The risks of sharenting: when parents post photos of their children

Sharenting

Parents of today have the unhealthy habit of compulsively sharing every step of their children and on social networks everything is a riot of children of all ages who perform the most common daily actions. They are certainly images that have always aroused feelings of tenderness and sympathy but with the advent of social media the very concept of intimacy and privacy has been distorted. But how does this affect all children ?

Meaning of Sharenting

Share + parenting : ” sharenting ” is an anglicism that originates from share (sharing) and parenting consists in the social sharing of the life of one’s children , a real documentary of all their progress and their development. The phenomenon is so widespread that the term officially entered the British Collins dictionary as early as 2016.

Dr. Rossella Valdré points out that

The online overexposure of children is part of the contemporary attitude of parents towards young children, exalted as fetishes in a culture, ours, where few children are born, usually very expected and often with parents who are no longer young. The child is now full of expectations, even before he is born, as never happened before: destiny seems already predetermined in the minds of parents without waiting to meet the real needs of the child.

The risks in adolescence

Those who are now funny and sweet children, sources of joy and precious social likes , will be teenagers , and then adults, in a few years , and it is not certain that the publications made over the years by parents are to their liking. Photo sharing creates a public digital archive with which the person concerned will have to deal in the future. His image will be bound to the images that his parents have decided to promote, a selection never approved and with which it is not said that he feels identified.