Most parents post a photo of their child before that child can speak. The birthday cake, the first day of school, the hospital wristband with the date and weight still legible. None of it feels like a decision at the time. It feels like sending a postcard.
The short answer to whether it is safe: posting a photo of your child on a private account, with no name, no school uniform and no location, carries little risk. Posting the same photo publicly, with a caption naming your child and their school, is a different act entirely. Most of the harm in sharenting comes from the details around the picture, not the picture itself.
This guide covers what sharenting is, what has changed since generative AI arrived, how to share photos safely, how to ask relatives and schools to stop posting, and how to clean up years of old posts.
What is sharenting?
Sharenting is a blend of “sharing” and “parenting”. It describes parents publishing photos, videos, stories, medical details or achievements about their children online, usually without the child’s consent.
It is not limited to Instagram and Facebook. A WhatsApp family group of forty people, a school parents’ group, a YouTube channel, a blog post about a difficult diagnosis: all of it is sharenting. So is a grandparent reposting a photo you sent them privately.
Stacey Steinberg, a law professor at the University of Florida who has studied this since 2016, frames it this way: “When we share about our children online without involving them in that decision-making process, we miss a valuable opportunity to teach and model consent.”
How much are parents actually sharing?
Studies from AVG found that 81% of children in Western countries have an online presence before the age of two, rising to 92% in the United States. A widely cited Nominet survey put the average at nearly 1,500 photos posted before a child’s fifth birthday. By age 13, common estimates run to around 1,300 images and videos.
The captions leak more than the images. Research on Facebook sharenting found that roughly 45% of posts about children include the child’s first name, and about 19% reveal both the name and the date of birth. That is two of the three fields most identity checks rely on.
A 2025 study reported that one in six parents said their child had experienced some harm connected to material the family had shared online.
Is it safe to post pictures of your child on social media?
It depends almost entirely on the account settings and the caption. Here is what actually goes wrong.
AI can turn ordinary photos into abuse imagery
This is the change that makes older sharenting advice out of date. The UK’s Internet Watch Foundation identified 8,029 AI-generated images and videos of realistic child sexual abuse in 2025, a 14% rise on the previous year. AI-generated video went from 13 confirmed items in 2024 to 3,443 in 2025.
The National Crime Agency and the IWF have both warned that offenders need as few as 20 ordinary photographs of a real child, fully clothed and entirely innocent, to generate illegal imagery in around fifteen minutes on a home computer. The source material comes from Instagram, Facebook, school websites, class WhatsApp groups and profiles parents believed were friends-only. In one case an offender scraped pupils’ photos from a school website and produced more than a hundred images. Around 94% of this content targets girls.
This is not a reason to stop photographing your child. It is a reason to think hard about which photos sit on a public profile and how many of them there are.
Identity theft and digital kidnapping
A full name, a date of birth and a hometown are enough to open accounts in a child’s name. Children make attractive targets because nobody checks their credit record for eighteen years. Digital kidnapping is a separate problem: strangers lift photos of babies and toddlers and repost them as their own children, sometimes running fake adoption or role-play accounts.
Location and routine
Geotags, school logos on uniforms, the house number in the background, a photo captioned with the name of a weekly swimming class. Individually these are trivial. Posted regularly, they map out where your child is and when.
A permanent footprint your child did not choose
Content posted online is difficult to fully retract. A funny photo from age four can resurface in a school WhatsApp group at age fourteen. Anything about a child’s health, behaviour, learning difficulties or bathroom habits deserves particular care, because it is the child, not the parent, who will be asked about it later.
The consent your child never gave
A toddler cannot weigh what it means for 800 people to see them mid-tantrum. Posting anyway removes the chance to model the thing you will later want them to do for their friends: ask first. Children who grow up performing for the camera also learn that attention is the reward, which is a poor foundation for self-worth.
Also read: Parenting in the AI Age and our Online Privacy Guide for Children.
What children actually say about being posted
Autonomy matters at every age. A four-year-old who does not want to be photographed is expressing a preference worth respecting, in the same way a preference about clothes is. Older children are often blunter: research repeatedly finds that tweens and teens want a say, and that their main objection is not privacy in the abstract but embarrassment in front of people they know.
There is also a quieter cost to the parent. Photographing a moment changes how you experience it. The instinct to capture and post can crowd out the thing being captured.
Five questions to ask before you post
- Would my child be comfortable with this at 15?
- Does the photo or caption reveal a name, school, birthday, address or routine?
- Is my child dressed as they would be in front of a stranger?
- Who can actually see this, and am I sure of that?
- Am I posting for them, or for the response?
If any answer makes you pause, send it privately instead.
How to share your child’s photos safely
Lock the account down first. Set profiles to private, review the follower list and remove people you cannot place. Turn off location tagging at the phone level so it is not something you have to remember each time.
Strip identifying detail. Use a nickname or an initial. Crop out house numbers, school crests and name tags. Avoid posting on the first day of school with the school named, which is the single most common leak.
Never post a child undressed. Bath photos, potty training, nappy changes and swimwear shots are the material most often harvested. There is no privacy setting that makes these safe.
