Sharenting: What It Means, Why It's Controversial, and What to Do Instead

Sharenting is the habit of parents regularly posting their children's photos, milestones, and personal details on social media; the word blends "sharing" and "parenting." It's not automatically harmful; most parents do it to stay connected with family and to feel less alone in the daily work of raising a kid. The controversy comes from a few specific, well-documented concerns: the child can't consent to what's shared about them, the posts are hard to fully undo, and platforms can use that content in ways parents never explicitly agreed to. This post covers where the term came from, what the actual research says, and the practical middle ground: sharing less publicly, or sharing just as fully but privately.

What Is Sharenting? (Definition and Origin)

The term was coined as "oversharenting" by Wall Street Journal writer and lexicographer Erin McKean in a May 2012 "Word of the Week" column, where she described "the tendency for parents to share a lot of information and photos of their kids online." It was quickly shortened in everyday use to "sharenting," and Collins English Dictionary formally added the word to its list in 2016.

The sharenting meaning has stayed consistent since: it's not a single dramatic act, but a pattern: a running habit of posting photos, updates, and life details about a child, usually starting from birth (or even before, with ultrasound photos) and continuing through their early years, before the child is old enough to weigh in on whether they want any of it public.

It's worth saying plainly: sharenting describes something almost every parent with a phone and a social account has done to some degree. The goal of understanding the term isn't to make anyone feel guilty about the first-day-of-school photo they posted last week. It's to make the tradeoffs visible enough that the next post is a choice, not a reflex.

Why Is Sharenting Bad? Four Real Concerns, Without the Shame

Most parents who share their kids online are doing something completely understandable: showing pride, staying close to family who live far away, or finding solidarity with other parents going through the same exhausting, wonderful season of life. The concerns below aren't a case against sharing; they're the specific things worth weighing before you do.

Consent a child can't give

A baby, toddler, or young child has no say in what gets posted about them: not the photo from the bath, not the tantrum caught on video, not the milestone chart with their weight and height on it. Adults get to curate their own digital footprint starting the day they choose to create an account. Kids of sharenting parents don't get that starting line; their footprint begins before they can talk.

Permanence: the internet doesn't forget on schedule

Deleting a post doesn't guarantee it's gone. Screenshots, shares, cached pages, and backups can outlive the original by years. A photo posted when a child is two can resurface when they're twelve, in front of classmates, with no way for the child to have prevented it in the first place.

Face recognition and AI training

This is the part that's changed the most since the term was coined in 2012. Many platforms' terms of service grant broad rights to use uploaded photos and data (increasingly including training AI systems and powering facial-recognition features), not just to display a post to a parent's followers. That's a real, current risk, not a hypothetical one, and it applies to any account that's public or has a large "friends" list, not only strangers who search intentionally.

Audience creep

A post shared with 200 "friends" today can be seen by a very different group in five years: platforms change privacy defaults, friend lists grow, and content gets reshared outside the audience a parent originally pictured. The intended audience at the moment of posting is rarely the actual audience over the life of that post. A photo shared "just with close friends" during a maternity leave can end up visible to coworkers, acquaintances, or a widened friends list years later, without the parent ever deciding to expand who sees it.

Taken together, these four concerns explain why sharenting keeps showing up in parenting conversations even though almost everyone participates in it to some degree. It's less a single risky decision and more a slow accumulation of small ones, which is exactly why it's worth pausing on periodically, rather than only thinking about it the first time a child asks "why is that photo of me online?"

The Questions Every Parent Actually Asks

Why shouldn't you post baby pictures on social media?

Once a baby photo is posted publicly or to a broad list, the parent no longer fully controls where it goes: it can be screenshotted, reshared, or absorbed into a platform's data used for ad targeting, face recognition, or AI training. It also starts a digital footprint for a person too young to consent to it. That's a reason to be selective about audience and platform, not a reason to stop taking or sharing photos altogether.

Is it safe to post baby pictures on social media?

Safety is a spectrum, not a switch. A public post is the least controlled; a "friends only" post is safer but not risk-free, since settings and friend lists change over time; a fully private, invite-only space (a group chat, a private shared album, or a private vault) is the lowest-risk option because there's no public feed for the content to leak into in the first place.

Why not show your baby's face on social media?

Some parents deliberately post updates without a clear face shot specifically to limit facial-recognition matching and keep their child's identity harder to tie to a searchable photo trail while they're too young to weigh in. It's a way to stay present and share the moment without building a permanent, identifiable public record for someone else's future self to inherit.

Can someone post a picture of my child without my consent?

