What to Consider When Sharing Your Kids Online

Photo by Tang Ming Tung/Getty Images

When it comes to my own privacy online, I’ve basically given up. My entire life is on Facebook, to the point where the site’s facial recognition software can pick me out of a billion-person lineup, and I’ve more or less made my peace with this (or at least stopped thinking about it).

My kids, though, never clicked “yes” on any user agreement. But I post their photos and videos and tell funny stories about them nearly daily, always without their consent. It doesn’t seem like a big deal now, while they’re both under 4 years old, but this digital trail could follow them into adulthood. The question is what to do about it.

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Philosophies on parental online sharing differ wildly: On one end of the spectrum are moms and dads who keep their kids’ names and photos off the web entirely; on the other are those who document and share absolutely everything, including their children’s potty-training efforts.

The rest of us are left to navigate a murky middle ground, taking care not to post anything too graphic or embarrassing, but also finding it impossible not to share the cute photos of apple picking and Halloween costumes.

There’s no one right answer. But James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media and author of “Talking Back to Facebook,” recommends turning off geo-location services on your phone, not tagging kids in photos, and not posting kids’ addresses, birth dates, or full names on social media in order to protect their privacy.

Personally, I try to follow my wife’s rule that we not post anything negative about our kids – even minor complaints about missed naps and cranky afternoons. This means that I can’t crowd source advice about behavior problems, but it also means that I won’t unintentionally give my kids unearned reputations as hellions.

Nicole, a parent friend of mine, created separate Facebook accounts for each of her three young children and tags them in her photos. “I’ve sort of thought of Facebook as their baby books,” she explains, “and that when my children were older, they would have this great timeline of their whole lives.”

But that still doesn’t mean that everything about her kids makes its way onto the Internet. Her oldest son is on the autism spectrum, and she avoids mentioning that fact online because she doesn’t want the diagnosis to define him for her hundreds of Facebook connections. And although she took lots of pictures recently when he dressed up as Princess Peach and wore the costume for four days straight, those photos didn’t make it online, either. “We thought it was hilarious,” Nicole says. “It’s a 5-year-old being a kid. But if this is going to be here for an eternity, it could become fodder for bullying. And I thought, I’m not sure this is appropriate for Facebook.”

My sister-in-law Anne Marie considers one big question when deciding what to post and what not to post about her daughter: “Would this embarrass her one day?” Otherwise, she doesn’t worry too much about her posts. She notes that only her friends can see her profile, and says that without Facebook, many of her extended family members would never get to see pictures of her daughter.

“If I was the only person posting photos of a child, it would worry me,” Anne Marie says. “But I feel like this isn’t going to be a problem for my daughter. This is going to be a problem for her generation. I don’t feel like I’m making things worse for her.”

Caroline Knorr, Common Sense Media’s parenting editor, says parents should keep in mind that anything they share might be later used in ways they didn’t intend. She encourages people to share stuff about kids with smaller groups of friends and family, instead of making posts viewable to all of your connections (or, worse, making them public).

“This is a totally new frontier,” Knorr says. “We can’t expect the technology to figure it out for us.”