Sharenting Explained: How Sharing Online Shapes Children's Privacy and Trust
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Sharenting refers to the practice of parents or caregivers sharing information about their children online. This might include photos, videos, anecdotes, or personal details posted on social media, blogs, or messaging platforms. Over time, these everyday posts can add up to a digital record created long before a child is able to understand, influence, or consent to how they are represented online.
For many parents, sharenting feels harmless, even caring. Sharing moments of family life can help people feel connected, supported, and seen. The issue is not intent, but impact. Once content is shared online, it can be copied, stored, and resurfaced in ways that are difficult to control or reverse — and in an era of generative AI, children's images can now be manipulated, repurposed, or fed into training datasets in ways that were unimaginable even a few years ago. Children inherit these digital traces without having chosen them, and the risks attached to those traces are growing.
If you’re in a hurry, there are some key takeaways below, but in this piece I’ll take a deeper dive into sharenting from a cyberpsychology perspective.
Key Takeaways
Sharenting refers to parents or caregivers sharing information about children online, including photos, videos, stories, or personal details.
Sharenting can create a lasting digital record for a child before they are able to understand, influence, or consent to how they are represented online.
Online sharing can affect children's privacy, trust, and sense of control over their own identity as they grow.
Content shared online may be copied, stored, or resurfaced in ways that are difficult to control or reverse.
In the age of generative AI, children's photos can be manipulated, used to train AI models, or exploited in ways that dramatically escalate the risks of sharing.
Sharenting can have short- and long-term effects, including impacts on personal boundaries, relationships with caregivers, and future self-expression.
Thinking carefully about sharenting involves considering the child's perspective over time, alongside the adult's reasons for sharing.
As you're reading, keep in mind that I speak internationally on sharenting, children's digital rights, privacy, and the psychological impact of digital life on families and relationships. If you're looking for a keynote speaker, workshop facilitator, or panellist on these topics, explore topics on my speaking page.
More of my writing on digital psychology and relationships:
Some of the material in this blog post is adapted from my book Reset.
What is Sharenting?
Sharenting refers to parents or caregivers sharing information about their children online. This includes photos, videos, stories, or personal details posted on social media, blogs, or other digital platforms where content can be seen, copied, or stored beyond the family's immediate control.
Not all documentation of family life amounts to ‘sharenting’; private records, such as printed photographs or securely stored files, don’t really count. The term primarily applies when information is published in spaces that allow third-party access, long-term retention, or wider distribution — in other words, online.
Importantly, sharenting is also defined by who holds the decision-making power. In these situations, adults choose what is shared and how, before a child is able to understand, influence, or consent to their digital presence or presentation. In sharenting, an adult is forming a digital identity and making digital choices on a child's behalf.
Sharenting also differs from content that children choose to create or share themselves. When a child has meaningful agency over participation, the dynamics are different. Sharenting applies specifically to adult-led decisions that shape a child's online footprint during early stages of development.
Examples of Sharenting
Sharenting often happens in an ordinary, well-intentioned, or habitual way. Many parents do not think of sharing their children’s information as questionable at all, because the behaviour simply feels normal or social, part of documenting family life.
Sharing Photos and Videos on Social Media
Posting photos or videos of children on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok is one of the most common forms. This might include everyday moments, milestones, school events, or funny incidents. Even when accounts are private, images can still be saved, shared, or stored beyond the original audience.
Sharing Personal Stories About Children
Sharenting also includes written posts about a child's behaviour, emotions, health, or family anecdotes or accounts that include children. Parents may share stories about tantrums, struggles at school, or difficult moments in order to connect, seek support, or garner attention. These posts almost inevitably reveal personal details, characteristics, and other information that a child has not chosen to make public.
Using Children in Blogs, Vlogs, or Influencer Content
Some parents document their children's lives through blogs, YouTube channels, or social media accounts. Over time, this can create a detailed public record of a child's life. In some cases, as with ‘family vloggers’ or ‘Instagram mums,’ the child's image or story is part of an ongoing online presence, a kind of family business, that continues as they grow and from which they cannot easily opt out.
