Sharenting and Child Safety: Best Practices for Parents

Presently, parents are not only willing but also like to post their children’s achievements on social networking sites. Starting with walking to other triumphs at school, such moments are happy and joyful. However this practice is becoming popular over time with a challenge that is associated with it termed as “sharenting” mainly in relation to child safety and privacy.

Understanding Sharenting

Sharenting is an informal term used to describe a practice parents use of posting content about their children on the internet. As it is a way of interacting with friends and family and sharing special moments ,one should acknowledge the consequences of such actions. According to CG’s blog post, sharenting can inadvertently expose children to privacy threats, identity theft, and even exploitation if not managed carefully.

The Challenges of Sharenting

Sharenting might seem harmless, but it can have long-term consequences that many parents may overlook:

Digital Footprint: Each photograph, video or update puts the child under a virtual map. They are permanent and may in the future prove shameful, embarrassing, or even become a cause of changes in their educational or employment outcomes.
Privacy Concerns: Full names, dates of birth, or places of birth may reveal information that parents did not realize could be used to harm one’s child.
Consent Issues: Probably young children are not competent to give informed consent to get their images or stories published. It also means the people as they grow older may feel embarrassed with content that their parents have posted about them.
Cyberbullying: Sometimes when shared in social networks the content can be misused to ridicule or even bully by peers or strangers.
Predatory Risks: Exposing a child’s life so much online can drag them into the hands of the wrong doers, the so-called predators. This risk is a lot higher when actual identifiable information or locations are posted.

Best Practices for Safe Sharenting

To balance the joy of sharing with the responsibility of ensuring your child’s safety, parents can adopt the following practices:

Think Before You Post: It would be helpful to think through possible saturation before posting any content. The last thing one should wonder is whether the post can make her or his child feel uncomfortable in future or if it tells about too many details of the family. Do not give information like home addresses, schools one attends or even details of the daily timetable.
Adjust Privacy Settings: Provide access to your posts to specific individuals only through the privacy filter of the social networks you are using. Posting information for only the circle of people that they know and trust minimizes the chances of falling foul of such a law.
Seek Consent When Possible: You do not need to force young children into sharing but as they grow older you help them decide whether or not they want to share photos or their stories. Listen to them, and take into account what they prefer.
Avoid Geotagging: Geotagging makes your child’s location easily vulnerable and visible to people who are unknown to them. To protect the locations, avoid tagging that to your posts and statuses.

Tackling the Emotional Aspect

To the majority of parents, sharenting is an emotion-driven practice that helps them communicate progress and success stories. Handling this emotional need while at the same time ensuring they have covered for privacy rights of a child can be very tricky. But, it is important to bear in mind that, once it is online, it is out there and can prove useful to people in a way you had not thought possible.

Alternative Ways to Share

If you’re concerned about online privacy but still want to share your child’s milestones, consider these alternatives:

Private Photo Albums: Post photos through online file sharing or mobile apps which offer shared access to limited people only.
Family Newsletters: Make your own monthly or quarterly general update email to friends and family.
Print Albums: Just as you have many family photos, go the traditional way of creating photo albums that will not be displayed online with the risks of having them pop up online.

The Role of Technology

Social media is the area where technology plays both the role, in the case of sharenting. On one hand it offers methods to show and keep memories; on the other hand it has dangers if not controlled. Parents should:

Share the information using the apps that have good encryption to encrypt your data.
Always when signing to a social media site, ensure to read their terms and conditions to understand their privacy policies.
Some of the recommendations are to use the parental control tools to control the time their child spends on the digital world.

Conclusion

Sharenting is rather a multifaceted process, and thus it deserves attention. Although any parent would like to broadcast all the beautiful moments in their little one’s life, one must consider the possible dangers. Parents should therefore follow the current best practices but also design their child’s future security to ensure that he or she enjoys the benefits of the attained milestones.

The goal here is to be aware of the issues which surround youth participation, to be able to critically analyze them and, in the end, to reduce the risks to your child. Thus, parents can help themselves and their offspring have only a positive sharenting experience and set an example of proper online behaviour.