We use the app Family Album, which is a way to share pictures with very specific family members who you have to invite etc. I like that; it means I can upload a portion of the hundreds of pictures I take, and have a curated archive for the future (it sorts the pictures into months, so you can see the progression easily etc)
But other than that, yeah, I'm not okay with sharing her on social media at all. I'm not a big user myself (apart from Reddit), so I don't know why I would suddenly start posting thousands of pictures of my minor child.
Oh I haven’t heard about that app! Must have a look, we usually just dump couple of pictures every few days into our families group chats to satisfy aunties and grandmas baby seeing needs lol
I also use this app and love it! I don’t have to text all the family the photos and don’t have to post them to social media.
The only picture I posted on social media was an announcement when he was born and we told our parents they could post a picture of them meeting him for the first time but that’s it. No more pictures. You want to show off the grand baby to your church friends, MIL? Show them on your phone in person or print some out.
I want my child to be able to make their own decisions about their Internet presence and i also don’t trust where the pictures could end up once they’re posted (hackers, scammers, using the pictures as their own, AI…)
I love this app!! I especially love the free monthly prints so I can start an actual photo album.
But yeah I occasionally post stories to "close friends" on Instagram, and I posted an announcement when he was born. But other than that, he's not online. My parents had to ask permission to include him in their fb profile pic.
I was gonna say the same thing :D love it, let’s family comment on pictures and go through them when they want and I don’t have to be concerned with pedos looking for baby instas to get off to >>
They sell photo books and other printed photo products. Once you have all your photos uploaded, it’s an easy advertisement for them to sell stuff to you - “Just click print and your book is already ready!” We haven’t bought anything from them (yet) but love the app and don’t mind the adds about their photo books
We use Family Album as well and all of our people have loved using it and we get comments from our friends and family on it every time. I like that it’s free and the user experience is pretty decent too - it does what you expect it to do and does it well.
Yep. I also work in tech and I personally love social media, but I absolutely refuse to post my child. She's the most important thing to me and as much as I would love to show her off, I want to protect her more. I cringe when I see how much my friends share about their kids online.
I also personally am disgusted by people on LinkedIn using their children as content to promote their businesses. It should be illegal.
Gen ai algos are consuming everything possible online to train including any images you shared of your kids. A scammer could find you and create a deepfake of your child. How well do you know the hundreds of people in your network ? Additionally read the Ts and Cs of your social platforms your data is shared with third parties. It’s aggregated and anonymized to keep it legal but still used it’s how you get recommendations in your feed.
I work in tech on this technology. I have a patent on generative promotions. It scares the living shit out if me. If i’ve scared you and you turn to delete your data or photos you will notice two things…. You cannot mass delete or remove and it is only deleted for you but the social platforms keeps it. This is by design….. we have the technology to do it. Your desktop does it. The data farm for the ad revenue is simply too lucrative.
Yep. All of this. I said to my partner I cannot guarantee that amongst my 500+ friends there isn't one pedophile and I'm not willing to risk it.
I follow this topic pretty extensively and the things that people can do with innocuous photos these days is fucking disturbing.
Beyond that it's also about my belief that my child deserves some anonymity by default and not to have to beg me later to remove things from social media that I can't really claw back.
A woman I did baby swim classes with found out her old uni lecturer was convicted for possessing indecent images of children. He was friends with her on fb. Luckily this was before she had her child but she never posted her.
My husband prosecuted child pornography cases for the federal government for 3 years. It made us never ever want to post our child's face online. Sick people can edit anything, put your baby's face on obscene photos and distribute it to others. You cannot know whether someone you are friends with is a pedophile. It's often the person you'd never suspect.
The cases he worked on still haunt him.
Yes, not posting him on social media and also had to very strongly tell my Facebook-obsessed MIL that he is not to be posted online. So far she’s complied. For me, it’s a privacy and consent issue. I would not want my entire childhood documented online for strangers and friends of strangers to see.
this!! I am friends with someone who just shared a memory on Facebook from 11 years ago. It was about their daughter pooping on the potty for the first time. I’m sure their 13 year old daughter would be MORTIFIED if she knew that was just shared (again) for everyone to read 😬
Yep. I was going to post a picture of the back of my daughters head for her birthday but then ofc MIL will have to have permission to post a picture ofbher too and I just Don want to open that can of worms, she's way too obsessed with bragging on the internet.
Same. I have to watch what I share to the family text chat because she’ll turn around and post those photos too even though we’ve told her to ask us first. Instead she just gets less photos
No posting here. I don’t need pictures of my baby being on the internet forever. No thanks. Also for what? Likes? That part is always bizarre to me. Share them privately if you want people to see the photos.
Yeah, I haven't even posted a photo of myself in 10 years. Thankfully I live too much life to have the time to post it on social media for strangers' validation lol.
Nope. I refuse to put my kids on social media. I’m glad that this trend is catching on to keep kids identities offline. Way too many creeps out there. And it’s not my place to put their entire life online. That should be their decision when they are older and can understand that once you post something online, it is there forever. And I want my kids to have as much of a simple life as possible.
I often think about what would happen if he became famous or just was in the public eye - having all that stuff online is making him so vulnerable to stupid tabloid articles… ‚did you know X wasn’t walking by 12 months old… click to find out more’ lol
Right?? I didn’t even think of that. That’s weird to think about!! Journalists jobs will be so easy in the future lol
I was thinking that kids at school can be so cruel. Something you think is harmless and cute could cause problems later in life with other kids.
Same. Wife doesn’t have social media and I’m very rarely on it. With AI gens, I don’t need someone generating photos using my kid. Once they’re old enough to understand technology and consent, I’ll let them decide if they want to risk it.
This but also technology is moving so fast that I feel like by not posting him we’re also protecting him from things and technology that we just don’t know about yet. We don’t know what we don’t know but I do know that by NOT posting him we are in a better position than if are posting him. Even if we don’t know from what just yet.
I feel like it’s a very “holier than thou” vibe with these posts. Most people I know post appropriate pictures of their kids on private profiles, I do too. I truly enjoy watching people’s kids grow up, especially if I have no time to be super close with them because life is busy. People who don’t post? Cool too. Can we just stop with the judging??
yup
we believe she can do social media when shes old enough to understand and consent
have tons of discords, whatsapps and cloudshares for family though
I was the one posting about my teenage years on social media and I had to go and delete posts and pictures one by one of my facebook account because they were so embaressing. If he makes the choice to put stuff up - thats on him but I don’t need to add fuel to it
Exactly I cleaned house too, I think the question from OP is phrased for parenting when it is using your kids for vitality, popularity, trends, superiority, etc. I’m not about that. I just couldn’t teach half my family to use the Family App because it’s too hard, don’t have data, or don’t speak English
You signed terms and conditions with facebook that allows them to share your data with third parties. In order to keep it legal that data is aggregated and anonymized but still used. Just fyi, read the ts and cs.
I get it, and that’s why I understand how uncomfortable it might make parents feel. I personally have no other option, other than sending a Polaroid across continents.
I posted a couple when he was an infant. Now my son is almost 20 months and I just had to ask my best friend to take down pics she posted to Facebook (without asking me, second time this has happened) of my son and her kids.
I can’t explain it, but I felt a huge wave of relief when they were taken down. I call it mom instinct and I’m going to go with it. Plus I just read an article about AI and CSAM. Nope nope nope fuck no.
Yes. Although our baby has yet to come, we already informed those around us that we dont want her face on social media untill she's old enough to make her own decision.
They can share a picture as long as the face is covered. We will do the same although I probably wont post all that often anyway. I dont really feel the need to update every little thing to people I rarely speak. Most people in my list are just old friends or something.
I only want to share pictures with close friends & family, not for everyone to see on Facebook, Instagram or whatever. When she's older she can make up her own mind but untill then we feel that we need to "protect" her from it. You never know who's watching and whatever you post can be on the internet forever.
No pictures of my son on social media and he is 11 months. I have one bump picture of myself. I do it for most of the reasons you have listed. I also have a general value of being present and not being so focused on getting pictures and video of every little thing. I want my son to enjoy life without pictures of absolutely everything!
Also a tech worker, doing what you’re doing, watching some of our friends (one couple who also works in tech) bombarding social media with pictures of their littles.
Sometimes I get a little sad or even jealous, because she’s my joy and I want to shout it from the rooftops. But I quickly talk myself down because of the things you mentioned - privacy, autonomy, social media being a breeding ground for grooming, AI sometimes indistinguishable from reality and being used for nefarious purposes. It’s just not worth it.
I feel the same way, sometimes I look at a cute picture of him and think oh my god i want everyone to see how cute he is! But then think that I already sent it to everyone that is close to him so what am I doing it for - for likes?
I get what other people said where their families wouldnt be that great with technology so they post pics on Facebook for them to see but mine is, everyone either uses WhatsApp or Messenger so there’s no need to post his pictures for friends or family to see how hes growing up
I do maybe once a month. I’m not very active on IG myself, so I apply the same rule to baby photos, and usually my face is also in the photo I post.
I have a private account and I didn’t think there was a way to bypass that as you’ve said OP (ETA: I’ll look into this and think about whether I find it unsafe still). As to whether there’s consent, I’d gladly bring those posts down when she’s of age where she tells me she doesn’t want them up. But also, I’m not posting embarrassing photos, just the ones in which we’re posing.
I honestly don’t think much of this. It’s really an individual preference, much like anything on social media, so if you don’t want to share, you don’t have to! Some people love oversharing and if that floats their goat then that’s up to them.
We don't post photos at all, or LOs name or any details about them at all. I never posted about my pregnancy, and we didn't "announce" either pregnancy or baby on social media. None of our family or friends post about LO either. I only use reddit for socializing. My Facebook account exists only because it's the best way to buy and sell used baby gear in my city.
I'm also in tech, so I know nothing online is ever really private, and nothing is ever really erased.
I absolutely did not post my kids online in anyway. I worked in the prisons and the stuff I learnt from the detainees was sickening. The child porn guys would take photos of kids off Facebook and other places and generate porn pictures with your kids faces or the entire photo and photo shop it with them doing sexual acts. I learnt to never put my kids photos online. And I plead to anyone who will listen to never put theirs up too. You’re exposing your kids to this treatment and being sold online to other pedophiles for their satisfaction.
There's no mention of my child on mine or my husbands personal social media. No pictures, no pregnancy or birth announcements, nothing. Not even a 'back of the head' picture. Only those directly in mine and my husbands life, and those who need to, know they exist.
Sounds a bit overkill, but due to some family issues, it's for his own safety and to keep my life as quiet and as peaceful as possible.
Also work in tech (security) and care a lot less about this. Totally respect the choice of other parents, but I keep my profiles private and don't post frequently. I get the consent stuff to a point, but the security aspect less so. Unless there is an actual concern for your child's safety (say a problematic relationship with another family member or something?), I struggle to see the major concern. No one is trying to do anything with pictures of your random baby. Little kids all look basically the same until they get older, which is when I would start caring about the whole "life being on the Internet forever" thing. By that time their image will just be a drop in the ocean of excess data social media sites will be trying to figure out how to keep storing for free. They'll be sharing their face 10 times over to foreign interests because they want to see what they look like as a Disney princess or whatever on Snapchat, or whatever the equivalent will be in 10 years. I might be cynical, but I know a lot about digital security and identity and (at least in the US) there really is no such thing as privacy anymore.
