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Calling All Parents: Are You Guilty of ‘Sharenting’?

mom taking a picture of her baby

It’s a familiar scene: Your toddler does something utterly adorable, you snap a pic and immediately share it on Instagram. 

It seems innocent enough, but if you’re posting constantly, you might be guilty of sharenting.  

Basically, sharenting is a term used to describe when parents overuse social media to share content related to their children, and it’s a hotly debated issue among moms and dads. 

In an interview with Bostons NPR affiliate, WBUR, Stacey Steinberg, associate director of the Center on Children and Families at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, offered suggestions for how to adapt as a parent in a social-media-filled world. 

Suggesting that social media sharing (like monitoring kids screen times) should be handled on a case-by-case basis, she recommends parents develop their own policies around sharing photos, videos and other life updates about their children. For some, this could mean not posting at all. For others, it could be a matter of giving a child the right to say no before a post is published (assuming, of course, they’re old enough to understand). 

Looking toward the future, Steinberg said, “I think that as we all get more comfortable with social media and theonline world that we’re all living in, I do think that parents are going to be thinking a little bit more cautiously and a little bit more proactively about what it is that they’re putting out there online,” adding that “as we have more studies that show us how kids are feeling about the information that’s been out there, I think that parents are going to be better equipped to be able to make smarter sharenting decisions.”

So basically, before you post that potty-training photo that’s so cute now, think about how your kid will react to it as a moody teenager.

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sarah stiefvater

Wellness Director

Sarah Stiefvater is PureWow's Wellness Director. She's been at PureWow for ten years, and in that time has written and edited stories across all categories, but currently focuses...