents’ and pre-teens’ opinions and experiences with sharenting Children did not just passively dislike the sharing; they actively expected their parents to respect their views and wanted to negotiate the terms of what was acceptable to post.
This matters because pre-teens are old enough to have a sense of their own image and reputation but typically lack the power to do anything about content that has already been posted. A child who finds out that a potty-training photo or a video of a tantrum has been shared with hundreds of people faces embarrassment with no obvious recourse. The frustration is compounded by the fact that the content was shared by a trusted authority figure. For younger children who cannot yet articulate these feelings, the issue is deferred rather than absent. Those photos do not disappear, and the child’s feelings about them will eventually arrive.
Privacy Risks and the Digital Footprint
Parents who share photos of their children often post names, birthdates, school names, and location details alongside the images, sometimes without realizing it. This kind of personally identifiable information is exactly what identity thieves and data brokers look for. By some estimates, the vast majority of children under two already have a digital footprint created entirely by their parents’ sharing activity.9Academia.edu. Sharenting: Sharing Moments or Violating Children’s Privacy? The child has no say in the creation of this footprint and may not discover it until years later.
The privacy concern is not hypothetical. Research has documented that images from parents’ social media accounts end up on child exploitation sharing sites.10Baltic Journal of Law & Politics. Child Right to Privacy and Social Media – Personal Information Oversharing Parents These are not images that were originally sexual or inappropriate. They are often ordinary beach photos or bath-time snapshots that are repurposed in contexts the parents never imagined. It is easier to recognize a privacy violation when a stranger commits it; it is much harder to see the same violation when a loving parent posts a perfectly innocent photo that ends up in the wrong hands.
Beyond exploitation, there is the quieter risk of data persistence. Content posted to major platforms is indexed, cached, and scraped by third-party services. Even if a parent later deletes a post, copies may exist in archives, search engine caches, or databases they have no control over. A child entering adolescence or adulthood may find that their digital history precedes them in ways that affect social relationships, school admissions, or job searches.
Creating a Digital Identity Before a Child Can Consent
Sharenting does not just generate a collection of embarrassing photos. It builds a digital identity for someone who never agreed to have one. A scoping review of the research literature identified two distinct approaches parents take when creating these identities online. The more common approach is what researchers call a “social digital identity,” where parents share photos with friends and family and create digital archives of childhood milestones. The second is a “performative digital identity,” where the child’s online presence is curated for a broader audience and shaped by how the parent wants the family to be perceived.11PubMed Central. Young Children and the Creation of a Digital Identity on Social Networking Sites: Scoping Review
Both approaches raise the same core issue: the child’s identity is being defined by someone else before the child has any capacity to participate in that process. A teenager who discovers that their parent has been constructing a public narrative about their childhood for years may feel that their ability to define themselves on their own terms has been preempted. The review also found that awareness of risks like digital kidnapping and identity theft did influence some parents’ behavior, suggesting that education can make a difference, but many parents remain unaware of these risks entirely.12PubMed Central. Young Children and the Creation of a Digital Identity on Social Networking Sites: Scoping Review
Generative AI Has Made the Risks Worse
The sharenting conversation began in an era when the main concern was who might see a photo. The rise of generative AI has introduced a new category of risk that most parents have not caught up with. Children’s images posted on social media can now be used to create deepfakes and synthetic media. A single clear photo of a child’s face is enough material for current AI tools to generate realistic fake images or videos, and the technology is becoming more accessible every year.13Edward Elgar Publishing. Amplified visibility: Critical reflections on children’s social media presence, sharenting and tech-abuse in the age of generative AI
Researchers have described this as “amplified visibility,” where the convergence of sharenting and AI technologies multiplies the dangers beyond what either would produce alone. The concern is no longer limited to a stranger seeing or saving a photo. It extends to the possibility that a child’s likeness could be manipulated into abusive or exploitative content without the family ever knowing. This affects not only the child’s right to be protected from violence and abuse but also their right to self-expression and self-determination, because their image has been weaponized in ways they cannot control.14Edward Elgar Publishing. Amplified visibility: Critical reflections on children’s social media presence, sharenting and tech-abuse in the age of generative AI The AI dimension makes even casual, low-frequency sharenting riskier than it was just a few years ago.
