Why I've Changed My Mind About Sharing My Son's Face on Social Media

Photo by Charlein Gracia on Unsplash

Hello friends and fellow travellers, I hope your week has been free flowing without any of the summer chafe which we have all become accustomed to. I feel we are well enough acquainted by now for me to admit that I am stretched to see-through this week. Apparently, no lessons have been learnt, as I wrote earlier in the week in one of my Instagram stories, my old amigos overcommitment and unrealistic expectations have come back to haunt me (they barely left my side tbh). As an actual aside, I also think September is a con when you have children: you think that things are going to ‘go back to normal’ (with normal being not great, but better than standing at the edge of an abyss in Louboutins) as soon as the kids walk through that school gate, but with staggered starts, lack of after school clubs and all those pent up, pushed-back deadlines ringing out like consecutive death knells, any sense of normality is a mirage. Trop dramatique? As mentioned, you know me well enough by now.

It's quarter to eleven on Saturday night. I’ve been decorating my house as if I was literally working on Changing Rooms with a 5pm panic shop with both kids in tow for a party gift (tomorrow 10am, no chance for Amazon) and an evening cycle to Ikea. I feel sexless and depleted, scraped so dry, that I can’t even appreciate some of the incredibly cool things I’ve done this week, from top level interviews to working on the best partnerships I’ve ever been booked for. It’s just been one foot in front of the other, eyes forward, don’t look left. I lived like this for years in my 20s; my bones just don’t have it in them anymore.

Post 44 may not be Pulitzer Prize winning, but here we are, I’m giving it my best punt. There is so much more I could say on this subject, so many more layers to peel back. But I’m aiming for brevity, so let’s see how that goes.

Getting to it, over the summer, I decided to be more circumspect about my eldest son’s digital footprint. As the author of a book entitled, Why Social Media is Ruining Your Life, it often comes as a surprise to people that my children have featured in any way as part of my online life. Sure, I’m not a ‘mum-blogger’ and my children aren’t a constant source of my content (I cast no aspersions, I just prefer for my content to focus on my creativity), but they crop up here and there, simply as a reflection of how much time I spend with them. When my first was very young, I opened a separate account dedicated to my experience of early motherhood and shared a lot about how hard I found it. Reading those posts back now, I can taste my desperation like soured milk, but my ability to keep a secondary account updated waned as my confidence as a parent grew and I stopped needing so much advice and the bosom of collective support. That account always had very high engagement and a lovely community which supported me through such a lonely, lost time, but it stopped feeling authentic, so I stopped posting there a couple of years ago and have since deactivated the account. As for my main page, over the past year, I’ve posted three images of my kids on the grid, two of which were part of a paid project. So, there are two strands to the conversation below. Firstly, the moral quandaries of working in a transactional way with kids and secondly, the frankly terrifying, Kafkaesque threats which come with sharenting.

So, starting with the first one, my perspective is likely totally skewed by the fact that I made money as a child. As a West End stage kid (I know), I worked every single day I legally could up until my teenage years (then at 14, I started a paper round—not q as exciting).  To say I enjoyed myself is an understatement. Back then I lived for the stage (I know). All I wanted to do was be in productions or in theatre class or auditions or recording or doing anything related to singing and performing. And I earned money from my work, which mum spent mostly on clothes for me. What I find so interesting around the moral judgement around including children in paid collaborations online is that so many people don’t have an issue with child actors or indeed child models whose images are disseminated on often a vast scale. But when it comes to social media, things get so incredibly emotive. Some of my performances at age eight or nine are on YouTube and I was on TV at the time (we’re talking centre stage, Royal Variety Performance). Literally millions of people watched me belt out AHHHH AHHHH next to Phillip Schofield and I earned cash to do it. Of course, there is the additional contextualisation that social media adds to the picture which I will get to, but brass tacks, it’s pretty much the same thing. Or in fact not the same thing at all, as I really worked for my bread as a child. I took weeks out of school, spent breaks between matinées and evening performances being chaperoned around Soho without my parents, did months of rehearsals, hours of beauty prep and spent late nights in central London, bussing home way past my bedtime. My kids have a couple of snaps taken while they eat a cinnamon bun. It’s not exactly the coal face. While they have enjoyed it, I’ve been happy to do it and treat them with the experience. The money has gone towards their holiday camps and breaks away. I understand and respect that other parents feel differently about it, but it’s a straightforward parenting choice (what with it being entirely legal), for better or worse.