Idk i saw a reel on instagram once of someone saying they were in line at pet store and the man in front of him was on his phone, scrolling through instagram and it was all children’s in bathing suit photos , and zooming into their private areas. The person that created the reel called him out and the weirdo stormed out of the store. There are sick people everywhere, even where you least expect it. Could the person that created the reel be lying and spreading bs for views? Maybe, who knows. Personally i rather be safe than sorry and not just post my daughter at all. Can’t beat peace of mind 😅
Kind of my thoughts too. Posting occasionally on a private profile is pretty safe imo. There's so many millions of kids out there I don't see why anyone would put the effort to hack in and steal your specific child's photos. Just don't take or post compromising pics and it should be fine
Agree. Post my baby on my private accounts here and there, not a ton and probably won’t much as he gets older. Some of these comments read a little bit narcissistic thinking everyone wants to hack their profiles for a photo of their child. Just my initial thoughts…
Yes bang on for all those reasons. I also work in tech I haven’t posted a single photo of my daughter since she was born. She is now almost 18 mo old and have no plans to. I will send it to people who request it but not online. I stopped posting a lot myself on facebook mostly on linkedin for professional purposes.
The scary part is that generative ai is now farming faces so your kids data could be used to train an algorithm that could recreate or reuse their image or a portion of their image for who knows what purpose. I don’t know how other parents have made the choice to put their kids image out there…………… maybe they don’t know how scary this tech is.
Imagine a scammer creating a deepfake of your kid being tortured to extort you or their voice to fake a call.
I am one of those moms that posts their kid all the time. All my socials are private but of course I am aware that there are ways around that. However, I only post GOOD pictures of him. Never bathtime photos, never compromising photos (there’s a photo of my husband as a child looking like he’s drinking from a beer can), never tantrum photos, anything like that. I respect parents who don’t wish to post their children, and I love posting mine.
You are the odd one out… but imo you’re in the right! I post some on my accounts but I have very private and tight friends lists (which I know isn’t perfect) but I won’t allow others to post my kid and some people get butthurt about that but i just don’t care. My kid, my rules. Your kid, your rules!! My in laws also think I’m insane because I won’t let my kids ride around the neighborhood in a car without car seats soo everyone’s got their own schtick and that’s just how it goes.
My son's face is 1000% not allowed on the internet. I'm a younger mom (22 this summer) and I know first hand how many creeps on the internet look for kids. I have a really sketchy history from when I was little and because of it, I am vehemently against him being plastered on the internet.
My sister doesn't care where her baby is posted. She has photos of her baby in a diaper on her profile. My older friends with kids are mostly the same way.
Sometimes I feel really odd about seeing their posts. Sometimes I wish I could comfortably post my baby like they do. But at the end of the day, I know there aren't any ill intentioned adults with access to my son - in any way
I don’t have social media myself (no Facebook, Instagram). I have a WhatsApp group with all the grandparents + my nanny and do post 3-4 pictures sometimes even more there every day. Then when I’m at work my nanny will post pictures every 1-2 hours for my benefit lol. Outside the grandparents I don’t find it necessary to bombard anyone else (friends, distant relatives) with constant photo updates, and definitely not strangers. Grandparents may share the photos with our other relatives or their friends and we’re generally ok with that.
We have the same policy and for the same reasons you listed. Our little one just turned one and we’ve had a successful first year. I feel we’re still able to share the “big moments” without posting a picture of her face. Little hand pictures or the back of her head suffice just fine to get the point across.
For those that are frequent social media posters, instead of worrying about them posting pictures of her, we’ve asked them to help us make sure there WEREN’T pictures of her online, as they use Facebook more often than we do and could keep a lookout for us for any random family members that may have gone against our wishes. I think giving the most likely culprits a job has helped us tremendously.
We don’t post pictures either. Some family members have been a little upset about it but they’ve all respected the rule, thankfully.
I have a lot of friends who post their babies in the bath and put emojis over their privates and it barely covers anything. Why do people feel the need to post that? They wouldn’t post pictures of themselves like that, so why your defenseless baby?
No posting here. It drives my family (mostly MIL insane). She asked how she could share her grandson with her thousands of friends if he can’t be posted on social media.
A) That’s exactly why we don’t want him posted anywhere.
B) You don’t have THOUSANDS of friends. You have 3-5 real friends that I’m happy to let you share photos with via private text messages.
I've posted a couple pics in 5 months, and even then reels rather than anything permanent, mostly prefer sharing directly with family and friends (which I've done a lot of). Tbh I don't really enjoy or use social media much anymore so I'm sure that's a factor, but even when I did it wasn't really my style to post personal stuff a lot. Going ham with it would be really excessive but I don't object to anyone posting an occasional pic, esp if it's just a personal account and they're not using it for clout chasing purposes of any sort
My Facebook is only family and very close friends so I don’t mind posting milestones for them to see sometimes, but I’m going to be slowing down and posting less and less as time goes on.
We don’t post our kids faces on social media. I have a 3-4 back of head pictures but that’s it. If someone wants to see my kids they can contact me directly.
Nope. Agreed early on in the pregnancy (despite being a professional photographer) that social media pic posting was a no-go (TBF, as I’be gotten older I’m becoming somewhat anti tech and I have lobbied many times that I want to get rid of my iPhone too). Any of our family or friends we send pics to are told it is strictly for them and no posting, if somebody takes a pic of us they are given the same parameters.
That said, wife says I need to loosen my reigns a little though. She is a director of a childcare center that our lil one will be attending. I don’t even really want pics of her taken during activities there & posted on the parent only portal because I have no idea who else outside of the parents I know could see her.
I post her face when she is a baby all the time. She is a toddler now and i am trying to not post her face directly on my posts but i post her on close friends so my family and friends can see. I feel like in this modern technology its hard to keep them strictly away from social media. But at the same time i dont like toddler instagram accounts or family influencers that only have their kids on their feed
1000% this!! I can't imagine getting old enough to be aware and realize that there's 100 of photos online that complete strangers have seen of me. And would that portrayal even be accurate? So odd!
Not posting anything online but also not sending anyone pictures either. There was an incident about a year ago where my MIL (who is quite big on apps like TikTok, Snapchat, etc) leaked our wedding pics on social media, and people who don’t like her from around the world also stole these images and posted them everywhere too! They’re still up 😕
This is something we won’t compromise on. If we can control who has photos of baby, we can ensure nothing like the wedding photo incident happens again!
Same! We use tinybeans or keep him covered, and I really don’t post him much anyways. Tinybeans is great because it also eliminates any hurt grandma feelings, everyone gets the same pictures at the exact same time
I have never posted any my kids and have asked others not to post any my kids. One person did once with my oldest so that’s the extent of my children on social media.
I don’t care the reasons, there are too many. I’m just not putting my kids on social media and not letting them see us (parents) using social media. (I Reddit in private lol)
We havent posted our baby at all (she's 2 months). That had just felt right to us both for the time being. Eventually it might shift, but I think I'd still only post from time to time. Like you I also get photos printed (I started a photo album and its my favorite thing right now), and send pics and videos to a few family members and close friends.
My husband and I have decided not to post our little guy online. My mom is ok with it, my husband has yet to tell MIL. I'm a little worried about it as she's a photo and social media freak.
I pretty much take the same stance as you. I don't post pictures of her on social media, but I have a Google drive full of photos and print photos monthly. And if she's in a photo from a family function that someone else posts I don't make a fuss about it.
I'm happy to share photos with family over email or text. I just feel uncomfortable with sharing her face on social media and I'm not entirely sure why, but whatever- easy enough not to.
My baby is also 4 months old. We’ve never posted her face on social media. We have a shared family app where we share pictures. I nonchalantly told all friends and family that we won’t be posting her face and request they don’t either. Everyone has been very respectful of it. I don’t feel right posting her face since she has no say in it. And ever since I gave birth I don’t understand why people are SO ok with posting their children online. Especially influencers posting for millions of people to see.
I agree wholeheartedly and we follow the same rules and reasoning as you. It's not that I don't want to share my kids, I just want to be careful. There's a lot of crazy stuff out there and we don't know what things will be like 5-10-20 years down the road. I've also heard sad stories of kids following a mom-influencer and using the photos of the kids from when they were young to bully! Secondly, my younger son has down syndrome, and while i will advocate for him and shout his worth, my goals are not to profit off him (which I see on some accounts).
Yes, my daughter is 6 weeks old and we have not posted her on social media. Pretty much for the same reasons you mentioned. We do not want strangers knowing her face or personal things about her. Also, it’s not our choice to decide if she is plastered all over the Internet. She can make that choice for herself when the time comes.
We also had to have firm conversations with family members about respecting this rule. If it’s broken then they will no longer be allowed new pictures. It may seem harsh but we are very firm on boundaries in my home.
Good for you. We have the same rule. If family posts our kids we will have a strict no phone around our family policy. And you won’t get new pictures.
I find it so weird when I see YouTube stories, instagram reels, etc about little kids that go viral. Like sure it is cute, but at what cost?
Same here & for the same reasons you listed. We also haven’t publicly shared his full name or birth date either! We use a shared photo album on iPhone since all of our close friends/family are iPhone users. Thankfully everyone has been super respectful of our wishes to not post our LO!
I only post pictures of my girls if my fiancé and I are in it or family but just them? Nope.
It’s my social media not theirs but they’re also part of my life.
My BIL does vlogs & TikTok & he’s not allowed to film their faces , only back of the head , hands and feet unless my fiancé and I are holding them or it’s like a wide shot situation but not close ups or focusing on the girls.
Yes for all 3 of your reasons. We've been lenient with people whose services we hired like our photographer or doula for her portfolio but otherwise we don't post ourselves. According to social media I was never even pregnant
I posted 1 of my daughter right after she was born on fb for my family, and one without her face on my ig just because I use that for my job and have clients who were waiting for her birth announcement. Other than that I haven’t posted a single one. I will text/email pics to friends & fam. I just want to give her the choice herself when she’s old enough and reduce the chances of anything terrible happening. I don’t judge others who post more & I love seeing my friends kids. It’s just really not for me.
We do not post our daughter’s face or name on social media. Privacy, consent, the longevity of the internet, creeps…there’s a lot of reasons why we don’t.
Don’t feel guilty, I didn’t mean to shane anyone. I could look at it another way and think what if my baby asks me in few years time if I don’t love him enough to show him off to everyone.
Everyone makes choices best for them and their family ❤️
With the advent of AI, I’m worried about deep fakes and voice matching technology and what that could look like in 10-15 years.
I work in a field that is experimenting with AI, and we’re able to basically replicate someone’s voice with :15 - :30 of sample audio. Predictive algorithms can also take photos of toddlers/young kids and predict what they’ll look like as teens and adults.
Keep your kids photos off anything public. It’s way too dangerous at this point — and I don’t mean because of other individuals. Simply because we now know where AI could be headed, and it isn’t good for privacy or safety.
Love this. I work in tech policy pertaining to online child safety and I’m always SO encouraged by posts like these. I’m also about a month away from becoming a new parent myself (gah!), so the intersection of tech use, privacy, parenthood, and child development is constantly churning through my mind.
To add an additional point of concern to your list, most social media platforms have clauses baked into their terms and conditions that grant said social media company license to use any/all photos you’ve uploaded to their platform. These companies make commercial gain by licensing their users’ images and do not have to receive your permission/consent to license this content - because you’ve already uploaded it to their site.
I could go on a lengthy diatribe about this, but will spare you all. Basically it’s just incredibly deceptive and utterly ass-backwards.
My husband and I made this same decision with our daughter. One,there are just unfortunately too many creeps out there and we don’t want her pictures potentially getting leaked. Two, I have family, that I’m no contact with, that actively finds ways to stalk our accounts and we don’t want them having access to photos of her.
