Parents now create a digital record their child never chose

The short answer

A 2017 legal analysis argued that when parents post photographs and stories about their children online, they create a digital record the child never agreed to and cannot easily erase. The article does not say sharing is wrong; it says the practice sits in genuine tension with a child's own emerging privacy, and it offers ways to narrow that tension rather than eliminate sharing altogether.

What the evidence says

The article, published in the Emory Law Journal in 2017 by law professor Stacey Steinberg, is presented as the first in-depth legal analysis of the conflict between a parent's right to share about family life and a child's interest in privacy over their own developing identity. It is a legal and policy argument, not an empirical study of families, and it draws on existing privacy law, child welfare scholarship and reporting on the volume of images now posted about children from birth onward. The piece proposes two responses: practical best practices parents can weigh before posting, and a broader public-health-style model that treats a child's digital footprint as something worth protecting by design, not only by individual parental choice.

For context

This is a single scholar's legal argument, useful for naming the tension clearly, not a survey of what most families actually do or a court ruling that settles anyone's rights. A separate and later document, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child's General Comment No. 25, adopted on 2 March 2021, independently names parents sharing photographs online as one everyday source of threat to a child's privacy, alongside data collected by companies and institutions. It also says that parental monitoring and disclosure should be proportionate to a child's evolving capacities, a related but distinct idea from sharenting: one is about what a parent posts outward, the other about what a parent observes inward. Neither document can tell a given family whether a specific photograph crosses a line; both are frameworks for thinking about it.

A practical next step

Before posting about your child, you might pause on anything that shows a full name alongside a location, a medical or behavioural struggle, or a moment the child could later find embarrassing, and consider whether an older version of that child would be glad it is public.

• Would our child, at sixteen, be comfortable with this post being searchable by their name?
• Does this post reveal a location, school or routine in a way we would not want a stranger to know?
• Is there a private way to share this moment with family that does not require it being public?

The tension Steinberg describes does not resolve itself; it is carried by parents, post by post, and a moment's restraint is one of the few tools already available while broader protections are debated.