The photo was posted before the child could speak. By the time they are old enough to object, there are thousands.
Literal meaning: Sharenting — a portmanteau of sharing and parenting — describes the practice of parents sharing images, videos, and personal information about their children on social media. The term covers a spectrum from occasional family photos to systematic documentation of a child’s life as content.
Origin: The term was coined by journalist Steven Leckart in a 2012 Wall Street Journal article and entered broader use as smartphone photography made constant documentation and sharing frictionless. Legal scholar Stacey Steinberg produced foundational academic work on sharenting and children’s digital privacy rights, arguing in a 2017 University of Florida Law Review article that children have a right to informational self-determination that sharenting may compromise.
The construction of a child’s digital identity by a parent before the child can consent — producing a permanent public record the child did not choose.
The Appeal: Sharing children’s moments is a normal expression of parental love and a way to maintain connection with family and friends at distance. The impulse is genuine, the technology is frictionless, and the social rewards — likes, congratulations, engagement — are real. For many parents, sharenting is simply what parenting in a connected world looks like.
The Friction: The child cannot consent. The digital footprint created in childhood is permanent and may follow the child into adulthood: searchable, screenshottable, potentially embarrassing or harmful. Surveillance Capitalism — human behaviour as raw material — means that images of children feed algorithmic training data, advertising systems, and facial recognition databases. Momfluencer and Family Vlogging are the commercial intensification: sharenting at scale, as business model. Steinberg’s research documented that the average parent shares roughly 1,000 images of a child online before their fifth birthday.
Why This Matters: Sharenting makes visible who owns a child’s digital identity before they are old enough to have an opinion about it. Once you see the data infrastructure the images enter, the decision to post looks different.
Related terms: Momfluencer · Family Vlogging · Kidfluencer · Surveillance Capitalism · Online Grooming · Attention Economy · Digital Detox · Privacy Washing · VSD (Value Sensitive Design)
Read more:
- Sharenting: Children’s Privacy in the Age of Social Media — Steinberg, S.B. (2017). Emory Law Journal
- “Sharenting,” Parent Blogging, and the Boundaries of the Digital Self — Blum-Ross, A. & Livingstone, S. (2017). Popular Communication
- Sharenting — overview article on the concept, privacy debates, and digital footprints of children.
- Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears About Technology Shape Children’s Lives — Parenting for a Digital Future — Sonia Livingstone & Alicia Blum-Ross (2020). Oxford University Press