“Part of the issue is our tendency for over-sharing”
USA - Over the holiday season, Facebook is inundated with pictures of children getting involved in the family festivities. But Joanne Orlando, a researcher in Technology and Learning at Western Sydney University, suggests parents who post pictures of their children online may be doing them harm. In an article for The Conversation, she explores the dangers of encouraging children to play up to the cameras. “We often express dissatisfaction at the ways young people post their lives online. But if we turn the mirror on ourselves, do we as parents actually have the right to make our family photos public? If so, which ones? Part of the issue is our tendency for over-sharing. We’ve even got to the point where if you don’t upload photos of our baby, others question whether you are a committed parent. This new norm means that many children will have a powerful digital identity created by someone else. This process can be likened to the manufacturing of celebrity identities, where parents can potentially shape the public persona of their child in any way they want: child genius, disobedient, fashionista, fussy eater and so on. How do you think your own mum or dad might shape your online identity? Do you think it would be an accurate portrayal of who you are? There is also the issue of Likes and comments on those photos. Without realising it, are we choosing to upload posts about our kids that we hope will get the most audience attention? Research shows that parents often haven’t considered the potential reach and the longevity of the digital information that they’re sharing about their child. Your child won’t have much control over where that home video of her having an embarrassing first singing lesson ends up or who sees it. Recent research from the University of Michigan asked children and parents to describe the rules they thought families should follow related to technology. Adults tend to think of these rules around how much time kids spend on screen, but about three times more children than parents thought there should be rules about what parents share and don’t share on social media. Many kids said parents should not post anything about them on online without asking them. Both children and parents considered positive images, events and news more appropriate to share than negative ones.
(dailymail.co.uk)