Before I begin, I will admit that I found this article difficult to write. I have two grown kids, 22 and 17 and and my wife and I shepherded them through social media, online drama and screen habits. But I don’t want to preach, I only write from my the challenges we faced with our our children, and somehow those travails prepared us for managing social media more easily. And I think it’s important for the reader to know that I don’t think that parents who share photos, videos and post about their kids achievements online excessively do so maliciously, or are attempting to outdo families and neighbors in their communities. My point about writing about online sharing is that we may not be aware of how much harm we could be doing by posting our kids lives online in such detail. So this is an invitation to reflect on what you are doing, and not a judgement against your decisions.
What Gives Me The Authority To Write This Article
I am just a dad who, along with my wife, had to respond to a curve The Man Upstairs threw at us. Navigating those difficult waters prepped my whole family in a many ways.
One of my kids was diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome at age 4, and so perhaps that is why we were extra vigilant regarding over stimulation from computer and phone overuse. My child was ultra sensitive to color and other visual stimuli, loud crows, fireworks, loud church organs, and many other things my other kid just ignored. We had to become real detectives hunting down what was causing tics and excessive emotional outbursts and long sleepless nights. That lack of sleep compounded other symptoms for our child. We were trying to avoid medications as a remedy at all costs, so we conducted exhaustive, and I mean exhaustive, review of routines, change in routines, exercise, and diet. We discovered that the change to a “big kid bed” and a room painted banana yellow was too much for our child, so we repainted it a soft sky blue and got light blocking shades for summer. We managed to avoid medication because we figured out by a lot of trial and error what alleviated symptoms. To date my child has not had any physical movements or tics related to Tourette’s in over 9 years.
That doesn’t make me an expert in any sense, it just helped us stay in tune with what we were exposing our child to. When it came time to devices we already had been through the ringer regarding books on CD with jarring music too late in the evening, loud movie theaters and venues ,so we learned how to be selective. And it has made my experience different. By profession I am a software developer so my concerns regarding security and allowing information about my kids leaking out online also made us very cautious. I don’t trust big corporations to do the right thing, because I have worked for large corporations. So the views and remedies I offer here are based on my experience as a parent. But that’s what they are, born only from experience. I’m not condemning other methods, because as I say I am not an expert. And I don’t write to make myself appear to be the pinnacle of perfect parenthood.
We are all proud of our children, and sharing moments of our kids’ triumphs, achievements, birthdays, and family trips is something that has increased as access to digital photography, internet storage and communications has become cheaper and more readily available. To want to share those moments with other family members and friends is natural, and those memories celebrate the child in positive ways. And now that they are home for the summer and their activities become front and center, it’s tempting to share all the more online, particularly if you just got home from an outing and the fun is still fresh in your mind.
This is called sharenting. The Collins Dictionary defines it as “the habitual use of social media to share news, images, etc of one’s children”.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/sharenting
And we have seen adults acting out on videos with their kids on TikTok, and that sometimes can appear like a quest for attention. It does present a certain image of a lifestyle for public consumption and in some cases it is a status symbol that your child is living an exceptional life. Or that your skills as a parent are demonstrated in how your kid is performing, or who they are growing up with. This goes beyond healthy pride, it is gratification by affirming status.
But there are risks that many don’t consider when the majority of a child’s life is published on social media. These risks are at the expense of a child’s physical well being but also their emotional health.
Building An Easy Target For Predators
Some of these risks seem obvious, but I am listing them to be thorough because perhaps we haven’t learned enough about building such obvious profiles online. As we reported on our Morning Mission podcast A Touch Of A Finger, predators are just a swipe away. To ingratiate themselves with your child without raising suspicions, they use information that they can glean to create a familiar context. So think about your child’s age, grade, teacher’s names, pets’ names, school names, club names, your neighborhood, even your church. Add photos and events and it’s easy to create a persona that feels familiar, that could mimic a child of the same age. Or that of a family who happens to live in a nearby neighborhood.
Some people feel better if they have a private group that they can share their photos in. After all, Facebook and other social media platforms make claims that your privacy is protected. Let’s take that promise at face value and assume Facebook had the best of intentions. Putting my software developer hat on, I can tell you that companies with rapid growth and large scale user bases face huge challenges, and the pressure to achieve growth and retain numbers takes primacy. If you watch the video of Sean Parker, former president of Facebook, and hear how their focus was just to keep on the platform despite knowing that they were providing an unhealthily overstimulating environment, do you hear a concern for safety?
This flippancy is indicative of a disregard for data integrity. As one of the largest social media companies in the world with a valuation of billions, how is that they cannot prioritize security? In 2018 there was a severe breach not that the users could detect, but software developers like myself could exploit. This is the most basic, security 101 violation, egregious for a large corporation.
What this means was a developer could rapidly probe accounts for photos by simply increasing a value by 1 and repeat that programmatically and rapidly get access to photos. By the millions. And ones that were in private groups.
https://www.securityweek.com/photos-68-million-facebook-users-exposed-api-bug/
The vulnerability exposed photos for 12 days, between September 13 and September 25, 2018. Facebook believes the bug impacted up to 6.8 million users and 1,500 applications built by over 870 developers. The company pointed out that only apps granted access to photos by the user could have exploited the flaw.