Sharing in Messaging Groups and Semi-Private Spaces
Sharenting does not only happen on public platforms. Photos and information shared in family group chats, school WhatsApp groups, or parent networks can still circulate beyond their original context. Content may be forwarded or stored without the child's knowledge, and perhaps without the original poster’s knowledge too.
Sharing Identifying Information
Posting details such as a child's full name, school, location, or daily routines is another form of sharenting. Single posts may seem harmless, but repeated sharing can build a clear picture of a child's identity and life over time. Now that facial recognition technologies are becoming more widespread, even censoring or concealing these details might not be enough to prevent identification of a particular child.
What Does Sharenting Mean for Children's Privacy and Trust?
Sharenting affects children because it involves decisions about visibility and identity being made on their behalf, often long before they are able to understand what that visibility means. (All too often, because of complicated terms and conditions or innocent ignorance, the adults might not understand either.)
Privacy and autonomy are closely linked, and both involve the ability to decide what parts of ourselves are shared, with whom, and under what conditions. Autonomy is a core emotional need in childhood, and one of the most critical foundations for psychological development. From their earliest years, children are gradually learning that they are separate people with their own boundaries, preferences, and stories.
Children are also working out how to act independently, how to assert their will, and how to push back; they are building a sense of self from the raw materials of how others respond to them. Every reaction from the adults around them feeds into what psychologists call ‘conditions of worth’: internalised rules about what makes you acceptable or unacceptable, what parts of you are welcomed and what parts you learn to hide.
When personal moments are shared without discussion or choice, even in loving families, that developing sense of ownership over the self can be disrupted. Repeated boundary overrides don't just affect the moment, but can lay down deep patterns in a child's emotional life, templates that shape how they feel about themselves and their relationships long into adulthood.
Over time, boundary transgressions can influence how safe a child feels expressing discomfort, asserting limits, or shaping their own narrative. Some children respond to sharenting (and the photograph involved) with ‘protest behaviours’ — indirect words and actions signalling emotional discomfort that adults may not recognise as objections.
Children rely on adults not only to protect their physical safety, but to safeguard their emotional world. If they discover later that personal stories, images, or conversations were posted without their knowledge, this can affect how trusted those relationships feel. Because of the wider pattern of who decides, and whose voice carries weight, even well-meaning sharing can be experienced as a loss of agency.
Understanding sharenting in this way shifts the focus away from individual posts and towards the relationship between adults and children. The central question is not whether sharing is right or wrong, but how decisions about visibility, consent, and respect are made on a child's behalf. For the generation of children growing up sharented from birth, this represents a new developmental tension: agency versus powerlessness.
Digital Identity and Narrative Control
In a digital environment, identity is not only something we build ourselves. It is also shaped by what others share about us. Over time, posts accumulate into a searchable, persistent narrative. A child may grow into adolescence or adulthood and find that parts of their story have already been written, published, and enfolded into others’ pictures of them.
Digital traces do not simply disappear with time. Images and stories may be copied, archived, resurfaced, or reinterpreted years later. This creates a situation where children inherit a public-facing version of themselves that they did not author. As they mature and seek to define who they are, they may be working against an existing digital record that feels fixed.
Sharented children can also find themselves in a position more usually associated with public figures: caught in ‘parasocial’ relationships, where other people feel they know them based on curated content. Adults who have followed a child's life through a parent's social media may greet that child with familiarity and expectations, referencing preferences, milestones, or personality traits the child has since outgrown or never recognised as their own. The experience of being known by strangers in ways you did not choose can be disorientating for a developing sense of self, particularly during adolescence, when self-definition matters most.
What Are the Potential Effects of Sharenting?
Sharing a child's information or image online can have both short- and long-term consequences.
