Have you ever googled yourself? I remember doing so in the computer lab of my primary school. I was surprised to find I already had an online portfolio – from my tragic first email address avatar photo to newspaper articles that documented my achievements.
Social media is intertwined in our everyday lives. As a society we have become desensitised to oversharing, often unaware of how our virtual image and details are being used or abused. Nevertheless, as adults we have the ability to choose our own privacy setting. Children do not.
Dr Ethan R. Plaut mentioned how he wouldn’t allow his daughter’s kindergarten to post photographs of her on their intranet system due to fear of surveillance capitalism and respecting her privacy. This made me realise how nowadays parents scrapbook their children’s lives on social media. Some even make a living from it.
‘Sharenting’ has been coined to define those parents who excessively post about their children’s lives before they have the autonomy to consent to it. This early exposure to social media has been shown to foster a distorted sense of self-worth, largely dependent on others’ opinions and number of ‘likes’. Former parenting blogger, Charlotte Philby, found that telling her children to smile more or stand differently in photographs led her seven year old daughter to become overly aware of her self-image. These modern tendencies to ‘do it for the gram’ have also been correlated with increased anxiety and depression, as well as the adoption of body image stereotypes in youth (Rodgers et al., 2017).
Plaut shared his story. Now it is our responsibility to educate others about the privacy risks of social media – especially with regard to sharenting. Maybe it is time to put baby in the corner, at least until they are old enough to make their own digital footprint decisions.
Philby, C. (2017). I’m giving up the ‘sharenting’ – for the sake for my children. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/04/sharenting-parents-instagram-privacy-social-media
Rodgers, R. F., Damiano, S. R., Wertheim, E. H., & Paxton, S. J. (2017). Media exposure in very young girls: Prospective and cross-sectional relationships with BMIz, self-esteem and body size stereotypes. Developmental Psychology, 53(12), 2356-2363.