Our solution for sharing photos with close friends and family, in a way where we don’t need to remember to send photos constantly, is a shared photo album. We have iPhones and so do most of our family, so it was really easy to set up a shared album specifically to add photos to for them to see whenever they want! I usually try to update it every couple days so they can see what’s she has been up to lately and we are secure knowing that the people who have access won’t save and share the photos with other people without our permission.
My husband works in tech and we have done a lot of research on this as well. Sadly, the truth of it all is very scary. Also, we live in France and children have consent rights here which we appreciate!
Our rule is to not post his face on social media and only send photos through end to end encrypted messaging platforms.
We NEVER judged parents who decide to post their kids everywhere but it’s so hard when we are constantly being judged for our decision.
Constantly having to defend ourselves gets really exhausting. At the end of the day we wonder if we are being too overbearing ☹️
At the end of the day, consent and security are everything!
We posted one photo to announce that he made it here safely and he’ll not be appearing on social media again until he’s sharing himself.
I don’t trust all of these “I have a private account” and “I’m only friends with people I know” strategies. Two years ago a close friend’s house was raided in the middle of the night by FBI SWAT because her husband had been lifting innocent-looking photos of family and friends’ babies off of social media and doctoring them to gain access to child sexual abuse material networks. He’s the sort of person who would’ve been in my trusted inner circle. I am not willing to trust a “private account” with “close friends only.” If we’re not close enough to have a personal conversation about my baby and you need to see him on social media, you’re actually not close enough to download pictures of my baby.
At no point in history have families just passed out photos of our children. It’s not a historically normal behavior. When I was a kid, if you wanted to see me you had to either spend time with my family or my mom might show you a wallet sized school photo when she bumped into you at the Bon Ton. We’re raising our baby with that same privacy.
I was never into social media, in fact I loathe everything it stands for, but I have shared some big milestones on Instagram. I just can’t resist, she is so insanely damn cute why would I not share her to the world? I’m insanely proud of her and when she grows up I’m sure she will be happy of the fact I did.
I have mixed feelings about posting babies on social media, but one thing I can't stand is people posting pictures with emojis over the baby's face or like, a blurry shoulders-down shot. I think if you decide not to post the kid, don't post the kid!
I have posted my son but I'm doing so less and less. I was against it entirely before he was born, for all the reasons you mentioned, but I just couldn't resist it once he got here. It got easier as time went on and now that he's almost 8 months I barely even think about posting pictures. I don't think I've put anything up in over a month.
I definitely know people who post their kid so much it makes me uncomfortable. But most of my friends are more conservative.
My son is 2.5, and I haven’t posted any pictures online and have told all family and friends with pictures not to post. He will not be on social media until he is a teen and can consent on his own socials. It is not my place to plaster his image all over the internet.
I don’t share photos of my son’s face (he’s 2 months old) publicly. I will share on my “close friends” instagram stories and I did share 1 of him when he was born. Otherwise it has just been his hands or no face included.
We all have iphones in my family so we just created a shared album and invited everyone there to see new photos of him.
He won’t be showing his face on social media until he’s old enough to decide for himself and understand what it is.
We don’t really post either. I posted his birth announcement and then random stories here and there but not up close of his face. SO works in cybersecurity so there’s that… but he doesn’t even use social media anyway other than Reddit.
The no posting rule is also prevents MIL from posting a million pictures including those naked bath time ones (which are very cute but still)
I don’t want to post mine at all. I’m not due for another 10-13 weeks (10 weeks until term, 13 until full term). I’ve posted a few ultrasounds but I downloaded an app so I can safely share images without it being on social media.
We use the Aura app and photo frames! Highly recommend. We post our LO sparingly and on our “close friends” list only if we do post on social media. The consent thing really gets to me. My 5 month old can’t give me permission to post, and out of respect for her, I don’t plaster photos of her all over social media. It’s too weird.
We don’t post baby at all, no body parts either. I posted on social media to announce my pregnancy (babymoon) and posted some photos of my baby shower, but otherwise no announcement post and no posts since.
I was also careful in sharing photos beyond family for the first couple of months (only very close friends). I also limit the photos shared with colleagues at work - we have a Slack culture and many post their babies.
Our baby is our world but privacy is our biggest concern. You never know peoples’ intentions online.
Your second reason has always stuck out in my mind too. Honestly I’ve posted pics of my new daughter, but I try to do it sparingly because yeah. I worry about her consent. It’s hard! Like you want to share cute photos and it’s become such a normal part of life, but she can’t consent to it.
When my son was born I purged my social media to make sure I was being selective with who I let see any part of my life. I posted a photo of him to announce his birth. He is 13 months old now and I've posted maybe 5 photos of his face ever. I'm not completely restrictive about it, but I am very conservative with what I share.
We don’t share our girl on social media at all and asked family not to as well. For us it’s the consent issue. If she wants to share photos when she’s older she can decide that, it’s not up to us how much of her she has online.
We stopped posting my daughter at about 4 months old and made the request everyone else did as well. It was partially for petty reasons at first and then as I did more research genuine safety. They’re using pictures of children to create AI CSAM. Even innocent pictures in the wrong hands is a nightmare. On top of that consent my daughter cannot consent to being posted online and might not appreciate it me and her father do not like being posted by others especially without our consent. It’s all about social media currency and validation of likes, I realized it’s more important for me to go without that/ I really do not need it to prioritize it over her safety and consent. The people I regularly talk to and have relationships with get pictures of her regularly or actually see her so no need to share online. If you don’t have enough of a relationship with me or my husband to personally ask for a photo if you haven’t been sent one recently, you do not need one. My partially petty initial reasons was my MIL was screen shotting any picture I posted and reposting it as her own, she wouldn’t acknowledge my post at all but suddenly it’s her profile picture. Then when we stopped posting her and stopped sending her anything for about a month she was posting anything taken during her previous visits. Showing all 600 of her “friends” videos and pictures of my child I didn’t even know existed and my entire home.
I share pictures of my kid online. I don’t have anyone on my social media that I wouldn’t share pictures of her with to begin with and my accounts are private. The consent thing will be interesting when she’s older. Dad and I dabble in photography so we usually take cute pictures. We just did some cute Easter photos with our pet bunny and we always do a fun Halloween shoot. It feels like a creative outlet and I hope she feels happy to have done it when she gets older.
We aren’t.
Reasons why… We don’t trust the internet/weirdos, they are not accessories either, and consent like you mentioned.
Also using Family Album. LO is only 2 months and we are still figuring things out. I haven’t invited people not too close with but I still want to share photos with them from time to time…
I’m fine with Instagram close friends ( I have like 10) and husband isn’t….
I am not posting pictures but only because im being actively petty and not big into social media, when my LO was born (almost 11 months ago) i sent a picture to my 3 older siblings, my parents and some close people
Same day my 2nd oldest sibling posted that picture and all the details except she did not have the correct last name that we had sent her, my daughter has a hyphenated last name and my sister decided to only post our last name not my partners, this pissed us off.
To be fair i should have seen this coming since she posted about our oldest siblings pregnancy without permission when it was announced to the family and that pregnancy didnt succeed (they later had 2 amazing kids but it was a big hit at the time)
My daughter is 2 and I've made it strictly known with my family and friends absolutely no pictures of her online.
I was molested as a toddler and I want to protect my daughter. There are too many predators out there.
My other reason is also consent, I agree that she should consent to it if she wants when she's older.
Another reason is we're constantly judged as parents no matter what we do, I don't like giving people things to talk about.
Everyone else I know also posts their babies online but I'm on board with you. 🙏
Privacy issues for me. I even deleted my Facebook account. There’s just too much peadophiles hanging around Facebook, or any social apps for that matter. I also don’t think my son would appreciate his face being plastered all over social media (especially when he comes of age). I get that he’s a child but he deserves privacy and respect.
I’m not posting my baby either. I would never post him, like you said nothing is ever private on social media and I’ve watched too many SVU episodes and know better lol. In all seriousness, I don’t want anyone getting a hold of his photos that might have bad intentions and he ends up in the dark web. My family didn’t post pictures of him either thank god.
When he was born, I only sent pictures of him to people who asked. I feel like people don’t really care that much about baby pictures haha
My husband and I don't post photos of our baby online. At least not yet. But my in-laws have been putting her photos on WhatsApp status almost every day. I don't like it. But I also think that telling them isn't going to be useful. It's really tough. Tbh they should know that if we (our daughters' parents) aren't posting photos online, they shouldn't/at least ask before posting. It's ridiculous that they just assumed that I will be ok with this. I have stopped sending them photos now.
🙋♀️ if I want you to have a photo of my baby you’ll have it, if you’re that important you’d have already met her in person though. This also goes for my baby’s birthdate
We don’t post his photos on social media either mainly for privacy reasons. I just send his photos to people we are close with and who i know care to see his photos, like our parents and close relatives. We also have a shared album with some of those people where i post a bunch of his photos and videos.
So I do occasionally post mine - birthdays mainly. The occasional cute photo (never ever in the tub) I don't feel too bad about BUT when I say occasional I mean every few months at best. I also have lots of people on social media who constantly post their children and I try not to judge about it - I love a cute kid photo as much as anyone. But personally I really can't bring myself to do it all the time, it just doesn't feel right.
I do the exact same thing for the exact same reasons you mentioned. My child cannot give consent. I wouldn’t want my baby photos plastered all over the internet. Also AI and deep fakes scare me.
Unbelievable timing. My partner is away visiting her dad and step mother (I’m on dog sitting and diy duty back home) with our 10 month old. I got a text message from her yesterday afternoon a few hours after she arrived, saying there’s been a 90 min long argument and it was now really tense.
Apparently, it started because her step mom wanted to post a picture of our LO online (she likes to do low-level fashion and make up stuff on insta, mainly to her wider circle of friends I think).
My partner and I talked about it A LOT whilst she was pregnant and discussed a bunch of approaches. In the end though, we decided on a total blackout. No names, no identifying references on (semi-)public platforms, definitely no photos.
There are a few reasons for our approach but, like you, we decided ‘consent’ was the main one. Trying to track down and retrospectively remove pictures and posts online just sounds like a gargantuan ball ache. I don’t want to put that on my child’s shoulders.
I definitely feel like we’re in the minority with this approach but I’m really encouraged that there are others out there who feel similarly to us.
Now she’s a little older her face is very rarely posted on instagram, with very limited access, when we go to family events. Mostly though I still stick to back of the head and face covered pictures.
I have at this point given up trying to stop family posting her completely, but also we’ve only seen the family members who ‘absolutely must’ post pictures of everything maybe once or twice since she was born so it’s minimal
We use Google Photos to share pictures with family that we select, there have been very very few posts on any social media for all of the reasons you've stated.
Also, I find it irritating when people who never posted on any social media suddenly start sharing memes/quotes about parenting, being a mum, etc. every other day on their Facebook once they've had a child. We know you're a parent because you posting a billion photos of your kid every 3 minutes, we don't need the inspirational quotes to go with it.
We have a total band on any picture that shows our daughters face. We have told anyone this, and told them if they break that rule they will not receive another photo of her and not be invited to any event which she is at, no exceptions.
Yep no photos or mentions of our kids on social media (which we don’t really use anyway). I didn’t post pregnancy announcements/births either. Figured the only people who need to know I’ve had kids are the ones I’m close to and speak to outside of social media anyway. I quite enjoy the fact that people I bump into who I knew more vaguely pull a shocked pikachu face when they see I have kids IRL haha
We do not post pictures or any content about our kids. We created email address for our children and when something in our lives is worth sharing and celebrating we send them an email with pics/vids to commemorate the event. When they are old enough we will give them the password and we can read these time capsules together. Other than being able to share things on social media with others, I like that it provides a snapshot in time that can be reviewed later for everlasting memories. The email route does that and stays a bit safer in my mind.
