Sharenting: What you should know

Sharenting: What you need to know (Photo: iStock)

Our children are the first generation to grow up shared.

Kioko Mutinda and Rita Mutinda are a young couple – millennials with two children, a boy aged 15 years and a girl aged 11. Kioko and Rita are caught up in the digital age, where navigating parenthood in the modern world of social media, smartphones, and other technologies is no easy task.

According to the couple, this digital space is advancing at a rate that seems to grow faster than today’s children, such that it is not always clear how to use these spaces safely – even when you have the best intentions.

Kioko and Rita have been sharing their parenting journey on social media and creating memories of their parenting journey.

According to tech experts, many parents and caregivers find it stylish to share about their children through pictures, and texts (some run blogs) because they want to include family and friends in the most joyful moments of their lives.

Sometimes this is done without involving or seeking the children’s permission (especially the teens and young adults).

Kioko and Rita have been doing this, until recently when they learnt about sharenting. They say, they no longer do it with the kind of enthusiasm, after learning that this style has its flaws that can affect their young children.

“Sharenting has taken over the traditional space of sharing our lives and experiences during traditional family visits and events such as Christmas and Easter family gatherings, where everything that happens is kept within the precincts of the family or other closed group events,” says Rita.

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Kioko says that this is no longer the case, pointing out that today’s parents share about their children outside of the family circle – a post on social media with a picture, a blog post about their child or children, a video recording through the social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram or WhatsApp.

What is sharenting?

Sharenting is what parents do when they talk about their children outside of the family circle, especially through the use of social media – like sharing a post on social media with a picture, a blog post about their child, a video through a messaging platform like Instagram and other social media platforms.

The term ‘sharenting’ was coined by Wall Street Journal writer Steven Leckart in the early 2010s. It was included in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2022.

“When parents share about their children online without involving them in that decision-making process, we are missing out on a valuable opportunity to teach them the importance of seeking consent before displaying them on social media,” says Peter Korir, a tech expert.

He says this especially for children as young as five years, as they need to grasp the foundation and idea of consent. Korir days no matter how, everyone embraces autonomy as we all value our images, irrespective of age.

For example, he says, a four or five-year-old will want to wear a pink dress and not a red dress, and a 12-year-old might want to be seen holding their grandmother’s hand while another may not want to be seen doing so.

Korir says this to a parent might look like a small thing, and the parent might document this on social media without the child’s consent.

“However, this small thing to an adult, really matters to the child as they too, have feelings, and we need to leave space for them to express themselves as young children cannot give informed consent about sharing,” says the expert.

Kioko and Rita thought it “fancy and trendy” to share their parenting journey digitally until they stumbled on Stacey Steinberg’s bestseller Growing Up Shared: How Parents Can Share Smarter on Social Media and What You Can Do to Keep Your Family Safe in a no privacy world.

“Reading this book opened our eyes to the fact that we were wrapped up in Ken’s and Naomi’s (their children) lives as being part of our identities, whereas they both had their individual feelings,” says the father of two, adding that sharing about ourselves (the parents) is one thing, but it is something else when we share about others in our homes.

The flipside of sharenting

Prof Steinberg, a mother of two says the first thing parents should consider when sharing content about children is the actual tangible harm that the child can experience when their details and lives are shared online.

She writes that there lies the danger of data brokers using this shared content to create digital dossiers on children what such children will say or do, and their health issues in the future.

“When we share about our children online without involving them in that decision-making process, we’re missing out on the valuable opportunity to teach our children and model for children the idea of consent, and to show them that we value privacy,” she says.

Rita says when they reflected on their sharing of overly personal information about their children such as embarrassing stories and pictures that they thought at the time of posting were funny, they did not pause to consider their children’s perspective.

Prof Steinberg advises it is important for parents not to share pictures of their children in any state of undress because there are bad actors who might use the content for bad motives.

She explains it is important for parents to talk to their children about what they are sharing and the process they go through to decide if something is appropriate to share

Tips on sharenting

Sharing children’s content online is never 100 per cent safe – it is a matter of balancing the risks and what parents perceive as the benefits.

Remember some adults may want to interact with or harm your child because of content they have interacted with online.

If you plan to share, consider the audience you are sharing with: what are your privacy settings on your social media profiles, how well do you know the people you have added as friends or followers, how much information they are sharing (locations and identifiable features like school logos), and whether or not that information could be embarrassing or harmful to their children now or down the road.

If you have already posted a lot about your children and are having second thoughts, the first step would be to look at what you have shared in the past and try to deal with some of it. There is help available to help you out with this.

If your children are around age 9-10 years involve them in the process of going through social media feeds and deleting things that are no longer relevant to them. Commit to doing that regularly every few months.

Have honest conversations with your friends and extended family about your sharing preferences, remember that sharing information about children on social media is a relatively new occurrence and not everyone has given the issue equal attention.