Sharenting – Brewing the Disaster Unawares

Dr. Shahzadi. Wafai Naw Bahaar
To raise a child is not a child’s play. As goes the adage, It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. The history of parenting is as old as the history of life on earth. The parent child bond may need no introduction as it goes beyond the spatial and temporal confinement of verbal locution. Times changed but the emotions remained unalloyed, strong and sterling, albeit parenting styles and approaches tended to amend from time to time. The yesteryear authoritarian parent has transited into a modern day indulgent and permissive parent who follows his own liberal modus operandi for child upbringing. The millennials are a breed of more confident, involved and tech savvy parents whose parenting styles are vastly different from those of gen-X and xennial parents. Since millennials are the first generation to experience social media platforms, the influence of latter on their parenting approaches is quite vivid. The millennials have made parenting appear trendy and upped its fun and style quotient. Social media has become an indispensable segment of the contemporary parenting and nurturing style. Right from the stylish pregnancy announcements to the prenatal and postpartum events, photo shoots both amateur as well as professional are posted on all social networking sites (in order to feed the flames of vanity and conceit). Perfectly filtered, cheerful, chubby and dimpled photos of babies, toddlers, and pre-teens etc, dressed in the best fancy attires continuously bombard the news feed. This trending in thing is looked forward to by all the aspiring and future parents who seem too eager to choir in the cacophony. With higher and higher PPI’s and high definition smart phone displays available in android and iOS mobile handsets, parents have been able to hone their photography skills and subsequently every kid born to millennial parents finds his details regularly updated on social media platforms. The ease with which futuristic, cutting-edge and state-of-the-art photography apps and filters are available in the play store, moms ensure not a single event of their child’s growth stages is left out. Be it the first glimpse of the new born, or the first word he speaks, the first step he takes, his bubble bath, birthday, his outing, his first day at school, or family events with the extended family, parents ensure nothing remains unposted.
The proud parent (rather possessor) revels in his 5 minutes of glory derived from the hundreds of likes and comments that keep barraging his photo and video uploads thus fortifying his false sense of parental pride and reinforcing his parental egos. The awwws and oooohhs he receives in response to his child’s uploaded pictures makes him euphoric and strengthens his portrayal of a picture perfect ideal family and his perception of “better than the rest” peer parents. His likes and comments syndrome grows massive with each new status update and he craves for ever growing and over whelming response from his social media friends each time he posts something new about his child. Sadly during this process the parent knowingly or unknowingly continues expanding his child’s digital footprint. So what is wrong about expanding ones child’s digital footprint and what exactly is a digital footprint and how does it matter? According to techterms.com, a digital footprint is a trail of data you create while using the internet. It includes the websites you visit, emails you send, and info you submit to online services. Every tweet you post on twitter, every status update you publish on facebook, and every photo you share on instagram contributes to your digital footprint. While you can often delete content from social media sites, once digital data has been shared online, there is no guarantee you will ever be able to remove it from internet. As per a study published in the Forbes, parents are the biggest violators of their kid’s privacy, leaving potentially harmful digital footprints well before their age of consent. A report released by UKs Children Commissioner estimates that by the age of 13 parents have posted roughly 1300 photos and videos of their children online. Unfortunately, this seemingly harmless activity has a potential of putting the little ones in harms’ way, warns a survey by cyber security company McAfee. The study finds 76% of parents say they are aware that such pictures could end up in the wrong hands. Yet 4 out of 10 parents post photos or videos of their child at least once a day on their social media accounts (courtesy: Economic Times). This obsessive sharing of videos and photos of kids by their parents is called Sharenting, a portmanteau so mainstream and immensely followed that it was incorporated in the Collins online dictionary in 2016. Wikipedia defines Sharenting as the overuse of social media by parents to share content based on their children such as baby pictures or details of their children’s activities. The Prospect puts it thus, “Sharenting refers to the practice of parents instagramming their child’s infancy, blogging about their potty training or scoring viral hits with videos of achievements and epic tantrums”. In numerous instances sharenting has been the primary cause of digital kidnapping – a phenomenon where malefactors with perfidious intentions have misused the photos for pornographic content. Millions of such innocent photographs shared by beaming and unaware parents landed on paedophilic and hebephillic websites without the knowledge and consent of parents. The digital kidnapper may repost the innocuous photos of other kids as their own with despicable hashtags like # babyrp, # orphanrp, # adoptionrp etc. running across the internet so brazenly. Since online predators always on prowl, the sharented photos and videos qualify for an easy prey. The effortless and easy to operate photo and video editing apps makes it a cake walk for perverts and malafied possessors to use the digitally kidnapped content on various other dangerous platforms like pornographic sites and highly sexualized child modelling websites. For parents, sharenting may be a way of expressing love and affection for their children, but this seemingly guiltless exercise can jeopardize the future of an entire family. Parents have always been delighted to share special moments of their lil munchkins with family and friends. Nothing wrong in that if done diligently, taking into consideration all the privacy safeguards.