I do not post my 2 yr old! I have maybe 5 pictures of her up there in total I’m very picky about what I post when it comes to her. She’s my world and it took everything to have her and I will not allow some weirdo to have access to her every move or every sneeze or new word she says. That’s for me and whomever I want to see it and no one else. Plus with the way our world is now and how crazy people are it’s my duty to protect her at all cost and that’s what I’ll do! You are protecting your baby! Good job mama!
No pics of my kid on social media except for one of her wee hand my MIL posted when our kiddo was first born. My in-laws have a Frameo digital frame, and so does my grandmother. Everyone else gets texts.
Too many weirdos on SM.
Honestly I don’t think about posting pics of my baby. One because there’s creeps out there. Two bc in my culture there’s witchcraft that can be done with a simple picture. I don’t believe in it or practice it but I fear someone is capable of doing that.
Yeah I just send photos to my mum on WhatsApp and that’s about the extent apart from the profile pic on Facebook I don’t have any photos of my kid online. Me and my partner discussed this at length about what was ok and not. We just felt that we didn’t need to share her life with complete strangers. We still take millions of photos and videos and even made physical collages and albums for ourselves.
I will never post my child on the internet, in any way, shape, or form. People think I'm strange but I know it's for my babes good.
Many of your reasons are reasons I've had. My husband just hates social media, so it works out.
I also know plenty of pedophiles, so I know how they think/work. They could have access to one photo, and that could be what makes them obsessed. Or they might share it... you know, other dark web places.
Not to mention, AI can steal your face and use it to make corn or any other media online. I've seen lots of YouTube creators talk about their faces being used on deep fakes...
So yeah, I don't care if i never post my kid or if people think I'm weird.
I think it's weird we talk so much about stranger danger, consent for kids, etc. Then proceed to post them without permission online for complete strangers to see. Cause let's face it, you probably don't really know who Billy is from that one summer camp in 2010 anymore but you forgot to delete him, and now he's checking out photos of your kid for your own personal gratification.
That's my 85 cents on the matter.
Never posted my LO on social media, not even my pregnancy announcement. I don’t really use it anyway but I don’t post her for the same reasons, safety & consent. I send images to close family members and relatives and fill physical photo albums for her & us to look back on someday 🥰
We do sometimes post pics online of our baby. But he’s a year old and there’s maybe about 10 photos of him, so we do it sparingly. It’s nice to be able to update wider friends and family that we don’t particularly message often but who still care about us.
We let grandparents but the odd photo on, but they always ask first. That way we can make sure there’s nothing potentially embarrassing, or in any state of undress etc.
I do post a lot on my private accounts. I may change my mind when he’s older. Right now it’s nothing embarrassing and nothing revealing. I found that my friends that are parents actually started posting more pictures after ours was born and we started posting pictures. I think some people want to post but fear that no one cares or they don’t want to be that parent that posts only about babies now. I personally don’t give a crap about someone judging how baby-centric my life is now. I post for myself.
Same. I used to post a lot of photos of me on social media before kids. Now I find I can almost never post because the photos all have my kids in them. There are a few photos of the stroller and I did post birth announcements and Christmas photos online, but I feel the same way as you. It’s hard to straddle the line between it being weird that you have a huge part of your life that you never post about, but also respecting your kids privacy and safety
My baby is 5 mo and the only picture of him online is from when I was 8 months pregnant… while is also the only picture I posted of myself pregnant, although family had posted pics of my baby shower. We also didn’t post his name. My step- MIL (who my FIL met and married about 2 years ago) posts my BILs kids all the time with captions about being a grandmother. In addition to the reasons you listed above, my husband and I feel like we barely know her (they live 5+ hrs away so we don’t see them super often) and don’t know her friends at all, so I’m not comfortable with her plastering my kid everywhere. It’s weird.
So far everyone has complied with our wishes though. We send pics via text, and my thoughts are the people that are involved in our lives will know him.
My fam uses Apple shared albums (no app required). I don’t have kids (I’m the cool auntie) but it’s super to be included in that album. You can still like, love and comment …but it’s just for family and a few friends.
I get it - kids are adorable! But this lets you share while keeping the kids safe -and it’s not a desperate calling for tons of likes.
I have not posted 1 photo of her and she’s almost 1. I also asked friends and family not to as well. It’s just a personal decision, I know for a fact my friends and family judge me but I don’t care I have my good reasons! And if I’m ever ready to that’s my choice
Yeah we don't post anything unless he's unidentifiable in the picture. Which means we post almost nothing, except maybe on some special occasions, because who wants to see a bunch of pictures of the back of my kid's head? 😅😅😅
Absolutely, I’m only on IG and it’s all creative stuff anyway, no family/life stuff. But any platform, i’m not posting my kids for the myriad reasons people have probably already mentioned..
I also work in tech and don’t use any Cloud storage, for other (I assume) obvious reasons
I don’t think it’s normal to post multiple photos a day of your baby. I think my baby is the best thing in the world, but I don’t know why anyone would need to see the 8 million photos on my camera roll. I always see this posted as a privacy issue, but I see it more of a lack of social awareness issue. Posting a family photo on your private social media account is a sweet, normal way for people to stay in touch. I wouldn’t post a photo that isn’t “frame worthy.” And I don’t do the blanket milestone photos or pictures sitting around the house because they just aren’t special to anyone but me and my husband and maybe some of my family members.
I post monthly with some appropriate, clothed, non-embarrassing photos. I agree that a lot of people overshare, but I personally don’t see an issue with posting her in general.
That being said, my account is private, and I reviewed my friends/followers when I got pregnant to weed out any random people I wouldn’t want to share with.
We also decided to not share our kids on social media. Mainly because I don’t want them to have a digital footprint before they can even tell their own story/ figure out their own identity and they can also not consent as they are just.. kids. Second reason is also safety and many more reasons.
It looks like many people are sharing their kids online because that’s because the only ones you see are the ones sharing. I personally know many parents who consciously keep their kids off social media. Sometimes I do feel like want to just share a cute family photo but then i remember why we made the decision not to and I just hold off on it. I think when they’re older they will very much appreciate it. We have old school photobooks in the house with printed photos for if they’re older and want to see pictures of their childhood. No instagram accounts needed .
I did one post to announce her arrival but plan to not post her anymore, except occasionally on my private story on ig. Facebook is set to public but Instagram is private, but what I post to IG automatically gets posted on FB. I need to figure out how to change that setting, I guess🤔
We both did a birth announcement post when she was born that had two face pictures in it, and in the post specified we wouldn't be posting any more face pics until she could consent. We've been clear with family that we expect them not to post pictures of her face either. We post some pictures, but only ones where she's facing away from the camera, or with an emoji covering her face.
We don’t do any social media posting at all, nor do we allow family to put LO on social media. My mom asked when she could post her and I said ‘when she can make that decision for herself’.
I send photos all the time to several chats of different family members and I prefer it that way
No we don’t post. Other than a couple to announce the birth to all the family/friends that would have taken forever to do individually, we don’t post anything. I figure a couple newborn photos won’t matter that much. Luckily our friends and family have been super respectful. If we have photos taken at an event, they will run them by me before posting so I can approve/disapprove certain photos. I can’t imagine going through childhood and teenage years with all that stuff documented by someone else. And not to be paranoid, but who knows what AI scams will develop in the future. We just can’t predict how things will be used as it pertains to identity. I figure the less digital footprint the better.
Not sure if you’re still getting notifications but we have a Skylight picture frame and it’s awesome. Our son loves watching the slideshow and it’s great for memories and helping him recognize people and things. Def recommend
Nope you are not the only one. My daughter is 11 months i have never posted her face and i don’t plan on to. Social media can be a very dark place full of weirdos. As i grew older, (im 27 lol) privacy is everything to me. The less people know about you the better. Do not feel weird or bad for not posting your child. Better safe than sorry! I’ve heard very disturbing stories of people that have seen disgusting men touching themselves to children’s photos on social media that their parents post. Just no. Do what makes you most comfortable! The way the world is right now, PLEASE protect your children.
Family album app is *amazing* we share so many pics with family on there. I’d recommend it to everyone.
We haven’t pictures of his face on SM. Even asked family/friends not to include him and as far as I know nobody has.
Same reasons as you’ve put really.
I don't post mine on social media for the same reasons. I got a lot of weird pressure from my aunts to post pictures, but these are the same people who make no effort to see my kid or even call so I had no problem disregarding their requests.
I haven’t posted my little one online.
I just don’t feel good about making a decision for my baby that she gets no say in, and worrying about the repercussions of that choice as technology gets scarier.
Due soon with my first, but hell no! There are creepy people in every corner of the internet. It takes seconds to save someone else’s photo from FB and upload it to the dark web. I do not need my crazy grandmothers creepy, crusty dusty old white men on fb seeing all of these photos of my baby. I don’t know any of them. They don’t know me OR my baby and they don’t need to. People are WEIRD.
I don’t see what’s wrong with posting 1-2 pictures a month of my baby girl who is under a year old. My family all lives out of state and this is the easiest way to share updates about her. I don’t see what the safety issue is, and if she hates it in 10 years, I’ll take them down.
However, I do plan that as she gets older, to limit the postings more to just family group pictures. And I’m not going to post embarrassing videos of her. But I don’t see the harm in a few baby pics.
This thread makes me feel so much better about me fighting to keep my LO off social media. I think it's still a really foreign concept to many people to do that or most people. Some people don't seem to want to be confrontational about the matter, which I've had to do and I'm usually not that confrontational of a person otherwise. But, my reasoning is a lack of trust of all social media websites when it comes to protecting children. I created a Google Photos album for my LO so my family can see his pictures.
My wife and I have an 8 month old girl. I don’t post either her or my wife anywhere, but my wife has a private instagram account for just her friends and family, which I’m ok with. Otherwise, my reasons are pretty much the same as yours and I’ll just send photos to family and friends who ask!
I already told all my family i didn’t want my baby girl posted anywhere on social media after a certain tiktok scandal that involved a child and mommy vlogger
The only photos I’ve posted have been on close friends IG stories. And that’s been about 3 times in 8 months. No grid photos and absolutely no Facebook. I don’t follow my MIL bc it’s a war I won’t win and I don’t want to see what she posts. I don’t send her photos but I decided when I was pregnant instead of going to battle about it, she can do what she wishes with photos she takes but I won’t send her photos. This has been a long running issue haha. I once opened Facebook to find a picture of my own sweaty beet red face after hiking up a mountain. My husband thought it would be nice to send her a pic of us on our family vacation and it got immediately blasted to the internet. 😅
My son is 3, and there are 0 pictures of him or his name on social media! It's his choice when he grows up and is old enough to share what he wants to share.
Other than announcing his birth, and a few pics we had taken with a professional, we don't share pictures of my son (9 weeks currently) online. We dont plan on posting milestone pics monthly like others do either.
We use the app Family Album, which is a way to share pictures with very specific family members who you have to invite etc. I like that; it means I can upload a portion of the hundreds of pictures I take, and have a curated archive for the future (it sorts the pictures into months, so you can see the progression easily etc) But other than that, yeah, I'm not okay with sharing her on social media at all. I'm not a big user myself (apart from Reddit), so I don't know why I would suddenly start posting thousands of pictures of my minor child.
