How WILL the children whose mums share every moment of their lives online feel when they grow up?
Pictures and films of other people’s children can be a delight. it’s natural that they should be. We’re biologically programmed to appreciate young children. they’re beautiful, often funny or pleasingly daft, and sometimes immensely touching.
Of course, your own are inevitably the best, but even the offspring of friends and family are usually more of a pleasure than a burden.
But we’re supposed to protect children. the safest place for them is the home, and the best audience for their pranks are those who love them.
Yet an unnerving trend is turning some children into commercial cash cows, freakshows, unwitting mass entertainment — a startling side-effect of the digital age.
How fast ideas of privacy and parenting can change. smartphones with cameras have only been common for around ten years, and the internet only easily available for about 20. Fast wi-fi and 4G are even newer.
Yet we now have a word — ‘sharenting’ — which depends on all these things and feels ever-more routine. it means taking pictures of your children and not just keeping them in a wallet to show friends, but posting their image on the biggest, most public global noticeboard in history.
Babies in silly fancy- dress costumes, toddlers taking their first wobbly steps or mangling their first words, knowing pre-schoolers saying cute things, kids falling over, jumping, playing, singing and dancing — or failing to.
THERE are children dressed up or halfnaked, on holiday or on the sofa, cuddling kittens or pointing at meerkats. Memories that were once precious to family circles are now routinely offered to the eyes of all comers.
if there are no privacy settings on whatever Facebook or instagram account is being used, this can mean a global audience.
Many ‘ sharenters’ do it out of vanity, to brag about the talents of their offspring or perhaps with a genuine desire to spread the delight that children bring.
there are many who are inspired by celebrity ‘sharenters’, such as socialite tamara ecclestone who has posted pictures of her daughter sophia, now three, outside the family ski lodge, cuddling up to her mum in a pool and with her new puppy.
Former spice Girl Geri Horner, model Abbey clancy and Victoria and David Beckham all regularly share online photos of their children, too.
Victoria’s recent posts include Harper painting, her school work and a shot of Harper etching in the sand on a beach: ‘ i love Mummy and Daddy’.
in 2016, Victoria was vilified online after she posted a snap on instagram of her kissing Harper, then five, on the lips, which many considered inappropriate.
Yet the controversy didn’t put off one blogger, Australian stevie Niki, who last week posted a photo of her kissing her daughter on the lips, while admitting she was concerned about the backlash she, too, might face.
You might well ask why any family would expose itself to potentially billions of internet users across the world.
Why aren’t your friends and family enough?
in a recent Ofcom survey in Britain, almost half the parents surveyed said they put their children’s pictures online. Yet only half of these were able to claim that their children were entirely happy about it.
the most disturbing thing is that while many parents are just light-heartedly enjoying social media, a great many others are doing it for profit. Videos on Youtube or dedicated websites can attract advertisers or commercial sponsors. ‘ Mummy bloggers’, women who chart their lives online, are often paid by companies (or receive goods for free) if they write about or mention certain products, as they are thought to ‘ influence’ the buying habits of those who read their websites.
Of course, the clicks and ‘likes’ will only build up if there are aspirational or appealing photos — and when you’ve got a cute child, posting pictures of them is the logical next step.
in North America, the top 10 per cent of mummy bloggers (there are some four million in the u.s.) make six-figure sums — and the trend is growing in Britain, too.
But we are now starting to get an insight into how it must feel to be one of the small children featured on instagram posts and in online videos (called ‘vlogs’).
One mother who uploaded sponsored posts for a shoe company found, when she extended it to plug children’s products, that she was forever chasing her little ones around to make them camera-ready.
‘i felt like i was turning their childhood into content,’ she admitted. she stopped.
However, not all are so restrained. there’s the story of one 13-year- old girl in the u.s. who started her own Youtube channel for fun, using her dolls as actors, and got attention from the fiercely competitive toy industry because she had nearly 100,000 subscribers.
Her mother showed her how to ‘monetise’ her hobby and, before long, she began to average a few thousand dollars a month into an account in her mother’s name.
But like a sinister fairytale, the girl said that, as the money built up, her mother made her work harder, spending long hours filming and editing: ‘i was just working, working. it was never enough.’
in the end, she went to live with her father, abandoning the dolls she now hated.
that is an extreme cautionary tale. But when BBc Newsround asked children aged between ten and 12 what they thought of their parents posting their pictures online, they got some stark answers.
ONE in four said that they were made embarrassed, anxious, worried or sad; among teenagers, 88 per cent thought that too much was shared online.
think back to your own childhood and early teens: i bet there were photos your parents thought funny or cute, but which you hated. Now imagine those old albums being made public.
there’s also the potential for real child cruelty.
One couple who posted ‘prank’ videos, making their children bewildered or upset — for example, smashing their toys in front of them, or accusing them of things they didn’t do — were prosecuted for child neglect in the states and given probation. they made a tearful public
apology. While the vast majority of parents would never dream of being so heartless, there are concerns even about seemingly sweet and harmless films when they are made so public.
For one thing, there’s the future: most of the mummy bloggers and other ‘online influencers’ use their real names.
With some editing, two-year- olds can be made into little divas for strangers to laugh at, and children are filmed caught in downright embarrassing poses or failing at activities and crying.
But these events will hang around for ever online — a threat to teen or adult dignity.
Some lawyers argue that ‘sharenting’ raises both public health and legal issues.
One legal expert summed up the dilemma: ‘These parents are acting as both gatekeepers of their children’s personal information and also telling their children’s stories online.
‘This dual role gives children little protection as their online identity evolves. A conflict of interest exists as children might one day resent the disclosures made years earlier by their parents.’
how fair to children is ‘sharenting’? A survey in Belgium of nine to 11year-olds made it very clear that they understood the moral aspect of having private life made public, without your control.
Compare ‘sharenting’ with how tightly protected children have to be in the non-internet world. A child actor, model or paid sporting star needs a licence from the relevant authority, and heavy safeguards ensure that he or she is positive about the experience.
The children on the Channel 4 programme The Secret Life Of FiveYear- Olds are put through an in-depth process to ensure that they have given consent and have full understanding, with a child psychologist involved.
YET because ‘ sharenting’ involves families posting pictures or videos that are produced in the home, very few vloggers apply for a licence.
Even so, some academic researchers at the University of Winchester have said there should be tighter legal safeguards.
In a report titled ‘have “Generation Tagged” lost their privacy?’ they expressed strong concern about the rights of children who are featured by their parents on YouTube and called for young children to have an independent right to privacy, with the introduction of a children’s digital ombudsman who could better represent their interests when it comes to digital publication.
In France, parents have been warned that their offspring might later sue them for invasion of privacy or, indeed, endangering their safety (there is reasonable evidence to believe that paedophiles enjoy these sites).
French privacy laws, astonishingly tight on all photography, could put a parent in prison for publicising intimate details of a child’s life without full consent.
So, is ‘ sharenting’ sweet and harmless — or dangerous? Is making money from it, or even burnishing your social media reputation with it, the new child labour?
We pride ourselves on no longer sending children up chimneys or into the fields to toil instead of going to school, but once you start using them for profit online, where is the limit? Where’s the safety net?
And even if you’re not making money from it, what can it do to family relationships if you’re forever diving for the phone, rather than sharing a game and a hug?
Or suppose one or two in a family are good-looking and lively and constantly being filmed and boasted of, while another is shy and dumpy or can’t bear to look at the camera. how does that affect sibling relationships?
It’s a new world. We need to draw some maps.