Are Your Online Postings Hurting Your Child? (Premium)
Today’s kids grow up knowing that the click of a cell phone means another photo or video is being taken. Maybe the child is getting an award, crashed on a bike, is sleeping, looks oh-so-cute in the bathtub, or is having a meltdown over homework. (A favorite for some parents seems to be the child learning to use the potty.)
Within moments, pics and videos are posted on Facebook or other social media. From birth to the present, the young child’s life can be up for viewing.
Families need to ask themselves: Why am I doing this? Who does it serve? How might this affect the child in the future?
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A discussion on National Public Radio brought these issues to light and is worth considering. First published a few years ago, the concern has increased rather than diminished since then.
Are online postings adding to anxiety?
Anxiety from online bullying is one of the biggest problems in society. Educators and parents try to instill a sense of respect to stop bullying, while also teaching potential victims how to deal with this if it happens.
We need to ask, as parents, whether posting images of our kids might affect their life as they get older. How it might this trigger or add to their anxiety–or even feed feelings of depression or OCD?
Most of us don’t like to see ourselves in a less than flattering image online. But we can try to find the source of the posting and ask that it be removed. And if that doesn’t happen, as adults we can usually cope with most typical issues.
But our kids? They’re at our mercy. They might not even see the material for years. And what may seem cute now can be a source of embarrassment for a child later.
Here are some excerpts from the discussion
When Katlyn Burbidge’s son was 6 years old, he was performing some silly antic typical of a first-grader. But after she snapped a photo and started using her phone, he asked her a serious question: “Are you going to post that to Facebook?”
She laughed and answered, “Yes, I think I will.” What he said next stopped her.
“Can you not?”
That’s when it dawned on her: She had been posting photos of him online without asking his permission.
“We’re big proponents of bodily autonomy and not forcing him to hug or kiss people unless he wants to, but it never occurred to me that I should ask his permission to post photos of him online,” says Burbridge, a mom of two in Wakefield, Mass. “Now when I post photos of him on Facebook, I show him the photo and get his okay. I get to approve tags and photos of myself I want posted — why not my child?”
When her 8-month-old is 3 or 4 years old, she plans to start asking him in an age-appropriate way, “Do you want other people to see this?”
That’s precisely the approach that two researchers advocated before a room of pediatricians last week at the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting, when they discussed the 21st century challenge of “sharenting,” a new term for parents’ online sharing about their children.
“As children’s-rights advocates, we believe that children should have a voice about what information is shared about them if possible,” says Stacey Steinberg, a legal skills professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in Gainesville.
Whether it’s ensuring your child isn’t bullied over something you post, that their identity isn’t digitally “kidnapped” or that their photos don’t end up on a half dozen child pornography sites, as one Australian mom discovered, parents and pediatricians are increasingly aware of the importance of protecting children’s digital presence.
Steinberg and Bahareh Keith, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine, say most children will likely never experience problems related to what their parents share, but a tension still exists between parents’ rights to share their experiences and their children’s rights to privacy.
Read more of the NPR exchange here
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