This is general information, not legal advice; the answer depends entirely on where you live, and laws vary a lot by country and even by state. France offers the clearest example: a 2024 law (Loi n° 2024-120) now requires both parents to jointly protect their child's image rights and allows a family court to step in if one parent posts against the other's wishes, or if a child welfare authority finds a child's dignity is seriously harmed by what's posted. Few other countries have anything this specific yet, so in most places, a direct conversation with the person posting is still the fastest and most effective first step; legal options exist but are usually a slower, more limited backstop.

Sharenting Statistics: What the Research Actually Shows

The dangers of sharenting are easy to state in the abstract; here's what's actually been measured or projected, with the caveats each number deserves.

Finding	Source	What it actually says
Sharenting could account for two-thirds of identity fraud affecting young people by 2030	Barclays research, reported 2018	Projected roughly £670 million in annual fraud costs tied to oversharing children's personal details online; the original Barclays report is no longer live online, so this figure comes from contemporaneous news coverage of it, not a document we can link directly.
A 2024 French law requires joint parental responsibility for a child's image rights	Loi n° 2024-120, French National Assembly, Feb. 19, 2024	Gives a family court power to intervene between disagreeing parents, and lets welfare authorities act when a child's dignity is seriously harmed by what's posted; it doesn't hand a child a personal right to sue on their own.
The American Academy of Pediatrics addresses sharenting through parent-facing guidance	HealthyChildren.org (AAP's official consumer site)	AAP hasn't issued a formal clinical policy statement specific to sharenting, but its consumer guidance ("Sharenting: 5 Questions to Ask Before You Post") advises parents to ask whether they'd want the same thing shared about themselves, and whether it could embarrass their child later.
A large share of children have some online presence before age two	AVG "Digital Diaries" survey, 2010	Frequently cited figures (81–92%, depending on the country sampled) come from a 2010 industry survey, worth knowing as an early data point on the trend, but it predates Instagram's mainstream growth and TikTok entirely, so treat it as historical context, not a current statistic.

The honest read of this table: the clearest, most current legal response to sharenting so far is France's. The clearest financial-risk projection is aging (2018) but directionally credible given how much more personal data ends up in photo captions and metadata than most parents realize. And there isn't yet a large, recent, rigorously sourced statistic on "how many kids are shared online" that we'd stake this article's credibility on repeating as current, so we're not going to invent one.

The Middle Path: You Don't Have to Choose All or Nothing

None of this means the answer is "never share a photo of your kid again." Most families land somewhere in the middle, and there are really two workable versions of that middle ground.

Share less publicly. If you want to keep using social media, the highest-leverage changes are usually: switching to a private account, pruning your friends/followers list to people you'd actually hand a physical photo to, turning off public discoverability and tagging, and skipping identifying details in captions (full name, birthdate, school, home neighborhood) even when the photo itself feels harmless. A few smaller habits add up too: cropping or angling shots so a face isn't always the focal point, waiting a day before posting rather than sharing in the moment, and periodically auditing who's actually on your friends list instead of assuming it's still the people you originally pictured. If a relative keeps posting photos you're not comfortable with, a direct, non-accusatory conversation works far more often than people expect, and our guide to asking family not to post your baby on social media has scripts for exactly that conversation.

Share fully privately. The other option is to keep sharing just as much (sometimes more), but move it entirely off public platforms. A family group chat works for quick updates. A private shared photo album works for a running stream of photos with a small, named list of people. And if what you actually want is somewhere the memories don't just pile up and scroll away, but get organized and kept for your child long-term, that's a different kind of tool. Some families start a private vault for exactly this: a space where photos, videos, and the stories behind them live for a child to have when they're grown, with no public feed, no ads, and no algorithm deciding who sees what. Full disclosure: that's what we built Ourtifacts for, so weigh this mention accordingly. If you're weighing your options for this route more broadly, the best apps to share baby photos with family compares the private-sharing tools most families already have access to, side by side.

If you're earlier in the process (still deciding how you'll keep people updated at all, or how to announce a new baby without defaulting to a public post), how to keep family updated on a new baby and announcing a baby without social media both walk through the practical logistics of doing this well from day one, rather than course-correcting later.

The Real Point of All This

Sharenting isn't a verdict on any individual parent's choices; it's a name for a pattern worth noticing, so the choices along the way are made on purpose. Some families will keep posting publicly and feel completely fine about it. Others will pull back to a private group chat or a small shared album. Either is a reasonable answer, as long as it's the one you'd choose knowingly, not just the one that happened by default because posting was the easiest button to press.

If what you want is somewhere in between (sharing everything with the people who love your kid, without it living in a public feed or getting buried in chat history), that's the gap Ourtifacts was built to fill: a private vault for the photos, letters, and voice memories that make up your child's story, kept for them until you choose to share it. It's free to start.