Facebook says it’s notifying impacted people via an alert in their account and it also plans on releasing tools early next week that will allow developers to determine which of their users may have been affected by the issue. Developers will be instructed to delete photos obtained as a result of this bug.
Again, I ask why you would consider putting a photo of a child on these platforms when there are backdoors so wide open teenage hackers could easily get to photos? For these reasons we did not post images on social media of kids. Sure we shared images in emails to families, made books of our trips that we’ve shared with families, but we didn’t jump on Facebook to post to private groups. With group activities like scouts and school events, images were put online by those organizations. You really can’t avoid it, and hopefully your schools and other organizations will take steps to protect your kids privacy.
Harming Your Child’s Mental Stability
Acknowledging the risks just listed due to identity exposure, what mental and emotional harms are there for children of parents who post an excessive amount of photos, videos and information?
An article in Psychology Today lays these risks out. For one, it can cause a rift between you and your child, as they may resent you sharing without asking their permission. That matters, because kids are very sensitive to how they appear to others. “That’s cringe” should be a phrase that is familiar to you, as kids are so afraid of being singled out as being different. Only weirdos take their own popcorn in awkward brown bags to movie theaters instead of just getting the popcorn in the lobby like everyone else, right? Or why do we always have to have “educational food” like carrots and gluten free snacks when we could have something like everyone else has. “Mom, why do we have to have healthy bread that is always so dry, can’t we just get McDonalds for once like the rest of the group?” Those are the mild accusations my kids leveled at us for making them brown bag and stand out as “those homeschoolers”.
Kids are put under pressure by these photos, they can feel pressured to perform, or worse, conform to what they think their parents want them to be. Or far worse, they could be attacked by peers because of images or video photos that parents love yet are considered “cringe”.
And how healthy is it that a parent is more intent on sharing online than being present with their children, what does that say about what that parent regards as important? And it does offer an example that you SHOULD post online, and that building a persona is of greater importance than interacting with family in the context of home life. And it breeds in the instinct that posting is a means of approval and status. If dad does it, it must yield something that is worth more than spending extra time with me.
Or how about something more serious reaction to a school photo that a teen girl could have indicated by an outburst like “I look like a boy in a dumb wig”? There have been numerous studies related to teenage girl perception of body image. In particular, Instagram and Facebook have been cited in studies to be detrimental to teen self perception, and depression among teen girls has escalated in the past decade. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation”, has stated specifically that teen girls exposed to cell phone usage and social media at an early age suffer far worse than young males. Haidt, in his 2021 article for the Atlantic titled "The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls", summarized the risks:
Rates of depression, anxiety, and self-injury among adolescent girls surged in the early 2010s as social media platforms like Instagram proliferated.
Instagram amplifies the insecurities girls typically face during adolescence about their bodies and social standing by publicly displaying their photos for judgment via likes and comments.
A 2017 study found Instagram was rated as the most harmful social media platform for teen well-being measures like anxiety, loneliness, and body image.
Internal Facebook research leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen corroborated that Instagram is harmful for teen girls' mental health.
As adults we may have tougher skin, and our generation has not been as steeped in technology and long screen time like the current crop of children. But we are setting an example that it’s OK to seek the accolades by revealing personal details. And we are ignoring the mental health risks, particularly to young girls.
What Should We Do as Adults?
I want to state again, I don't think parents do this maliciously, and that makes it harder for a self-help improvement plan. Many have become habituated to social media use, it has after all been around for almost 20 years. And yes we all take pride in our families, and that act can be demonstrated with sharing online.
But given the harms listed above, this is about your child, and you may not realize the frequency with which you post. While it may seem obvious, you have to ask yourself some questions, and maybe ask your spouse or trusted family members to also answer these questions as well.
How often are you sharing, and is it in private groups like the one offered by Facebook?
Are you sharing during events themselves?
Are your kids uncomfortable with you sharing images of them?
What would someone learn about your child from what you have posted, is this information helpful for a predator to know?
This list is essentially an inventory of your habits, and you might be surprised with the frequency with which you perform these tasks, and if you're habituated they could be considered rituals.
Some interesting outcomes were found in a study where adolescents largely were suspcious of their parents motives for sharenting. Forbes summarizes:
adolescents were largely disapproving of the practice of sharenting, especially when they felt the parental motives behind sharenting were to do with impression management. The study discovered the most common reaction adolescents had towards sharenting was that it is “embarrassing and useless.” The notable exception was when the motive was information archival.
As an adult, you might be more impervious to social pressure that can result from constant exposure to so many lifestyles than your children. At 40 you've built up calluses enough to ignore others' station and success, or failings, in life to remain focused on your own life. But what about a 13 year old, have they survived maturation and have they developed the battle scars needed to shrug and walk on from comparisons that they make with their friends? Or can they fend off perceived attacks on their appearance and ignore the norms that require them to adopt certain styles of clothing, hair, manner of speaking or even how they walk?