Loss of Privacy Before a Child Can Choose
Sharenting creates a digital record for a child before they are able to understand what privacy means or make decisions about it. Personal information, images, or stories may remain online long after they were shared, limiting a child's ability to decide what parts of their life are public later on and potentially having an impact on their personal safety.
Reduced Sense of Control Over Personal Identity
As children grow older, they may discover that aspects of their lives have already been defined or documented online. This can affect how they see themselves and how comfortable they feel shaping their own identity, particularly during adolescence, when self-expression and autonomy become more important.
Strain on Trust Between Children and Caregivers
Trust can be affected when children realise that personal moments were shared without their knowledge or consent. Even when sharing was well intentioned, children may feel exposed or misunderstood. Over time, this can influence how safe they feel sharing thoughts, feelings, or experiences with the adults in their lives.
Embarrassment or Social Discomfort Later in Life
Content that feels harmless to adults may feel very different to a child as they get older. Photos or stories shared in early childhood can become sources of embarrassment or discomfort in teenage years or adulthood, particularly if they are rediscovered by peers, schools, or employers.
Impact on How Children Understand Boundaries
Sharenting can influence how children learn about boundaries and consent. When personal information is shared without discussion or choice, children may struggle to understand where their own limits lie or how to assert control over their privacy as they grow. This can shape how they approach sharing, consent, and self-protection in digital spaces later on.
Long-Term Digital Footprints That Are Hard to Undo
Once content is shared online, it can be difficult to fully remove. Even deleted posts may have been saved, shared, or stored elsewhere. This means that decisions made early in a child's life can have lasting effects that are not easily reversed.
Vulnerability to AI Manipulation and Data Harvesting
The risks of sharenting have escalated significantly with the rise of generative AI. Children's photos posted online, even on private or semi-private accounts, can now be used in ways that go far beyond the familiar concerns of screenshots and forwarding.
AI-generated image manipulation
Publicly or semi-publicly available photos of children can be used as source material for deepfakes or, in the most disturbing cases, AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM). A single clear facial image may be sufficient. Law enforcement agencies and child safety organisations across multiple countries have flagged this as a rapidly growing threat, and it is driving new legislative efforts worldwide.
Training data for AI models
Children's images posted on social media can be scraped and incorporated into the datasets used to train AI systems, without the knowledge or consent of either parent or child. This is not a hypothetical risk! Researchers have identified children's photos in large-scale training datasets. The implications extend beyond privacy: a child's likeness may be used to generate synthetic images entirely outside anyone's control.
Biometric profiling and facial recognition
A growing archive of a child's photos creates a biometric record that can be matched and tracked across platforms, databases, and contexts as they grow. Unlike a name or address, biometric data cannot be changed.
These developments mean that the risk profile of sharing a child's image online has dramatically increased. This isn’t only about social visibility, but about technologically enabled kinds of exploitation. Parents making decisions about sharenting today are operating in a fundamentally different environment from even five years ago.
How to Think About Sharing From a Different Point of View
Thinking more carefully about sharenting does not mean stopping all sharing or treating every post as a potential mistake. It means slowing down enough to consider the child's perspective alongside the adult's impulse to share.
Digital platforms are not neutral spaces that passively host our decisions. They are designed around specific business models, models which depend on users sharing as much as possible, as publicly as possible. Likes, comments, and supportive messages can feel validating, especially during challenging stages of parenting. Social proof — the powerful human tendency to look to others when we are uncertain about what to do — reinforces the sense that posting is normal and expected. When everyone in your parenting cohort is sharing, it feels natural to do the same.
These dynamics are not accidental but rather designed, drawing on decades of research in behavioural psychology and persuasive technology. Recognising that the platform's interests and your child's interests are not the same thing can help parents pause and reflect before posting on impulse.
One helpful question is whether the content and the function or benefit of the posting centres the child or the adult. Parents often share to feel connected, supported, or understood, especially during difficult moments. Noticing whose needs are being met by a post can help clarify whether sharing feels appropriate in that moment.
