03/26/2022
By Kate Stone Lombardi
Published in Good Housekeeping Magazine
When my kids were born, I mailed out birth announcements. The cream-colored stock cards listed their names, birth dates and weights. The one for my daughter had a tiny pink ribbon attached; my son’s had a pale blue one.
Forget the gendered ribbon colors; the entire concept of a paper birth announcement now seems incredibly antiquated, and far too slow. So when my granddaughter was born last year, I couldn’t wait to post her photo on social media. (After all, she was the most beautiful child that had ever been born.)
Fortunately, I thought to check with my daughter before I uploaded that first round-cheeked, tightly swaddled newborn shot taken moments after her birth. My daughter asked me to not only refrain from posting any pictures of her baby, but also the news that she’d arrived. First, it was my daughter’s news to share, and second, she had privacy concerns about sharing her child’s image online.
Like many grandparents — and some parents — negotiating the issue of consent around posting kids’ photos was new to me. But think about the implications. My paper announcement, which had no photo enclosed, went to a few dozen relatives and close friends. Had I announced my granddaughter’s arrival online, it would have gone to hundreds. Maybe more. It may have even been shared with total strangers. And likely would have lived online forever.
The average parent shares almost 1,500 images of their child before their fifth birthday.
Today children have a digital footprint before they are even born. (Think of all those pregnancy announcements that include ultrasound images.) According to a 2020 study conducted by the Parent Zone, a UK nonprofit which studies digital family life, the average parent shares almost 1,500 images of their child before their fifth birthday. The term “sharenting” to describe this phenomenon is becoming part of the lexicon.
But what about grandparents? Because parents themselves run the gamut from posting their child’s every move to never sharing a photo online, figuring out how to approach “grand-sharenting” is tricky. “Knowing when to share and where to share photos on social media is a big issue,” says Nancy Sanchez who teaches a grandparenting class as part of a perinatal program at Stanford’s Children Health in California. “Some parents have real privacy concerns, while some don’t mind at all.” The bottom line, says Sanchez, is “grandparents need to defer to the parents.”
So what’s the problem with posting photos of kids on Facebook, Instagram or other social media? The two biggest concerns for many parents are identity theft and child pornography.
Stealing a kid’s identity is shockingly easy. Research by the Bank of Barclay’s in the UK revealed that parents’ oversharing would likely result in up to 7.4 million cases of identity fraud by 2030, costing future generations. It’s all too easy for fraudsters to put together names, birthdays and even addresses from online family posts and then use this information to steal an identity. It’s also useful for cracking passwords. Think of common security questions — birthplace, name of school, favorite sports team or pet — all information regularly revealed online.
Further, according to Leah Plunkett, the author of Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online and a faculty member at Harvard Law School who specializes in children and digital media, we now know that many pornographic images are pictures of real kids, taken offline and photoshopped. A 2019 study done by Australia’s Children’s Esafety Commission found that of 45 million images of children on pornographic sites, roughly half were taken directly off social media.
What’s a proud grandparent to do? Experts say that these concerns don’t mean that you should never share photos of grandkids online. But it does mean that you should think before you do so.
“My goal is never to shame or embarrass parents or grandparents and tell them what they should and shouldn’t do, but to empower them so they can make safe decisions,” says Stacey Steinberg, a law professor and author of Growing Up Shared: How Parents Can Share Smarter on Social Media — and What You Can Do to Keep Your Family Safe in a No-Privacy World.
One thing that’s important to understand is that social media “privacy” settings are not entirely private. Heather, who preferred not to use her last name for fear of alienating her mother-in-law, repeatedly asked both sets of grandparents not to post photos of her children online without permission. Her own parents complied, but not her in-laws.
“My mother-in-law couldn’t seem to get the hint, no matter how much we asked her to stop public resharing of my kids that I posted to my private friends-only account,” Heather said. “I turned off the share option, but then she would just download the photo and repost. Now I hardly ever share pictures.” Even if you disable the ability to download a photo, it’s easy for someone to take a screen shot and then reuse the image as they want.
For Marisa LaScala, Good Housekeeping’s senior parenting and relationships editor, photo sharing isn’t as fraught, but can still cause trouble. The issue came to a head while visiting her mom’s Delaware home in November. LaScala had decided to take her 6-year-old daughter’s Christmas-card photo while she was there.
“We all had a great time dressing her up and preparing her for the shoot, but when it was over, I had to stop my mother from immediately posting the photos on Facebook,” LaScala recalls. “I said, ‘Mom, don’t scoop me on this one; it’s not even Thanksgiving yet!’ Now when we’re together she always asks if she’s going to scoop me if she posts a picture, but she’s just ribbing me … mostly.”