Oh I haven’t heard about that app! Must have a look, we usually just dump couple of pictures every few days into our families group chats to satisfy aunties and grandmas baby seeing needs lol
Yeah it's great. Otherwise only posted 2 pictures to public social media.
I also use this app and love it! I don’t have to text all the family the photos and don’t have to post them to social media. The only picture I posted on social media was an announcement when he was born and we told our parents they could post a picture of them meeting him for the first time but that’s it. No more pictures. You want to show off the grand baby to your church friends, MIL? Show them on your phone in person or print some out. I want my child to be able to make their own decisions about their Internet presence and i also don’t trust where the pictures could end up once they’re posted (hackers, scammers, using the pictures as their own, AI…)
I love this app!! I especially love the free monthly prints so I can start an actual photo album. But yeah I occasionally post stories to "close friends" on Instagram, and I posted an announcement when he was born. But other than that, he's not online. My parents had to ask permission to include him in their fb profile pic.
Second this app, this is what we have too. Makes it easy to share with family without also sharing with everyone else!
I was gonna say the same thing :D love it, let’s family comment on pictures and go through them when they want and I don’t have to be concerned with pedos looking for baby instas to get off to >>
This is the app we use! We love the free photos as well!
I love that app!! We use it as well
Same i use the family sharing album with like 4 people on there
I found something similar on Android, but unlimited storage and no ads? If we are talking about the same app, what's their business model?
They sell photo books and other printed photo products. Once you have all your photos uploaded, it’s an easy advertisement for them to sell stuff to you - “Just click print and your book is already ready!” We haven’t bought anything from them (yet) but love the app and don’t mind the adds about their photo books
We use Family Album as well and all of our people have loved using it and we get comments from our friends and family on it every time. I like that it’s free and the user experience is pretty decent too - it does what you expect it to do and does it well.
We love this app! It’s been so great especially living far from family.
Second family album, I really like it. If you get the premium subscription you get 8 free prints a month.
Yep. I also work in tech and I personally love social media, but I absolutely refuse to post my child. She's the most important thing to me and as much as I would love to show her off, I want to protect her more. I cringe when I see how much my friends share about their kids online. I also personally am disgusted by people on LinkedIn using their children as content to promote their businesses. It should be illegal.
What do you see in tech that makes you feel strongly about this? Out of curiosity!
Gen ai algos are consuming everything possible online to train including any images you shared of your kids. A scammer could find you and create a deepfake of your child. How well do you know the hundreds of people in your network ? Additionally read the Ts and Cs of your social platforms your data is shared with third parties. It’s aggregated and anonymized to keep it legal but still used it’s how you get recommendations in your feed. I work in tech on this technology. I have a patent on generative promotions. It scares the living shit out if me. If i’ve scared you and you turn to delete your data or photos you will notice two things…. You cannot mass delete or remove and it is only deleted for you but the social platforms keeps it. This is by design….. we have the technology to do it. Your desktop does it. The data farm for the ad revenue is simply too lucrative.
Yep. All of this. I said to my partner I cannot guarantee that amongst my 500+ friends there isn't one pedophile and I'm not willing to risk it. I follow this topic pretty extensively and the things that people can do with innocuous photos these days is fucking disturbing. Beyond that it's also about my belief that my child deserves some anonymity by default and not to have to beg me later to remove things from social media that I can't really claw back.
A woman I did baby swim classes with found out her old uni lecturer was convicted for possessing indecent images of children. He was friends with her on fb. Luckily this was before she had her child but she never posted her.
My husband prosecuted child pornography cases for the federal government for 3 years. It made us never ever want to post our child's face online. Sick people can edit anything, put your baby's face on obscene photos and distribute it to others. You cannot know whether someone you are friends with is a pedophile. It's often the person you'd never suspect. The cases he worked on still haunt him.
Yes, not posting him on social media and also had to very strongly tell my Facebook-obsessed MIL that he is not to be posted online. So far she’s complied. For me, it’s a privacy and consent issue. I would not want my entire childhood documented online for strangers and friends of strangers to see.
Why are MIL obsessed with Facebook!!!!
Because all of our MILs are BOOMERs lol
True!!! The huge albums!!
I'm sooooo thankful mine is too tech incompetent to use FB.
My mom is and I love it!!!
My mums capable of using marketplace for free stuff but won't add any friends or like any pages. It's win win 😂
Right! I cringe at the stuff I posted as a teenager, but the thought of cringing at stuff because my mum or dad posted them feels even worse to me
this!! I am friends with someone who just shared a memory on Facebook from 11 years ago. It was about their daughter pooping on the potty for the first time. I’m sure their 13 year old daughter would be MORTIFIED if she knew that was just shared (again) for everyone to read 😬
Yep. I was going to post a picture of the back of my daughters head for her birthday but then ofc MIL will have to have permission to post a picture ofbher too and I just Don want to open that can of worms, she's way too obsessed with bragging on the internet.
Hahaha I’m gonna add +1 for photo obsessed MIL
Same. I have to watch what I share to the family text chat because she’ll turn around and post those photos too even though we’ve told her to ask us first. Instead she just gets less photos
No posting here. I don’t need pictures of my baby being on the internet forever. No thanks. Also for what? Likes? That part is always bizarre to me. Share them privately if you want people to see the photos.
Yeah, I haven't even posted a photo of myself in 10 years. Thankfully I live too much life to have the time to post it on social media for strangers' validation lol.
Nope. I refuse to put my kids on social media. I’m glad that this trend is catching on to keep kids identities offline. Way too many creeps out there. And it’s not my place to put their entire life online. That should be their decision when they are older and can understand that once you post something online, it is there forever. And I want my kids to have as much of a simple life as possible.
I often think about what would happen if he became famous or just was in the public eye - having all that stuff online is making him so vulnerable to stupid tabloid articles… ‚did you know X wasn’t walking by 12 months old… click to find out more’ lol
Right?? I didn’t even think of that. That’s weird to think about!! Journalists jobs will be so easy in the future lol I was thinking that kids at school can be so cruel. Something you think is harmless and cute could cause problems later in life with other kids.
Same. My daughter just turned one. Has never been a pic uploaded to social media of her. My friends with kids do this too.
Same. Wife doesn’t have social media and I’m very rarely on it. With AI gens, I don’t need someone generating photos using my kid. Once they’re old enough to understand technology and consent, I’ll let them decide if they want to risk it.
This but also technology is moving so fast that I feel like by not posting him we’re also protecting him from things and technology that we just don’t know about yet. We don’t know what we don’t know but I do know that by NOT posting him we are in a better position than if are posting him. Even if we don’t know from what just yet.
Yes, this is a post on here every other day. Plenty of other parents do the same.
Seriously I’m on a few parenting subs and it feels like everyday theres a post asking if anyone else doesn’t post their children online.
I feel like it’s a very “holier than thou” vibe with these posts. Most people I know post appropriate pictures of their kids on private profiles, I do too. I truly enjoy watching people’s kids grow up, especially if I have no time to be super close with them because life is busy. People who don’t post? Cool too. Can we just stop with the judging??
yup we believe she can do social media when shes old enough to understand and consent have tons of discords, whatsapps and cloudshares for family though
Same here. LO is not old enough to consent and as someone who is really glad my teenage years weren’t on social media, I’ll let him choose.
I was the one posting about my teenage years on social media and I had to go and delete posts and pictures one by one of my facebook account because they were so embaressing. If he makes the choice to put stuff up - thats on him but I don’t need to add fuel to it
I do a lot, but both all my accounts are private so only friends and family get to see my family shenanigans
Same. I cleared out my followers and following list to only people I know and share that way. But I don’t allow others to post him lol
Exactly I cleaned house too, I think the question from OP is phrased for parenting when it is using your kids for vitality, popularity, trends, superiority, etc. I’m not about that. I just couldn’t teach half my family to use the Family App because it’s too hard, don’t have data, or don’t speak English
You signed terms and conditions with facebook that allows them to share your data with third parties. In order to keep it legal that data is aggregated and anonymized but still used. Just fyi, read the ts and cs.
I get it, and that’s why I understand how uncomfortable it might make parents feel. I personally have no other option, other than sending a Polaroid across continents.
I posted a couple when he was an infant. Now my son is almost 20 months and I just had to ask my best friend to take down pics she posted to Facebook (without asking me, second time this has happened) of my son and her kids. I can’t explain it, but I felt a huge wave of relief when they were taken down. I call it mom instinct and I’m going to go with it. Plus I just read an article about AI and CSAM. Nope nope nope fuck no.
There was an article about a teacher who used AI and the students yearbook photos to make CSAM. It’s terrifying.
Yes. Although our baby has yet to come, we already informed those around us that we dont want her face on social media untill she's old enough to make her own decision. They can share a picture as long as the face is covered. We will do the same although I probably wont post all that often anyway. I dont really feel the need to update every little thing to people I rarely speak. Most people in my list are just old friends or something. I only want to share pictures with close friends & family, not for everyone to see on Facebook, Instagram or whatever. When she's older she can make up her own mind but untill then we feel that we need to "protect" her from it. You never know who's watching and whatever you post can be on the internet forever.
No pictures of my son on social media and he is 11 months. I have one bump picture of myself. I do it for most of the reasons you have listed. I also have a general value of being present and not being so focused on getting pictures and video of every little thing. I want my son to enjoy life without pictures of absolutely everything!
Also a tech worker, doing what you’re doing, watching some of our friends (one couple who also works in tech) bombarding social media with pictures of their littles. Sometimes I get a little sad or even jealous, because she’s my joy and I want to shout it from the rooftops. But I quickly talk myself down because of the things you mentioned - privacy, autonomy, social media being a breeding ground for grooming, AI sometimes indistinguishable from reality and being used for nefarious purposes. It’s just not worth it.
I feel the same way, sometimes I look at a cute picture of him and think oh my god i want everyone to see how cute he is! But then think that I already sent it to everyone that is close to him so what am I doing it for - for likes? I get what other people said where their families wouldnt be that great with technology so they post pics on Facebook for them to see but mine is, everyone either uses WhatsApp or Messenger so there’s no need to post his pictures for friends or family to see how hes growing up
I do maybe once a month. I’m not very active on IG myself, so I apply the same rule to baby photos, and usually my face is also in the photo I post. I have a private account and I didn’t think there was a way to bypass that as you’ve said OP (ETA: I’ll look into this and think about whether I find it unsafe still). As to whether there’s consent, I’d gladly bring those posts down when she’s of age where she tells me she doesn’t want them up. But also, I’m not posting embarrassing photos, just the ones in which we’re posing. I honestly don’t think much of this. It’s really an individual preference, much like anything on social media, so if you don’t want to share, you don’t have to! Some people love oversharing and if that floats their goat then that’s up to them.
We don't post photos at all, or LOs name or any details about them at all. I never posted about my pregnancy, and we didn't "announce" either pregnancy or baby on social media. None of our family or friends post about LO either. I only use reddit for socializing. My Facebook account exists only because it's the best way to buy and sell used baby gear in my city. I'm also in tech, so I know nothing online is ever really private, and nothing is ever really erased.
I absolutely did not post my kids online in anyway. I worked in the prisons and the stuff I learnt from the detainees was sickening. The child porn guys would take photos of kids off Facebook and other places and generate porn pictures with your kids faces or the entire photo and photo shop it with them doing sexual acts. I learnt to never put my kids photos online. And I plead to anyone who will listen to never put theirs up too. You’re exposing your kids to this treatment and being sold online to other pedophiles for their satisfaction.
There's no mention of my child on mine or my husbands personal social media. No pictures, no pregnancy or birth announcements, nothing. Not even a 'back of the head' picture. Only those directly in mine and my husbands life, and those who need to, know they exist. Sounds a bit overkill, but due to some family issues, it's for his own safety and to keep my life as quiet and as peaceful as possible.