When they see your habits, are they aware of your state of mind and how the years have fortified you now that you are through puberty and have learned to ignore group perception and adjust to more independent behavior?
Social media —particularly video-centric platforms like Instagram, which displace other forms of interaction among teens, put the size of their friend group on public display, and subject their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts —takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women's magazines and intensifies them. As the parent you are through that phase, your kids are not. But have your habits become the model for their habits without the emotional armor you have acquired?
I have an example I lived through with my daughter, which illustrates the point of kids mimicking what they see in adults behavior. I relayed earlier that we homeschooled both our kids until 9th grade, when both my son and daughter expressed the desire to be educated in a "school" setting. My daughter had her sights set on the International Academy and in our region we were lucky enough to have enough slots open so she could test into the school. Suddenly she, as well as we, were in a completely new educational culture, she had entered an intensely competitive school. Compared to homeschool it was like going from 0 to 60 in under 2 seconds.
When my daughter was in 10th grade, I noted the late hours and her complaints of the group projects she had to complete. While we were lucky to have a sizable homeschooling community, our kids did a majority of their learning on their own. Group activities such as musicals, art installations from art class and sports were the communal activities.
My daughter relayed on several occasions that she had to work online with her group to complete team projects, and that many times key team members wouldn't connect until midnight. Worse, her peers were boasting about how late they stayed up to complete their tasks. These were badges of honor that kids were sharing with one another. I spoke with another family we knew who had homeschooled and their son had also entered the IA.
"This is not healthy for the kids to work so late, and to be so stressed out about these projects. For one, what are you learning from team members who are late, and more importantly, they praise each other for these bad, busy-body habits", I said.
"What do you mean?"
"Well we all know people in our fields who make it a big show to always talk about how busy they are, how much energy they have to spend when in fact they have bad work habits. Yet they earn these badges of honor for being heroes with monumental work loads," I replied.
We later told my daughter that she had to petition the teacher to make sure she would not be paired up with her peers who would pull that stunt. It was not an easy task, and one that we didn't always achieve. But messaging and group chat became the means with which they worked. Being 2016-17 the damages of social media were not well known, yet my wife and I knew that this was very unhealthy. Many of the teachers were amenable to instructing the kids to not go overboard, but still, the dynamic was a powerful one that competitive young adults became swept up in.
Our kids mimic what they see in us, they do not have the judgment to know what is excessive. It's our job to give them those tools to make those judgments. We also need to be aware that our habits as adults, who must use Zoom, Slack and Skype, can be the source of inspiration for habits that are truly detrimental to our teens.
What Can We Do As Families
I am only a parent, not a mental health expert or clinical psychologist. I got lucky in that we had to be involved with a kid who was at risk for over-stimulation. We had simple rules with both our kids, and really stayed involved. We also had the advantage that we homeschooled our kids up to 9th grade, and there were an abundance of physical and kinetic activities that left very little time for smart phone use.
Until our kids were in 9th grade, all computer time had to be downstairs in the TV room. Sounds dumb, but it established the idea that dad would, at any random time, come and go through your computer. That rule applied later when my son or daughter had to use the computer for school. It is very hard to escape the use of team software, messaging and chat when your school requires that your child log into Moodle or some other online resource to get materials, lesson plans and assignments. I can't tell you how many times my son would be at the dinner table at 9 PM finishing up an essay that he had to submit online, then email the teacher. The online culture is part of the fabric of things, for better or for worse.
Our kids wanted get jobs, and stated that they wanted to save for a phone. This presented a dilemma for us. While this was in the mid 2010s, we were not aware of the risks of social media. I had read an article or two about reduced reading comprehension so while I wanted them to be able to set goals, earn their own money and be free to do with it what they wished because their earnings were indeed theirs, I was afraid that they would be lost in devices.
As a family, we set limits, and we sought out life away from electronics. Camping, travel, work during the summer, skiing in the winter, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and activities at church. My wife and I looked for things that would fill our kids time that they could do without the need for mom or dad to drive them somewhere. Musical instruments litter our house, still. And yep, piano and we had to schedule time for practicing for lessons and for the TV to be off. The family room was the community room, and as the single breadwinner, that meant I had to give up TV time so the kids could get off screen time.
While writing this article the thing I realized is that families really need to seek out alternatives for entertainment and fulfillment that are beyond the trending themes our culture offers. Kids will tell you "that's cringe, Dad". But when they see you get out of your own comfort zone it tells them that there's nothing wrong with taking that step. We were lucky enough to know families with the same interests, and two times a year a family would host a talent show. 30 people in a house, where everyone has spent the afternoon prepping a dish to bring and weekend practicing skits or songs, can be a great way to get those phones out of everyone's hands. Writing a comedy skit with your son, and hearing him still recite some of the lines years later is really something for a dad to hear, let me tell you. And yes, we sat through some awful renditions, but the confidence that performing builds for a kid to get up in front of friends and present a skit or play a song is priceless.
That's the treasure of family time.