Post less often. Frequency, not any single photo, is what builds a usable profile of a child. It also lowers the pressure on everyone.
Ask, from around age four. Show them the photo. If they say no, it does not go up. Children who are asked learn to ask.
Turn off face recognition and photo tagging where the platform allows it, and decline school and club consent forms that permit unrestricted use of images.
How to share baby photos privately, without social media
If the point is to keep grandparents and close friends updated, a social feed is the wrong tool. Better options:
- Invite-only family album apps such as Tinybeans, FamilyAlbum or 23snaps, which are built for a fixed audience rather than an open feed.
- Shared cloud albums in iCloud, Google Photos or Amazon Photos, restricted to named people and revocable at any time.
- A closed messaging group with a small, known membership, with the understanding that anything sent can be re-shared.
- A printed photo book once a year. It cannot be scraped, and children tend to prefer it.
Read the storage terms before committing. Most mainstream cloud services encrypt in transit and at rest but not end to end, which means the provider can still access and analyse the images.
How to ask family and friends not to post photos of your child
This is the request most parents find hardest, and grandparents are frequently the largest source of unwanted exposure. Directness works better than hinting.
Say the rule plainly: “Please don’t post photos of [child] online unless we say yes first.” Give a one-line reason and stop there; long justifications invite negotiation. Offer the alternative in the same breath, because the underlying wish is usually to show the child off, not to publish: “Send them to the family album instead, and we’ll add you to it.”
Put it in writing once, in the group everyone is in, so nobody hears a different version. If a photo has already gone up, ask for it to be taken down the same day, without escalating. If it keeps happening, the consequence is straightforward: fewer photos shared, and no photographs at family gatherings.
What about schools, clubs and nurseries?
Ask for the organisation’s image policy in writing before you sign a consent form. Reasonable policies specify where images may appear, whether children are named, how long images are retained, and how to withdraw consent later. Many forms are written far more broadly than they need to be, and consent is usually severable: you can permit internal newsletters and refuse public social media.
In India, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 treats anyone under 18 as a child and a child’s photograph as personal data. Schools and other data fiduciaries need verifiable parental consent before processing it, and tracking, behavioural monitoring and targeted advertising aimed at children are prohibited outright. Posting class photos to a public page without that consent is the most common breach. The DPDP Rules notified in 2025 set out how consent must be obtained and verified.
Where the law stands on sharenting
France went furthest first. A law of 19 February 2024 wrote children’s image rights into the Civil Code, requiring both parents to act jointly on publishing images of their child and to take the child’s own view into account. A judge can restrict a parent’s ability to post. France had already regulated commercial use of under-16s’ images in 2020.
In the United States, Illinois became the first state to require that child influencers be paid, covering children under 16 who appear in at least 30% of a parent’s monetised content. California extended its Coogan protections to social media in 2024, and other states have followed.
No jurisdiction yet gives an ordinary child a general right to have their childhood photos removed. Several legal scholars expect that to change.
How to clean up what you have already shared
If you have been posting for years, none of the above is an accusation. Almost all oversharing comes from not knowing how the material could be used.
Start with an audit. Search your own child’s name and see what surfaces. Work backwards through your own posts, deleting anything with a full name and birthday together, anything showing a school or home address, anything involving undress, and anything your child would find humiliating now. Then check what other people have posted and tagged.
Reduce your audience before you do anything else, since a follower cull removes more exposure in five minutes than a month of deletions. Set a recurring reminder, twice a year, to repeat the sweep.
From around age nine or ten, do this with your child rather than for them. Deciding together which pictures stay teaches the audit habit they will need for their own accounts, and it hands back some control over a record they had no part in creating.
Also read: Creating Healthy Digital Habits at Home
Frequently asked questions
Is it illegal to post photos of my own child? In most countries, no. France is the notable exception in requiring both parents to agree and to consider the child’s view. Elsewhere the constraints apply to schools, employers and platforms rather than to parents.
At what age should I start asking my child’s permission? Around four, once they can understand what a photo is and where it goes. Their answer should be binding, including when it is no.
Are private accounts actually safe? Safer, not safe. Followers can screenshot and re-share, and the platform still holds the images. Treat “private” as reducing the audience, not sealing it.
Should I blur or cover my child’s face? Emoji and stickers are widely used and easily removed by software. If a photo needs a face covered to be postable, it is a photo to send privately.
Can I ask a school to delete a photo of my child? Yes. Under India’s DPDP Act, the UK and EU GDPR and similar regimes, you can withdraw consent and request erasure. Ask in writing and keep a copy.
What if the other parent disagrees about posting? In France this is now a legal requirement to resolve jointly. Everywhere else it is a household decision, and the more restrictive position is the safer default, since a photo can always be posted later but not unposted.
Today’s children are the first cohort whose early years were documented in public before they could object to it. The practical response is narrow and unglamorous: a private account, a caption with no name or school in it, a family album app for the people who actually want the updates, and a twice-yearly clean-up done with the child once they are old enough to have an opinion.