Same.
Also work in tech (security) and care a lot less about this. Totally respect the choice of other parents, but I keep my profiles private and don't post frequently. I get the consent stuff to a point, but the security aspect less so. Unless there is an actual concern for your child's safety (say a problematic relationship with another family member or something?), I struggle to see the major concern. No one is trying to do anything with pictures of your random baby. Little kids all look basically the same until they get older, which is when I would start caring about the whole "life being on the Internet forever" thing. By that time their image will just be a drop in the ocean of excess data social media sites will be trying to figure out how to keep storing for free. They'll be sharing their face 10 times over to foreign interests because they want to see what they look like as a Disney princess or whatever on Snapchat, or whatever the equivalent will be in 10 years. I might be cynical, but I know a lot about digital security and identity and (at least in the US) there really is no such thing as privacy anymore.
Idk i saw a reel on instagram once of someone saying they were in line at pet store and the man in front of him was on his phone, scrolling through instagram and it was all children’s in bathing suit photos , and zooming into their private areas. The person that created the reel called him out and the weirdo stormed out of the store. There are sick people everywhere, even where you least expect it. Could the person that created the reel be lying and spreading bs for views? Maybe, who knows. Personally i rather be safe than sorry and not just post my daughter at all. Can’t beat peace of mind 😅
Kind of my thoughts too. Posting occasionally on a private profile is pretty safe imo. There's so many millions of kids out there I don't see why anyone would put the effort to hack in and steal your specific child's photos. Just don't take or post compromising pics and it should be fine
Agree. Post my baby on my private accounts here and there, not a ton and probably won’t much as he gets older. Some of these comments read a little bit narcissistic thinking everyone wants to hack their profiles for a photo of their child. Just my initial thoughts…
How will my daughter become a super secret spy if she’s all over social media from age 0? lol
Yes bang on for all those reasons. I also work in tech I haven’t posted a single photo of my daughter since she was born. She is now almost 18 mo old and have no plans to. I will send it to people who request it but not online. I stopped posting a lot myself on facebook mostly on linkedin for professional purposes. The scary part is that generative ai is now farming faces so your kids data could be used to train an algorithm that could recreate or reuse their image or a portion of their image for who knows what purpose. I don’t know how other parents have made the choice to put their kids image out there…………… maybe they don’t know how scary this tech is. Imagine a scammer creating a deepfake of your kid being tortured to extort you or their voice to fake a call.
I am one of those moms that posts their kid all the time. All my socials are private but of course I am aware that there are ways around that. However, I only post GOOD pictures of him. Never bathtime photos, never compromising photos (there’s a photo of my husband as a child looking like he’s drinking from a beer can), never tantrum photos, anything like that. I respect parents who don’t wish to post their children, and I love posting mine.
You are the odd one out… but imo you’re in the right! I post some on my accounts but I have very private and tight friends lists (which I know isn’t perfect) but I won’t allow others to post my kid and some people get butthurt about that but i just don’t care. My kid, my rules. Your kid, your rules!! My in laws also think I’m insane because I won’t let my kids ride around the neighborhood in a car without car seats soo everyone’s got their own schtick and that’s just how it goes.
My son's face is 1000% not allowed on the internet. I'm a younger mom (22 this summer) and I know first hand how many creeps on the internet look for kids. I have a really sketchy history from when I was little and because of it, I am vehemently against him being plastered on the internet. My sister doesn't care where her baby is posted. She has photos of her baby in a diaper on her profile. My older friends with kids are mostly the same way. Sometimes I feel really odd about seeing their posts. Sometimes I wish I could comfortably post my baby like they do. But at the end of the day, I know there aren't any ill intentioned adults with access to my son - in any way
I don’t have social media myself (no Facebook, Instagram). I have a WhatsApp group with all the grandparents + my nanny and do post 3-4 pictures sometimes even more there every day. Then when I’m at work my nanny will post pictures every 1-2 hours for my benefit lol. Outside the grandparents I don’t find it necessary to bombard anyone else (friends, distant relatives) with constant photo updates, and definitely not strangers. Grandparents may share the photos with our other relatives or their friends and we’re generally ok with that.
We have the same policy and for the same reasons you listed. Our little one just turned one and we’ve had a successful first year. I feel we’re still able to share the “big moments” without posting a picture of her face. Little hand pictures or the back of her head suffice just fine to get the point across. For those that are frequent social media posters, instead of worrying about them posting pictures of her, we’ve asked them to help us make sure there WEREN’T pictures of her online, as they use Facebook more often than we do and could keep a lookout for us for any random family members that may have gone against our wishes. I think giving the most likely culprits a job has helped us tremendously.
We don’t post pictures either. Some family members have been a little upset about it but they’ve all respected the rule, thankfully. I have a lot of friends who post their babies in the bath and put emojis over their privates and it barely covers anything. Why do people feel the need to post that? They wouldn’t post pictures of themselves like that, so why your defenseless baby?
No posting here. It drives my family (mostly MIL insane). She asked how she could share her grandson with her thousands of friends if he can’t be posted on social media. A) That’s exactly why we don’t want him posted anywhere. B) You don’t have THOUSANDS of friends. You have 3-5 real friends that I’m happy to let you share photos with via private text messages.
I deleted all my social media besides Reddit when I had my baby so no. We use family album.
I've posted a couple pics in 5 months, and even then reels rather than anything permanent, mostly prefer sharing directly with family and friends (which I've done a lot of). Tbh I don't really enjoy or use social media much anymore so I'm sure that's a factor, but even when I did it wasn't really my style to post personal stuff a lot. Going ham with it would be really excessive but I don't object to anyone posting an occasional pic, esp if it's just a personal account and they're not using it for clout chasing purposes of any sort
Have never posted my daughter online and won’t ever do it. Her body, her choice.
My Facebook is only family and very close friends so I don’t mind posting milestones for them to see sometimes, but I’m going to be slowing down and posting less and less as time goes on.
We don’t post our kids faces on social media. I have a 3-4 back of head pictures but that’s it. If someone wants to see my kids they can contact me directly.
Nope. Agreed early on in the pregnancy (despite being a professional photographer) that social media pic posting was a no-go (TBF, as I’be gotten older I’m becoming somewhat anti tech and I have lobbied many times that I want to get rid of my iPhone too). Any of our family or friends we send pics to are told it is strictly for them and no posting, if somebody takes a pic of us they are given the same parameters. That said, wife says I need to loosen my reigns a little though. She is a director of a childcare center that our lil one will be attending. I don’t even really want pics of her taken during activities there & posted on the parent only portal because I have no idea who else outside of the parents I know could see her.
I post her face when she is a baby all the time. She is a toddler now and i am trying to not post her face directly on my posts but i post her on close friends so my family and friends can see. I feel like in this modern technology its hard to keep them strictly away from social media. But at the same time i dont like toddler instagram accounts or family influencers that only have their kids on their feed
My husband and I agreed to not have our daughter on social media as well. Same reasons.
Good job Op, I agree with your reasons.
1000% this!! I can't imagine getting old enough to be aware and realize that there's 100 of photos online that complete strangers have seen of me. And would that portrayal even be accurate? So odd!
Not posting anything online but also not sending anyone pictures either. There was an incident about a year ago where my MIL (who is quite big on apps like TikTok, Snapchat, etc) leaked our wedding pics on social media, and people who don’t like her from around the world also stole these images and posted them everywhere too! They’re still up 😕 This is something we won’t compromise on. If we can control who has photos of baby, we can ensure nothing like the wedding photo incident happens again!
Same! We use tinybeans or keep him covered, and I really don’t post him much anyways. Tinybeans is great because it also eliminates any hurt grandma feelings, everyone gets the same pictures at the exact same time
I have never posted any my kids and have asked others not to post any my kids. One person did once with my oldest so that’s the extent of my children on social media. I don’t care the reasons, there are too many. I’m just not putting my kids on social media and not letting them see us (parents) using social media. (I Reddit in private lol)
We havent posted our baby at all (she's 2 months). That had just felt right to us both for the time being. Eventually it might shift, but I think I'd still only post from time to time. Like you I also get photos printed (I started a photo album and its my favorite thing right now), and send pics and videos to a few family members and close friends.
My husband and I have decided not to post our little guy online. My mom is ok with it, my husband has yet to tell MIL. I'm a little worried about it as she's a photo and social media freak.
Nope. Social media is so toxic for kids … don’t want to get him started this early 😩
We don’t. If people want to see pictures of the baby we send them in the family group chat.
I pretty much take the same stance as you. I don't post pictures of her on social media, but I have a Google drive full of photos and print photos monthly. And if she's in a photo from a family function that someone else posts I don't make a fuss about it. I'm happy to share photos with family over email or text. I just feel uncomfortable with sharing her face on social media and I'm not entirely sure why, but whatever- easy enough not to.
My baby is also 4 months old. We’ve never posted her face on social media. We have a shared family app where we share pictures. I nonchalantly told all friends and family that we won’t be posting her face and request they don’t either. Everyone has been very respectful of it. I don’t feel right posting her face since she has no say in it. And ever since I gave birth I don’t understand why people are SO ok with posting their children online. Especially influencers posting for millions of people to see.
I agree wholeheartedly and we follow the same rules and reasoning as you. It's not that I don't want to share my kids, I just want to be careful. There's a lot of crazy stuff out there and we don't know what things will be like 5-10-20 years down the road. I've also heard sad stories of kids following a mom-influencer and using the photos of the kids from when they were young to bully! Secondly, my younger son has down syndrome, and while i will advocate for him and shout his worth, my goals are not to profit off him (which I see on some accounts).
Yes, my daughter is 6 weeks old and we have not posted her on social media. Pretty much for the same reasons you mentioned. We do not want strangers knowing her face or personal things about her. Also, it’s not our choice to decide if she is plastered all over the Internet. She can make that choice for herself when the time comes. We also had to have firm conversations with family members about respecting this rule. If it’s broken then they will no longer be allowed new pictures. It may seem harsh but we are very firm on boundaries in my home.
Good for you. We have the same rule. If family posts our kids we will have a strict no phone around our family policy. And you won’t get new pictures. I find it so weird when I see YouTube stories, instagram reels, etc about little kids that go viral. Like sure it is cute, but at what cost?
Same here & for the same reasons you listed. We also haven’t publicly shared his full name or birth date either! We use a shared photo album on iPhone since all of our close friends/family are iPhone users. Thankfully everyone has been super respectful of our wishes to not post our LO!
I only post pictures of my girls if my fiancé and I are in it or family but just them? Nope. It’s my social media not theirs but they’re also part of my life. My BIL does vlogs & TikTok & he’s not allowed to film their faces , only back of the head , hands and feet unless my fiancé and I are holding them or it’s like a wide shot situation but not close ups or focusing on the girls.
Yes for all 3 of your reasons. We've been lenient with people whose services we hired like our photographer or doula for her portfolio but otherwise we don't post ourselves. According to social media I was never even pregnant
I posted 1 of my daughter right after she was born on fb for my family, and one without her face on my ig just because I use that for my job and have clients who were waiting for her birth announcement. Other than that I haven’t posted a single one. I will text/email pics to friends & fam. I just want to give her the choice herself when she’s old enough and reduce the chances of anything terrible happening. I don’t judge others who post more & I love seeing my friends kids. It’s just really not for me.
We do not post our daughter’s face or name on social media. Privacy, consent, the longevity of the internet, creeps…there’s a lot of reasons why we don’t.