The Legal Landscape Is Still Catching Up
Children’s privacy is protected in principle by international law. Article 16 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child explicitly protects children from arbitrary interference with their privacy. In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation provides additional protections that apply to children’s personal data. But in practice, enforcing these protections against a child’s own parents is a different matter entirely.15Baltic Journal of Law & Politics. Child Right to Privacy and Social Media – Personal Information Oversharing Parents
A widely reported story from 2016 claimed that an eighteen-year-old Austrian woman had sued her parents for posting embarrassing childhood photos on Facebook. The story spread internationally as a cautionary tale, but it was later shown to be untrue.16Northumbria Research Link. Family privacy in the internet age: Family photographs as a case study Researchers have noted, however, that such a claim is “not inconceivable” under existing legal frameworks, and some legal scholars expect these cases to emerge as children raised in the sharenting era reach adulthood.
France has been one of the more proactive countries. In 2024, French lawmakers passed legislation that can restrict parents’ right to post images of their children online if doing so is deemed harmful. Several U.S. states have also begun considering laws that address children’s digital privacy in the context of parental sharing and child influencer content. But across most of the world, sharenting exists in a legal gray zone where the parent’s right to free expression and the child’s right to privacy collide without a clear resolution. The law has not yet decided whose right wins.
When Schools Do the Sharing
Sharenting is not exclusively a parental behavior. Schools and other institutions regularly post photos and videos of children on their social media accounts for promotional purposes, event documentation, and community engagement. A study of school social media practices found that all local education authorities surveyed advised schools to obtain written consent before sharing children’s images online.17Computers and Education Open. School social media use and its impact upon children’s rights to privacy and autonomy In practice, consent forms are often signed once at enrollment and cover all future sharing, which means parents are giving blanket permission for years of content they have never seen.
The dynamics are different from parental sharenting because families often feel pressured to consent. Declining to sign a photo consent form can feel like opting out of the school community, and children whose parents refuse may be excluded from group photos or event documentation in ways that single them out socially. Meanwhile, schools face their own incentives to share content: social media engagement helps with enrollment, community relations, and fundraising. The result is another channel through which children’s images enter the public internet without meaningful child input.
If you are a parent reviewing a school’s social media consent form, it is worth asking specific questions. Can you limit consent to certain types of content? Can you request that your child’s face not be clearly identifiable? Can you revoke consent later and have existing images removed? Most schools have not thought through these details, and asking forces the conversation.
What Parents Can Actually Do Differently
The research does not suggest that parents need to stop sharing entirely. Keeping distant family connected and creating digital memories are legitimate goals. But the evidence points to several adjustments that meaningfully reduce risk without eliminating the benefits of sharing:
- Audit your audience: Before posting, check who can actually see the content. A photo shared on a public Instagram account reaches a fundamentally different audience than one sent to a private family group chat. The Italian study found WhatsApp was the most common sharing platform among parents, which at least limits the audience to direct contacts, though forwarding is always possible.18PubMed Central. Sharenting: characteristics and awareness of parents publishing sensitive content of their children on online platforms
- Strip identifying details: Avoid including your child’s full name, school name, birth date, or precise location in posts or captions. These details are what turn a cute photo into a data point that can be exploited.
- Ask your child: Even young children can be asked whether they want a photo shared. Pre-teens feel strongly about this, and dismissing their objections teaches them that their boundaries do not matter.19Media International Australia. ‘Take it down!’: Estonian parents’ and pre-teens’ opinions and experiences with sharenting
- Think about the future audience: Imagine your child at 15 seeing this post. Would they be embarrassed? Angry? Indifferent? If you are not sure, that uncertainty is itself useful information.
- Avoid naked or semi-clothed images: Even innocent bath or beach photos can be repurposed. Given the documented movement of images from parent accounts to exploitation sites, this is the single most concrete risk-reduction step available.20Baltic Journal of Law & Politics. Child Right to Privacy and Social Media – Personal Information Oversharing Parents
The Consent Problem That Has No Clean Solution
At the heart of sharenting is a tension that no privacy setting or parenting tip can fully resolve. Young children cannot consent to having their image shared online, and by the time they are old enough to have an opinion, years of content may already exist. Parents are both the people most motivated to share and the people legally responsible for protecting the child’s interests. These roles conflict in ways the law has barely begun to address.
The U.S. study’s finding that parents do not meaningfully distinguish between general social media posting and sharing content about their children suggests the problem is partly one of categorization.21Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. Sharenting and Children’s Privacy in the United States: Parenting Style, Practices, and Perspectives on Sharing Young Children’s Photos on Social Media If posting a photo of your child feels like posting a photo of your lunch, then the child’s distinct privacy interests never enter the calculation. The most useful shift parents can make may not be adopting specific rules but recognizing that their child’s digital presence is a separate thing from their own, with its own stakes and its own future owner. That reframing alone changes a surprising number of the daily decisions about what to post and where.