Point two is obviously far thornier and overwhelming. From digital kidnapping (where someone takes photos of your child from social media and repurposes them with new names and identities, often claiming your child as their own), to scraping family images for child porn to baby roleplaying (where people impersonate your child online), to deepfakes and AI identity fraud, there is no end to the internet’s nefariousness. Anyone who watched Deutsche Telekom’s Without Consent this summer will doubtless have been scared shitless about those cute park shots they posted in the pandemic. The addition of recognisable geography, from schools to home addresses adds the bone chilling IRL aspect to those threats. It is a murky quagmire and a host of hideous things you would obviously want to protect your precious babes from.

But like all aspects of the online world, the hideousness is a reflection of the actual world. There are dangers everywhere and learning how to manage those is part and parcel of modern life. I absolutely get why so many people just avoid the whole thing and keep their children’s likeness totally private. But the reality is that over 75% of parents share their kid’s data online in some guise, so the majority of children—the majority of the human race going forward—has its digital footprint started for them by their parents. By the age of 18, on average 70,000 images of a child will have made it into sharable data. There is comfort, perhaps, in the fact that they won’t at least be outliers—presumably 75% of people aren’t going to be implicated in crimes they didn’t commit or have their credit scores ruined based off of images taken from Facebook twenty years prior. What’s more, the kids will be posting pictures of themselves online at some point if they’re going to say, have a Linkedin profile. While both my dad and brother are un-Googleable, they are in a very small niche.

To be real, there is no way to protect your children from the internet entirely unless you completely shield them from it, much like the minute you walk outside of your door. But of course that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to be considered about anything that you do share. Being mindful about any information about your child’s identity, being mindful about information which might embarrass them in the future (one day my eldest might be upset that I spoke online about his colic—time will tell how well my take on all of this will date). I am obviously operating on a specific level with so many people watching my life, but tight privacy settings, using a pseudonym when talking about your kids and keeping content anodyne is all sensible if you are concerned.

Going back to the idea of consent—that is obviously another palpable factor to consider, and it has been the trigger for my decision. My eldest has begun not to like having his picture taken on occasion and for me, that was the end of that. Moreover, age 5 is the moment when psychologists have found children become aware that they are being perceived by others and begin to engage with the notion of their public reputation. The moment he asked me who would see the picture, I felt immediately chastened. Because we continue to chart this new course as parents, so much comes from the gut and mine simply said it was time.

The thing that I suppose this decision has forced me to interrogate is why my gut said it was ok to share any pictures and information about my kids in the first place. None of this scary information is new for me, Ive literally been studying and writing about internet culture for my son’s entire life. Why have I decided to take any risk at all with the most precious things on my planet? Have you ever really asked yourself why you share anything about your kids? For me personally, I couldn’t give a fig about likes on anything I post, so I’m not hooked to any kind of mini-me thirst trap. I know that friends and family like to see the kids online, see how they are growing and what they’re up to and it is of course lovely to spread the joy of two box fresh personality making their way in the world. I am definitely proud of them and find myself overwhelmed at times with love for them—in many ways, I feel like that is the nub of why I snap. I post what I’m passionate about in general and they are at the very top of that tree.

Recently, I uploaded a post about my most recent trip to see family and omitted any pictures of Grey. It made me feel strange, almost concerned that it might appear that I loved the little one more, or that I wasn’t kvelling over my big boy. It’s been a little confronting to admit I have these feelings, because really who gives AF about what anyone might read into my abundance or lack of motherly love? Either way, what someone thinks about my storge or my own inability to contain my adoration for my children are not good enough reasons to compromise his consent. Overall, I think I feel a little regretful, but berating myself for something I posted five years ago is never going to make me a better parent. Onwards as always.

So here we are. It’s a dynamic in flux and something I am chewing through weekly. I’m sure plenty of you are doing the same and I certainly don’t want anyone to feel judged or shamed by this piece. The children of the Facebook era, let’s call it 2006, are now 17, so we now have a proper pioneer generation to study for both the positive and adverse impact of sharenting and perhaps we will find a more balanced picture. It will be instructive to see what research uncovers, though all the while technology advances apace and continues to change the game for even the littlest too. I said I’d keep it short, but with such an open-ended conversation, there is no real sign off or full stop to type. I guess, all we can say is keep learning, keep questioning and keep striving to do the best for the kids we all love.