A parenting author and columnist has urged other parents to delete all the photos they’ve shared of their kids online – warning that these pictures are like “landmines” waiting to go off as children grow up.
Plenty of parents share photos, videos and details of their children’s lives online – usually on social media or in private groups – a phenomenon known as ‘sharenting’.
But this increasingly comes at a cost. Other children and teens can easily find these photos online and then turn them into cruel memes, deepfake videos (some of which can be pornographic) or share them around school to cause embarrassment.
Lorraine Candy, a journalist and author of ‘Mum, What’s Wrong with You?’: 101 Things Only Mothers of Teenage Girls Know, shared: “I think we need to go back and delete all the pictures we have ever shared – even in private Facebook groups or on private WhatsApp channels – of our children when they were younger.”
Explaining the reasoning for this statement, she said when kids reach their tween and teen years, those photos on social media are “landmines” for them and it can be “really upsetting” that other people can see them and they might get shared around.
“Imagine your worst teenage bully at school, imagine your worst friendship group where you feel very insecure and vulnerable, imagine them having access to pictures of you in a bath when you were a baby, to posts about you having a poo,” she said in an Instagram reel.
The author continued: “I know you can say it’s in a private group, it won’t get shared. [But] It does get screenshot, it does get shared. Other children have access to their parents’ private groups.”
Candy, who has four children, noted it’s “really important to a developing mind, as a teenager, that they don’t have these little bombs going off in the background emotionally as they’re developing their identity and their autonomy and their privacy”.
Plenty of people resonated with the post. “I mentor teenagers and would always recommend that parents do this. Online photos can cause all sorts of issues further down the line,” said one commenter.
“I’ve thought about this a lot over the years. I’ll have the conversation with my 12-year-old son this weekend and see how he feels about it. It’ll be so difficult to erase them because my Instagram is like a memory book of his childhood!” added another parent.
One mum recalled how she received a “barrage of requests” from her daughter’s friends to connect with her on Instagram (back when her daughter was 13).
“When I asked my daughter she said they were only sending these requests to access pics of her when she was younger – for jokes, basically. It was a real moment of enlightenment for me,” she added.
It’s not just bullying and deepfake creation that can be an issue as a result of sharenting. Images – whether real or fake – can also be used to intimidate or blackmail teenagers, as well as to commit identity theft and fraud.
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