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Sharenting refers to the practice of parents regularly sharing content about their children on internet platforms. With the term originating in the early 2010s, sharenting has gained traction as a controversial application of social media outlets. Detractors find that it violates child privacy and hurts the parent-child relationship. Proponents argue that critics take sharenting posts out of context and ignore that the practice is a natural expression of parental pride in their children. As an international phenomenon with significant presence in the United States, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom, sharenting has ignited online disagreements across the globe.

Academic research has been conducted over potential social motivations for sharenting and legal frameworks that can balance child privacy with this parental practice. Researchers have conducted several psychological surveys, outlining social media accessibility, parental self-identification with children, and social pressure as potential causes for sharenting.

History
The origins of the term "sharenting" have been attributed to the Wall Street Journal, where they called it "oversharenting," a portmanteau of "oversharing" and "parenting." Priya Kumar suggests that recording life moments of children rearing is not a new practice: people have been using diaries, scrapbooks and baby log books as the media of documentation for centuries. As we stride into the digital age, "sharenting" has become remarkably popular as a result of the ease to post contents and form interactive communities on social media. "Sharenting" also stems from the connected nature of social-media early adopters, who are comfortable with sharing their lives online even with strangers. When they enter parenthood, it is natural for them to maintain this habit and post a lot of images and information about children. The trend of oversharing on social media has raised public attention in the 2010s and become the focus of a number of editorials and academic research projects. It was also added to Time’ s Word of the Day in February 2013 and Collins English Dictionary in 2016 given its influence.

Popularity
Several studies describe sharenting as an international phenomenon with widespread prevalence. In the United States, the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital found that almost 75% of American parents are familiar with someone who over-shares their child on social media, and an AVG survey suggests that 92% of all American two-year-olds have some presence on the internet. In Australia, Fisher-Price conducted a survey that reported that 90% of Australian parents admitted to over-sharing. In Spain and Czech Republic, a survey of approximately 1500 parents found that 70-80% participate in sharenting. In the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy, a Research Now report revealed that almost three-quarters of parents said that they were “willing to share images of their infants”.

Motivations
Research has suggested that sharenting is associated with a mix of parent self-identification with children, mothering pressures, and the accessibility of social media. Conducting 17 interviews with mothers in the United Kingdom, a London School of Economics study found that parent bloggers often re-explained their sharing practices in terms of expressing their own personal identity, representing their own child as part of themselves. In particular, the report surveyed the use of blogs as a networking vehicle to connect parents with similar family situations, including having children with disabilities or being a single mother. As such, it was found that sharenting parents, by filtering self-presentation through their parent-child relationship, were found to adopt a less autonomous and more relational identity on social media websites. Alternatively, some have suggested that these online expressions indicate the infiltration of individual pride into the sphere of parenting, as family photography becomes a means to “show off” one’s children to the others and instead strengthens a parent’s sense of self. Addressing the prevalence of mothers engaging in sharenting, those who purport this view suggest that the rise of digital communication has pressured more into performing the role of a “good” mother on social media platforms. They claim that these developments may reinforce a dominant vision of a “normal” family, as sharenting posts could be motivated by the need to converge to a normative interpretation of familial relationships.

Controversy
While some people assert that online platforms enable parents to establish a community and seek parenting support, others are concerned about data privacy of children and their lack of informed consent. Sharing of some contents may not only embarrass children but also create an initial digital footprint for them, which children have no control over. This might bring some negative consequences such as being ridiculed at school and leaving a negative impression on future employers.

Parental Benefits
Many parents use social media to seek parenting advice and share information about their children. With the convenience of online platforms, parent bloggers can easily connect to other people in similar situations as well as those who are willing to contribute meaningful advice. By forming a community, parents can receive encouragement from empathetic peers and assistance from experts in children rearing. For instance, parents whose children need special educational accommodations or have disabilities often found themselves detached from the mainstream. Therefore, they regard online blogs as a means to gain support from others and support back. As the research conducted by London School of Economics (LSE) reveals, online blogging enables Jane, whose daughter has been diagnosed with autism, to connect with parents under similar circumstances. Their advice opened up new possibilities in terms of social interventions for Jane's daughter and helped Jane "negotiate the complexities of social services, health care, and schools", which significantly transformed Jane's daughter's life. Such advantages of social media are not limited to particular groups of parents. In general, most parents benefit from exchanging parenting experience and learning about insightful practices that are worth adopting from others. A research study shows that parents who engage in "sharenting" tend to be strongly aware of the importance to encourage children to read from an early age because they often see many posts about bedtime reading routines and recommended books for children from other parent bloggers. Statistically speaking, 72% of parents rate social media useful for emotional connection and affirmations, and 74% of them receive support about parenting from friends on social media.