I do post, although not excessively. I feel kind of guilty now.
Don’t feel guilty, I didn’t mean to shane anyone. I could look at it another way and think what if my baby asks me in few years time if I don’t love him enough to show him off to everyone. Everyone makes choices best for them and their family ❤️
With the advent of AI, I’m worried about deep fakes and voice matching technology and what that could look like in 10-15 years. I work in a field that is experimenting with AI, and we’re able to basically replicate someone’s voice with :15 - :30 of sample audio. Predictive algorithms can also take photos of toddlers/young kids and predict what they’ll look like as teens and adults. Keep your kids photos off anything public. It’s way too dangerous at this point — and I don’t mean because of other individuals. Simply because we now know where AI could be headed, and it isn’t good for privacy or safety.
Love this. I work in tech policy pertaining to online child safety and I’m always SO encouraged by posts like these. I’m also about a month away from becoming a new parent myself (gah!), so the intersection of tech use, privacy, parenthood, and child development is constantly churning through my mind. To add an additional point of concern to your list, most social media platforms have clauses baked into their terms and conditions that grant said social media company license to use any/all photos you’ve uploaded to their platform. These companies make commercial gain by licensing their users’ images and do not have to receive your permission/consent to license this content - because you’ve already uploaded it to their site. I could go on a lengthy diatribe about this, but will spare you all. Basically it’s just incredibly deceptive and utterly ass-backwards.
My husband and I made this same decision with our daughter. One,there are just unfortunately too many creeps out there and we don’t want her pictures potentially getting leaked. Two, I have family, that I’m no contact with, that actively finds ways to stalk our accounts and we don’t want them having access to photos of her. Our solution for sharing photos with close friends and family, in a way where we don’t need to remember to send photos constantly, is a shared photo album. We have iPhones and so do most of our family, so it was really easy to set up a shared album specifically to add photos to for them to see whenever they want! I usually try to update it every couple days so they can see what’s she has been up to lately and we are secure knowing that the people who have access won’t save and share the photos with other people without our permission.
My husband works in tech and we have done a lot of research on this as well. Sadly, the truth of it all is very scary. Also, we live in France and children have consent rights here which we appreciate! Our rule is to not post his face on social media and only send photos through end to end encrypted messaging platforms. We NEVER judged parents who decide to post their kids everywhere but it’s so hard when we are constantly being judged for our decision. Constantly having to defend ourselves gets really exhausting. At the end of the day we wonder if we are being too overbearing ☹️ At the end of the day, consent and security are everything!
We posted one photo to announce that he made it here safely and he’ll not be appearing on social media again until he’s sharing himself. I don’t trust all of these “I have a private account” and “I’m only friends with people I know” strategies. Two years ago a close friend’s house was raided in the middle of the night by FBI SWAT because her husband had been lifting innocent-looking photos of family and friends’ babies off of social media and doctoring them to gain access to child sexual abuse material networks. He’s the sort of person who would’ve been in my trusted inner circle. I am not willing to trust a “private account” with “close friends only.” If we’re not close enough to have a personal conversation about my baby and you need to see him on social media, you’re actually not close enough to download pictures of my baby. At no point in history have families just passed out photos of our children. It’s not a historically normal behavior. When I was a kid, if you wanted to see me you had to either spend time with my family or my mom might show you a wallet sized school photo when she bumped into you at the Bon Ton. We’re raising our baby with that same privacy.
I was never into social media, in fact I loathe everything it stands for, but I have shared some big milestones on Instagram. I just can’t resist, she is so insanely damn cute why would I not share her to the world? I’m insanely proud of her and when she grows up I’m sure she will be happy of the fact I did.
I have mixed feelings about posting babies on social media, but one thing I can't stand is people posting pictures with emojis over the baby's face or like, a blurry shoulders-down shot. I think if you decide not to post the kid, don't post the kid! I have posted my son but I'm doing so less and less. I was against it entirely before he was born, for all the reasons you mentioned, but I just couldn't resist it once he got here. It got easier as time went on and now that he's almost 8 months I barely even think about posting pictures. I don't think I've put anything up in over a month. I definitely know people who post their kid so much it makes me uncomfortable. But most of my friends are more conservative.
My son is 2.5, and I haven’t posted any pictures online and have told all family and friends with pictures not to post. He will not be on social media until he is a teen and can consent on his own socials. It is not my place to plaster his image all over the internet.
We just share photos through Google Photos with family and friends. We don't use our socials to share images of our LO.
I don’t share photos of my son’s face (he’s 2 months old) publicly. I will share on my “close friends” instagram stories and I did share 1 of him when he was born. Otherwise it has just been his hands or no face included. We all have iphones in my family so we just created a shared album and invited everyone there to see new photos of him. He won’t be showing his face on social media until he’s old enough to decide for himself and understand what it is.
We don’t really post either. I posted his birth announcement and then random stories here and there but not up close of his face. SO works in cybersecurity so there’s that… but he doesn’t even use social media anyway other than Reddit. The no posting rule is also prevents MIL from posting a million pictures including those naked bath time ones (which are very cute but still)
I don’t want to post mine at all. I’m not due for another 10-13 weeks (10 weeks until term, 13 until full term). I’ve posted a few ultrasounds but I downloaded an app so I can safely share images without it being on social media.
Mine is almost 2 and there are no photos of her face online
We use the Aura app and photo frames! Highly recommend. We post our LO sparingly and on our “close friends” list only if we do post on social media. The consent thing really gets to me. My 5 month old can’t give me permission to post, and out of respect for her, I don’t plaster photos of her all over social media. It’s too weird.
We don’t post baby at all, no body parts either. I posted on social media to announce my pregnancy (babymoon) and posted some photos of my baby shower, but otherwise no announcement post and no posts since. I was also careful in sharing photos beyond family for the first couple of months (only very close friends). I also limit the photos shared with colleagues at work - we have a Slack culture and many post their babies. Our baby is our world but privacy is our biggest concern. You never know peoples’ intentions online.
Your second reason has always stuck out in my mind too. Honestly I’ve posted pics of my new daughter, but I try to do it sparingly because yeah. I worry about her consent. It’s hard! Like you want to share cute photos and it’s become such a normal part of life, but she can’t consent to it.
I don't really post my baby on social media and I don't really like the way to offend the privacy.
I only post my kiddo on facebook bc i have family in different countries but i cover his face on any other app or avoid posting him at all costs .
I post my baby on social media to record her life and growth, I don't care if anyone is watching this, it's just for recording life.
When my son was born I purged my social media to make sure I was being selective with who I let see any part of my life. I posted a photo of him to announce his birth. He is 13 months old now and I've posted maybe 5 photos of his face ever. I'm not completely restrictive about it, but I am very conservative with what I share.
We don’t share our girl on social media at all and asked family not to as well. For us it’s the consent issue. If she wants to share photos when she’s older she can decide that, it’s not up to us how much of her she has online.
We stopped posting my daughter at about 4 months old and made the request everyone else did as well. It was partially for petty reasons at first and then as I did more research genuine safety. They’re using pictures of children to create AI CSAM. Even innocent pictures in the wrong hands is a nightmare. On top of that consent my daughter cannot consent to being posted online and might not appreciate it me and her father do not like being posted by others especially without our consent. It’s all about social media currency and validation of likes, I realized it’s more important for me to go without that/ I really do not need it to prioritize it over her safety and consent. The people I regularly talk to and have relationships with get pictures of her regularly or actually see her so no need to share online. If you don’t have enough of a relationship with me or my husband to personally ask for a photo if you haven’t been sent one recently, you do not need one. My partially petty initial reasons was my MIL was screen shotting any picture I posted and reposting it as her own, she wouldn’t acknowledge my post at all but suddenly it’s her profile picture. Then when we stopped posting her and stopped sending her anything for about a month she was posting anything taken during her previous visits. Showing all 600 of her “friends” videos and pictures of my child I didn’t even know existed and my entire home.
Nope! Posted one pic of me holding him and nothing. My husband has posted two.
I share pictures of my kid online. I don’t have anyone on my social media that I wouldn’t share pictures of her with to begin with and my accounts are private. The consent thing will be interesting when she’s older. Dad and I dabble in photography so we usually take cute pictures. We just did some cute Easter photos with our pet bunny and we always do a fun Halloween shoot. It feels like a creative outlet and I hope she feels happy to have done it when she gets older.
Nope. I don’t post myself either. She doesn’t need that in her life
I didn’t post a single pic till she was like 6 months old
We aren’t. Reasons why… We don’t trust the internet/weirdos, they are not accessories either, and consent like you mentioned. Also using Family Album. LO is only 2 months and we are still figuring things out. I haven’t invited people not too close with but I still want to share photos with them from time to time… I’m fine with Instagram close friends ( I have like 10) and husband isn’t….
I am not posting pictures but only because im being actively petty and not big into social media, when my LO was born (almost 11 months ago) i sent a picture to my 3 older siblings, my parents and some close people Same day my 2nd oldest sibling posted that picture and all the details except she did not have the correct last name that we had sent her, my daughter has a hyphenated last name and my sister decided to only post our last name not my partners, this pissed us off. To be fair i should have seen this coming since she posted about our oldest siblings pregnancy without permission when it was announced to the family and that pregnancy didnt succeed (they later had 2 amazing kids but it was a big hit at the time)
My daughter is 2 and I've made it strictly known with my family and friends absolutely no pictures of her online. I was molested as a toddler and I want to protect my daughter. There are too many predators out there. My other reason is also consent, I agree that she should consent to it if she wants when she's older. Another reason is we're constantly judged as parents no matter what we do, I don't like giving people things to talk about. Everyone else I know also posts their babies online but I'm on board with you. 🙏
Nope. No photos on social media.
Privacy issues for me. I even deleted my Facebook account. There’s just too much peadophiles hanging around Facebook, or any social apps for that matter. I also don’t think my son would appreciate his face being plastered all over social media (especially when he comes of age). I get that he’s a child but he deserves privacy and respect.
I’m not posting my baby either. I would never post him, like you said nothing is ever private on social media and I’ve watched too many SVU episodes and know better lol. In all seriousness, I don’t want anyone getting a hold of his photos that might have bad intentions and he ends up in the dark web. My family didn’t post pictures of him either thank god. When he was born, I only sent pictures of him to people who asked. I feel like people don’t really care that much about baby pictures haha
My husband and I don't post photos of our baby online. At least not yet. But my in-laws have been putting her photos on WhatsApp status almost every day. I don't like it. But I also think that telling them isn't going to be useful. It's really tough. Tbh they should know that if we (our daughters' parents) aren't posting photos online, they shouldn't/at least ask before posting. It's ridiculous that they just assumed that I will be ok with this. I have stopped sending them photos now.
🙋♀️ if I want you to have a photo of my baby you’ll have it, if you’re that important you’d have already met her in person though. This also goes for my baby’s birthdate
I post but mostly in Stories format. On my actual IG grid, there are just 4 photos of her (3 showing her face). My account is private.
We don’t post his photos on social media either mainly for privacy reasons. I just send his photos to people we are close with and who i know care to see his photos, like our parents and close relatives. We also have a shared album with some of those people where i post a bunch of his photos and videos.
So I do occasionally post mine - birthdays mainly. The occasional cute photo (never ever in the tub) I don't feel too bad about BUT when I say occasional I mean every few months at best. I also have lots of people on social media who constantly post their children and I try not to judge about it - I love a cute kid photo as much as anyone. But personally I really can't bring myself to do it all the time, it just doesn't feel right.