Let us pledge to minimise the digital footprint of our children and instead focus more on their comprehensive and all-inclusive growth so that they are ready to take all the challenges head on.
What makes sharenting perilous is the relatively recent advent of social networking and our naivety regarding privacy concerns and impacts of digital footprints. With just less than 2 decades into the enterprise, the future of social networking promises infinite and limitless potential and hence unimaginable threats and privacy hacks. The ever-expanding cannonade of children’s photos and videos on social networking sites has sparked a debate on the dark side of sharenting. This practice has heavily come under fire and is being greatly criticized for exposing children to social media and its vulnerabilities, thus promoting digital narcissism, a condition which makes a parent post the accomplishments of his kids making the boastful parent appear great among his virtual peer parents. It is argued that Sharenting is all about parental humble brag whose underlying aim is to promote the image of a proud and perfect narcissist parent. Tom Albrighton describes sharenting not as a record of child’s life but the parents, channelled vicariously through the proxy of the child. Its primary motivation isn’t love for the child but the parents love for themselves. Sharenting is akin to usurping the rights to digital privacy of ones own children, a prerogative that ought to be entitled to the child solely. What if in future the child never opts for social media in the first place? With so many emerging privacy concerns and loopholes, there is every possibility that in future many people may not go for social networking thus restricting their digital footprint. According to a study published in the New Yorker, by 2030 nearly two thirds of identity fraud cases affecting today’s children will have resulted from Sharenting. Unfortunately this vicious trend has gained much ground in our rather conservative society as well. Parenting in this part of world has been more than stressful given the unpredictable political perplexities. Exhausted moms have often turned to facebook and instagram for support, information, validation and social affirmation. Studies have found a strong positive correlation between positive responses (likes, comments, shares) received on sharented content and a satisfied parenthood. Results have also depicted negative correlations between greater social media presence (including the time spending in scrolling down the feed) and mental health of parents especially mothers. The pit falls of sharenting are not limited to this only. It has even much wider implications on the individual growth of the kid and may be seen as an impediment to the overall development. Child psychologists worry that an early exposure to social media can have serious far fetching dangerous insinuations with regards to the social and mental well being of the child in future. It may primarily promote anxiety, depression and lower self esteem. The children initially may seem to enjoy the process of creating fun videos and would temporarily delight in the new found fame, eventually they may get tired and face burnouts. The social media presence can dominate their conscious and sub conscious thought process which can create a rift between their real self and virtual self. Such kids develop a sharp affinity towards internet usage which can ultimately lead to the condition termed Problematic Social Media Use. In the long term, if left unchecked, it may develop into an even more hazardous form called Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) which refers to the problematic internet use or pathological internet use, a problematic, compulsive use of internet that results in significant impairment in an individual’s function in various life domains over a prolonged period of time. Sharenting has gathered momentum recently in response to the nationwide lockdown. Videos of kids conveying social messages pertaining to COVID-19 pandemic have flooded the social media platforms. Unaware of the repercussions, parents deem it a duty to circulate videos of their kids in the cutest of gestures and expressions reaffirming their fight against the catastrophe. The joys of parenthood are insurmountable and surpass over all other emotional faculties. The child and his special moments are an exclusive privilege of the parents and should remain privy to them only. Whatever baby content we share in public domain should go through a thorough scrutiny and only after ensuring proper privacy it should get a broadcast. We as strong mothers can raise strong kids who are future ready, as has already been done by our mothers without any urge for social validation and certification. Let the right to digital exposure and privacy remain the exclusive right and choice of a strong and well informed future citizen. Let us pledge to minimise the digital footprint of our children and instead focus more on their comprehensive and all-inclusive growth so that they are ready to take all the challenges head on.
(The author is Assistant Professor at the environmental sciences department, GDC Pattan. Views are her own, [email protected])