In addition to pragmatic utility, "sharenting" also plays a role in fostering interpersonal relationships. As the images and words about children's lives initiate conversations, "sharenting" provides people who cannot meet very often with opportunities to stay connected and open up more topics. In particular, mothers, as a research study reveals, are willing to engage in "sharenting" since they believe that the positive contents can help avoid digital conflicts and maintain close relations with those in their social circles. Researchers also found that female participants in this study carefully chose photos and phrases to express love and present laudable behaviors of children in their updates, which indicates their intention to convey positive messages. These messages also promote a close social network for a child as the parents invites supportive family members and friends into daily life.

Children's Privacy
The disclosure of minors' personal information, such as geographic location, name, date of birth, pictures, and the schools they attend, might expose them to illegal practices by recipients with malicious intentions. "Sharented" information is often abused for "identity theft", when imposters manage to track, stalk, commit fraud against children, or even blackmail the family. According to Barclays, online fraud targeting at the young generation will contribute to a loss of £670 million (approximately $790 million) by 2030 and two thirds of the identity frauds will be related to "sharenting". Besides, some people collect children's images from social media in order to produce pornographic contents. Given these potential harms, people are now critical about "sharenting" and the majority of parents are cautious about the wrongdoing with online posts.

Violation of data privacy within a legal framework is also worth concern. When users accept the terms, conditions, and privacy policies of social media platforms, tech companies as well as some affiliated organizations are entitled to track and transmit some part of users' data, a fact that most parent bloggers tend to neglect. "Sharented" information can be used for developing advertising and marketing strategies against children, developing new algorithms for surveillance systems, tracking a family for immigration enforcement action, predicting misbehavior of some kids, etc. Practices of such kinds by third parties trigger a public debate on whether accessing and selling users' data infringes their rights, especially for minors who have little autonomy of their private information.

In addition, a phenomenon termed "digital kidnapping", when imposters acquire photos to act as if they were the parents or friends of minors, has rendered parents who share online uncomfortable. According to the case study in Law Professor Stacy Steinburg's research, one mother, Paris, found that a stranger stole the photos of Paris' son and presented these on her homepage to misleadingly indicate that she is the parent of Paris' son. "Digital kidnappers" like this person revel in the rapid increase of "likes" and popularity through this kind of role playing without considering privacy issues.

Children's Digital Footprint
Parents who post children-related contents online create children's initial digital identity. According to the findings of the AVG survey conducted in the United Status, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain, 81% of children under age 2 have already left some digital footprint that identify with them because of "sharenting". This trend is particularly striking in the U.S., where 92% of 2-year-old children have online presence. It is significant that the digital footprint constitutes part of children's persona, so casual posts by parents may bring negative consequences for children as they grow up. A study by University of Michigan evinces that over half of the participants have shared embarrassing contents about children online and 27% of them have shared photos that are deemed potentially inappropriate. These contents can become sources of ridicule among teenagers and even damage a teenager's self-esteem. Moreover, college admission officers and potential employers may happen to access the inappropriate materials, which will probably shape their impression on a young candidate and sometimes negatively affect academic or career opportunities. Critics also argue that creating a digital identity by parents fails to fully respect children's autonomy over their persona and does impact on how children are likely to feel as they develop own their social media accounts.