It can also help to think about time. What feels harmless today may feel very different to a child in five, ten, or twenty years. Asking whether a post would still feel respectful if read by an older version of the child can shift decisions away from immediacy and towards care.
There is no single right way to navigate sharing in a digital world, and families differ widely in their approach. Following a fixed set of rules often matters less than staying attentive to how sharing decisions are made and revisited over time. Approaching sharenting as an ongoing, reflective process allows space for learning, adjustment, and care, rather than pressure to get it right from the start.
Choosing Care and Agency in a Digital World
Most parents share because they love their children and want connection and support, or because they want to remember and have an archive of family life. The uncomfortable reality is that systems amplify, preserve, and spread what is initially shared in ways that extend far beyond the moment. In the age of AI, those systems can now transform and exploit content in ways no parent could have anticipated.
Resetting our approach to sharenting involves recognising the drawbacks of children being seen as extensions of parents' digital identities and social lives. Children are individuals' whose senses of self are still forming, and particularly in today’s and tomorrow’s uncertain and fast-changing informational landscape, children need the chance to be the narrators of their own stories rather than the subjects of someone else’s.
Some parents do ask their kids whether sharing information is okay. However, consent is meaningful only when the person giving it has the capacity to understand the consequences. In the case of social media, parents are often in a similar position to their children: only true knowledge and understanding grant the full capacity to consent, and adults, too, struggle to grasp the full picture. Asking a very young child for permission to post may feel respectful, but without genuine understanding, consent is merely symbolic.
We’re constantly nudged towards online visibility. But the decision to pause before posting is an increasingly meaningful and wise one, especially when the story being shared is not yours alone. The child whose story it is deserves the space to tell it in their own time.
Frequently Asked Questions About Sharenting
Does sharenting affect a child's trust in their parents?
It can. Some children feel uncomfortable or exposed when they later discover that personal moments or stories were shared without their knowledge. Over time, this can influence how safe they feel sharing thoughts or experiences with the adults in their lives. In psychological terms, repeated sharing without discussion can become a pattern that shapes the child's developing sense of whether their boundaries will be respected — part of what psychologists call early relational schemas.
Is it okay to share in private groups or family chats?
Sharing in private or semi-private spaces can feel safer, but content can still be forwarded, saved, or stored beyond its original context. The key issue is not just audience size, but loss of control once something is shared digitally. In the age of AI, even images shared in closed groups can potentially be scraped, repurposed, or used to train AI models if they are forwarded or stored outside the original platform.
How can parents think more carefully about sharenting?
Many parents find it helpful to pause and consider the child's perspective, how the content might feel later in life, and whether sharing meets an adult need more than a child's interests. It also helps to recognise the design pressures at work. Platforms are built to encourage sharing, and posting can even feel obligatory. There is no single right approach, but awareness of both the psychological and technological dynamics can support more intentional choices.
What is the difference between sharenting and children sharing themselves?
Sharenting involves adults making decisions on a child's behalf. When children are older and able to understand the implications of sharing, the dynamics change. However, meaningful consent requires the capacity to grasp long-term consequences, something young children cannot reasonably be expected to do. Even adults struggle to anticipate how content may travel, or be interpreted. And again, asking a very young child for permission may feel respectful, but without true understanding, consent can become symbolic rather than substantive. Parents are also in the best position to monitor their children’s own sharing and to step in if they think that the sharing may be ill-considered or unsafe.
Can children's photos be used by AI?
Yes. Photos of children shared online — even on accounts with privacy settings — can potentially be scraped and incorporated into datasets used to train AI models. More concerning still, individual images can be used as source material for AI-generated deepfakes, or in the most serious cases, AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Facial recognition technology can also build biometric profiles from accumulated photos, creating records that follow a child as they grow. These risks have escalated rapidly and are driving new legislation in multiple countries. They represent a fundamental shift in what it means to share a child's image online.