Have you guys heard of the term sharenting?
-No. -Er, sharenting? No.
Sharing about being a parent?
Those parents that share everything about their children online?
Sharenting.
It's something that I do quite regularly to be honest.
People come to this country, they haven't been back,
they have kids and make their life here.
Some of my family back home have never seen them before.
If I didn't put them on social media they wouldn't see them.
Sometimes I get really embarrassed
when my mum posts stuff on her Facebook page
or her Instagram or whatever, very embarrassing.
Very.
-Very? -Mmm.
They might not want their friends to see them that way.
They want to have some kind of control over their image.
There's a famous case of Gwyneth Paltrow
posting a picture of her daughter Apple and it was a selfie.
There was nothing really, you would think, contentious about it,
yet her daughter complained about it.
Wow, I'd be in trouble.
They're posting about people who are not themselves
and that could impact us when we go out into the real world
and try to get a job, for example.
There is an element of trust there between a parent and a child
I'm not comfortable with my face being shown
without me knowing what actually I'm being perceived as on their platform.
It may not seem like something which is particularly significant.
It may be very personally upsetting to individuals
what parents put up on the internet.
For people of our generation,
your online identity isn't so much seen as separate
from your real-life identity but just an extension of it.
Social media profiles are identity projects.
I don't think that the government as well as parents
should take control over our online identities
because it is a part of who we are
and we use our posts and stuff like that to express ourselves.
-It draws attention to
the kind of complex everyday work that those posts are doing
which are not about showing off.
Sharenting isn't new. Those of us that can remember cringy moments
seeing kids' photo albums handed around to friends and family
know all too well that this is a fairly fundamental urge
on behalf of parents to share their pride about their children.
It's a way of showing that you're doing that parenting.
What is new about sharenting in the digital context is of course that
we are leaving a fairly extensive and lengthy digital stream
of photos, comments, stories.
We didn't want to invade her privacy, even though she's just a baby.
That's going to stay online forever.
Any image you post now is going to be on the internet forever
and then we don’t know what's going to happen in the future
with things coming up like deepfake
and you're just giving your kid's image away.
Especially now with face-recognition software
by posting facial images online
you're helping them create a database.
You don’t know how these images that you've posted are going to be used.
Unfortunately we have paedophile groups who will literally
sort of scan videos to take out single shots
which seem to expose parts of a child's body or--
And that's a horrifying thought
so I think a lot of this is about education and changing social norms.
One of the strategies that I use is
taking pictures of them when they're not actually facing the camera
so you can't see her face.
These new digital tools enable us to look back on
nice moments from our child's early days,
early years, development, etc.
Funny little things that you write on there and then it's like,
"Oh yeah that happened then, like a whole year ago."
It's pretty good to let all her friends know that
I did this, oh, I went to this school and like,
knowing that, oh like, I'm really happy.
If sharenting is done in a responsible way
and it enables families to have conversations,
for example with their kids as they get older
about what you want to have online, how you portray yourself,
then actually I think it can be a really important step
towards keeping kids themselves safe
as they become digitally enabled adults.