Disagreement on Children's Consent
In regard to whether parents can post some material online, children and parents sometimes disagree with each other and have conflicts. Research studies show that children are often annoyed or frustrated about "sharenting." Among 1000 British teenagers in a study who are between 12 and 16 years old, 71.3% believes that their parents failed to give enough respect towards their digital identity, and 39.8% claimed to have felt embarrassed about photos that parents posted online. As Law Professor Stacy Steinberg argues, minors not only strive to protect their private information, in particular something potentially inappropriate, from public exposure, but they also may not agree with their parents' relatively facile decisions to share any personal information, whether it is positive or negative. The different attitudes about asking for consent is pivotal to the debate of parents' rights to disclose children's information. Interviews with some pre-teens reveal that many parents take it for granted to share children's pictures without asking for permission and tend to neglect children's requests to remove some contents because of the negative self-perception about what the contents will show. Interviews with mother participants confirmed the trend. They believed that as parents and adults, they have the discretion to decide what information to share while making everything in control. Therefore, as children's rights to preserve some information are not properly respected, parents' oversharing will probably vitiate children's trust on parents. Disagreements may also arise due to differences in the severity or type of privacy violation.

Applicable Legislation
The absence of legal precedent regarding parents’ control over their children’s media online seems to be the general consensus across the world. While different countries have their respective federal and local laws to protect children’s privacy, most hand over the responsibility to the children’s guardians, which sharenting may exploit as the parent is able to take advantage of their power to consent. One of the many flaws in this presumption of the parent acting solely in the best interest of their child is the lack of protection of the child’s privacy from the parents themselves.

Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations broadly advocates for children’s individual identity. Article 14 outlines the applicable legal guardians’ duty to represent the child’s best interest.

Europe
In 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was made official within the European Union to protect individual privacy in the digital space. Under Article 8, “holder of parental” responsibility is given consent for children who are less than 16 years old. Therefore, the bounds of sharenting are blurred even with the current regulations set in place to protect identities online. GDPR’s Recital 18 cites that the regulation of content does not apply to “personal or household activities” as long as there is no commercialization.

In 2020, the Dutch courts ruled in favor of the parent after a grandmother had posted media of her grandchild online without the parent’s consent. The court referenced Recital 18 as they found the premise of the media to be unclear as the images could’ve fallen into the hands of the third parties. The courts also mentioned the absence of parental consent since the children were under the age of 16. In this case, the grandmother’s sharenting was ruled to go against the European Union’s bylaws, and she had to remove the pictures as a result.

United States of America
In the U.S., the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was enacted in 1998 to protect the data collection of children under the age of 13. YouTube went under fire in 2019 after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found the media platform was violating COPPA by sharing children’s information without the parent’s consent. This ruling was argued by some senators that it weakened children’s right to their own digital data privacy by further emphasizing parental power over children online.

Currently, COPPA only handles privacy matters for children under 13 without inclusive protection guidelines from guardians. Sharenting is a widely unregulated topic under COPPA as the act works to assume children’s parents as the protectors of their children’s privacy. Rather than protecting children’s data from their parents, COPPA focuses on the protection of data from corporations.

Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) protects Illinois residents’ biometric data such as fingerprints and facial scans by requiring consent before service usage, limiting the companies’ amount of data collection, and giving individuals the right to sue. In 2020, Google was sued for violating BIPA and COPPA by collecting biometric data of Illinois children, mostly under the age of 13, through school-provided ChromeBooks. The violation was made by the collection without consent of the children nor their parents. COPPA’s requirement of “verifiable parental consent” was relevant under Google’s alleged violation for the children under 13. While the photos are not protected by BIPA, scanning them is a breach of one’s biometric privacy.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was made effective in 2020 to further regulate privacy rights for California residents. While the act, like COPPA, requires parental/guardian consent for children under 13, affirmative consent is required for children between the ages 13 to 16.

Because family vlog channels are essentially self-employable markets, there are no strict child labor laws similar to child actors on set. In 2017, parents of FamilyOFive, a popular YouTube family channel, were sentenced to probation on child neglect charges. The family vloggers were monetizing their videos, which focused around pranks that would often get physical amongst and/or towards their children. The parents were accused of neglect of their 9 and 11 year old children. The psychological consequences - rather than the physical consequences - of filming the pranking incidents were the basis of the claims. The psychologist on trial found “observable, identifiable, and substantial impairments of their mental or psychological ability to function”. The long-term consequences of sharenting on children are still yet to be fully analyzed as social media is still a relatively newfound boundary.