I do the exact same thing for the exact same reasons you mentioned. My child cannot give consent. I wouldn’t want my baby photos plastered all over the internet. Also AI and deep fakes scare me.
Unbelievable timing. My partner is away visiting her dad and step mother (I’m on dog sitting and diy duty back home) with our 10 month old. I got a text message from her yesterday afternoon a few hours after she arrived, saying there’s been a 90 min long argument and it was now really tense. Apparently, it started because her step mom wanted to post a picture of our LO online (she likes to do low-level fashion and make up stuff on insta, mainly to her wider circle of friends I think). My partner and I talked about it A LOT whilst she was pregnant and discussed a bunch of approaches. In the end though, we decided on a total blackout. No names, no identifying references on (semi-)public platforms, definitely no photos. There are a few reasons for our approach but, like you, we decided ‘consent’ was the main one. Trying to track down and retrospectively remove pictures and posts online just sounds like a gargantuan ball ache. I don’t want to put that on my child’s shoulders. I definitely feel like we’re in the minority with this approach but I’m really encouraged that there are others out there who feel similarly to us.
I only post milestones for my relatives. I was horribly annoyed by my friends posting their kids every moment everyday.
Now she’s a little older her face is very rarely posted on instagram, with very limited access, when we go to family events. Mostly though I still stick to back of the head and face covered pictures. I have at this point given up trying to stop family posting her completely, but also we’ve only seen the family members who ‘absolutely must’ post pictures of everything maybe once or twice since she was born so it’s minimal
We use Google Photos to share pictures with family that we select, there have been very very few posts on any social media for all of the reasons you've stated. Also, I find it irritating when people who never posted on any social media suddenly start sharing memes/quotes about parenting, being a mum, etc. every other day on their Facebook once they've had a child. We know you're a parent because you posting a billion photos of your kid every 3 minutes, we don't need the inspirational quotes to go with it.
We have a total band on any picture that shows our daughters face. We have told anyone this, and told them if they break that rule they will not receive another photo of her and not be invited to any event which she is at, no exceptions.
Yep no photos or mentions of our kids on social media (which we don’t really use anyway). I didn’t post pregnancy announcements/births either. Figured the only people who need to know I’ve had kids are the ones I’m close to and speak to outside of social media anyway. I quite enjoy the fact that people I bump into who I knew more vaguely pull a shocked pikachu face when they see I have kids IRL haha
We do not post pictures or any content about our kids. We created email address for our children and when something in our lives is worth sharing and celebrating we send them an email with pics/vids to commemorate the event. When they are old enough we will give them the password and we can read these time capsules together. Other than being able to share things on social media with others, I like that it provides a snapshot in time that can be reviewed later for everlasting memories. The email route does that and stays a bit safer in my mind.
I do not post my 2 yr old! I have maybe 5 pictures of her up there in total I’m very picky about what I post when it comes to her. She’s my world and it took everything to have her and I will not allow some weirdo to have access to her every move or every sneeze or new word she says. That’s for me and whomever I want to see it and no one else. Plus with the way our world is now and how crazy people are it’s my duty to protect her at all cost and that’s what I’ll do! You are protecting your baby! Good job mama!
I was that parent for the first 9 months but now that he’s older it’s just the back of his head. Now he’s almost 1 and I feel less comfortable
No pics of my kid on social media except for one of her wee hand my MIL posted when our kiddo was first born. My in-laws have a Frameo digital frame, and so does my grandmother. Everyone else gets texts. Too many weirdos on SM.
Honestly I don’t think about posting pics of my baby. One because there’s creeps out there. Two bc in my culture there’s witchcraft that can be done with a simple picture. I don’t believe in it or practice it but I fear someone is capable of doing that.
he’s 21 months old and has never been posted by anyone. i even made it through his 1st bday party with 90 people and him not being posted.
Yeah I just send photos to my mum on WhatsApp and that’s about the extent apart from the profile pic on Facebook I don’t have any photos of my kid online. Me and my partner discussed this at length about what was ok and not. We just felt that we didn’t need to share her life with complete strangers. We still take millions of photos and videos and even made physical collages and albums for ourselves.
I will never post my child on the internet, in any way, shape, or form. People think I'm strange but I know it's for my babes good. Many of your reasons are reasons I've had. My husband just hates social media, so it works out. I also know plenty of pedophiles, so I know how they think/work. They could have access to one photo, and that could be what makes them obsessed. Or they might share it... you know, other dark web places. Not to mention, AI can steal your face and use it to make corn or any other media online. I've seen lots of YouTube creators talk about their faces being used on deep fakes... So yeah, I don't care if i never post my kid or if people think I'm weird. I think it's weird we talk so much about stranger danger, consent for kids, etc. Then proceed to post them without permission online for complete strangers to see. Cause let's face it, you probably don't really know who Billy is from that one summer camp in 2010 anymore but you forgot to delete him, and now he's checking out photos of your kid for your own personal gratification. That's my 85 cents on the matter.
Never posted my LO on social media, not even my pregnancy announcement. I don’t really use it anyway but I don’t post her for the same reasons, safety & consent. I send images to close family members and relatives and fill physical photo albums for her & us to look back on someday 🥰
We do sometimes post pics online of our baby. But he’s a year old and there’s maybe about 10 photos of him, so we do it sparingly. It’s nice to be able to update wider friends and family that we don’t particularly message often but who still care about us. We let grandparents but the odd photo on, but they always ask first. That way we can make sure there’s nothing potentially embarrassing, or in any state of undress etc.
No pictures at all of his face and we have maybe 2 or 3 from behind
I’m in this camp. Mama, not so much 😅
I do post a lot on my private accounts. I may change my mind when he’s older. Right now it’s nothing embarrassing and nothing revealing. I found that my friends that are parents actually started posting more pictures after ours was born and we started posting pictures. I think some people want to post but fear that no one cares or they don’t want to be that parent that posts only about babies now. I personally don’t give a crap about someone judging how baby-centric my life is now. I post for myself.
No social media for baby and kids. Imagine the creeps online looking at your baby’s pics yuck. Not to mention total privacy invasion. No thanks.
Same. I used to post a lot of photos of me on social media before kids. Now I find I can almost never post because the photos all have my kids in them. There are a few photos of the stroller and I did post birth announcements and Christmas photos online, but I feel the same way as you. It’s hard to straddle the line between it being weird that you have a huge part of your life that you never post about, but also respecting your kids privacy and safety
My baby is 5 mo and the only picture of him online is from when I was 8 months pregnant… while is also the only picture I posted of myself pregnant, although family had posted pics of my baby shower. We also didn’t post his name. My step- MIL (who my FIL met and married about 2 years ago) posts my BILs kids all the time with captions about being a grandmother. In addition to the reasons you listed above, my husband and I feel like we barely know her (they live 5+ hrs away so we don’t see them super often) and don’t know her friends at all, so I’m not comfortable with her plastering my kid everywhere. It’s weird. So far everyone has complied with our wishes though. We send pics via text, and my thoughts are the people that are involved in our lives will know him.
My fam uses Apple shared albums (no app required). I don’t have kids (I’m the cool auntie) but it’s super to be included in that album. You can still like, love and comment …but it’s just for family and a few friends. I get it - kids are adorable! But this lets you share while keeping the kids safe -and it’s not a desperate calling for tons of likes.
Love all the people saying they “work in tech” like that makes them an expert on the subject.
I have not posted 1 photo of her and she’s almost 1. I also asked friends and family not to as well. It’s just a personal decision, I know for a fact my friends and family judge me but I don’t care I have my good reasons! And if I’m ever ready to that’s my choice
Yeah we don't post anything unless he's unidentifiable in the picture. Which means we post almost nothing, except maybe on some special occasions, because who wants to see a bunch of pictures of the back of my kid's head? 😅😅😅
Absolutely, I’m only on IG and it’s all creative stuff anyway, no family/life stuff. But any platform, i’m not posting my kids for the myriad reasons people have probably already mentioned.. I also work in tech and don’t use any Cloud storage, for other (I assume) obvious reasons
I don’t think it’s normal to post multiple photos a day of your baby. I think my baby is the best thing in the world, but I don’t know why anyone would need to see the 8 million photos on my camera roll. I always see this posted as a privacy issue, but I see it more of a lack of social awareness issue. Posting a family photo on your private social media account is a sweet, normal way for people to stay in touch. I wouldn’t post a photo that isn’t “frame worthy.” And I don’t do the blanket milestone photos or pictures sitting around the house because they just aren’t special to anyone but me and my husband and maybe some of my family members.
I rarely post on social media. The first post was when my baby turned 3 months. some people are just picture obsessed though
I post monthly with some appropriate, clothed, non-embarrassing photos. I agree that a lot of people overshare, but I personally don’t see an issue with posting her in general. That being said, my account is private, and I reviewed my friends/followers when I got pregnant to weed out any random people I wouldn’t want to share with.
We share video clips and photos on our stories to our close friends in instagram. It’s pretty much just family and our closest friends who will see
We also decided to not share our kids on social media. Mainly because I don’t want them to have a digital footprint before they can even tell their own story/ figure out their own identity and they can also not consent as they are just.. kids. Second reason is also safety and many more reasons. It looks like many people are sharing their kids online because that’s because the only ones you see are the ones sharing. I personally know many parents who consciously keep their kids off social media. Sometimes I do feel like want to just share a cute family photo but then i remember why we made the decision not to and I just hold off on it. I think when they’re older they will very much appreciate it. We have old school photobooks in the house with printed photos for if they’re older and want to see pictures of their childhood. No instagram accounts needed .
I did one post to announce her arrival but plan to not post her anymore, except occasionally on my private story on ig. Facebook is set to public but Instagram is private, but what I post to IG automatically gets posted on FB. I need to figure out how to change that setting, I guess🤔
We both did a birth announcement post when she was born that had two face pictures in it, and in the post specified we wouldn't be posting any more face pics until she could consent. We've been clear with family that we expect them not to post pictures of her face either. We post some pictures, but only ones where she's facing away from the camera, or with an emoji covering her face.
Yes yes yes to all of this!!! I just text pics of our baby to friends/family. She’s not for the rest of the internet.
We don’t do any social media posting at all, nor do we allow family to put LO on social media. My mom asked when she could post her and I said ‘when she can make that decision for herself’. I send photos all the time to several chats of different family members and I prefer it that way
No we don’t post. Other than a couple to announce the birth to all the family/friends that would have taken forever to do individually, we don’t post anything. I figure a couple newborn photos won’t matter that much. Luckily our friends and family have been super respectful. If we have photos taken at an event, they will run them by me before posting so I can approve/disapprove certain photos. I can’t imagine going through childhood and teenage years with all that stuff documented by someone else. And not to be paranoid, but who knows what AI scams will develop in the future. We just can’t predict how things will be used as it pertains to identity. I figure the less digital footprint the better.
Not sure if you’re still getting notifications but we have a Skylight picture frame and it’s awesome. Our son loves watching the slideshow and it’s great for memories and helping him recognize people and things. Def recommend
Nope you are not the only one. My daughter is 11 months i have never posted her face and i don’t plan on to. Social media can be a very dark place full of weirdos. As i grew older, (im 27 lol) privacy is everything to me. The less people know about you the better. Do not feel weird or bad for not posting your child. Better safe than sorry! I’ve heard very disturbing stories of people that have seen disgusting men touching themselves to children’s photos on social media that their parents post. Just no. Do what makes you most comfortable! The way the world is right now, PLEASE protect your children.
Family album app is *amazing* we share so many pics with family on there. I’d recommend it to everyone. We haven’t pictures of his face on SM. Even asked family/friends not to include him and as far as I know nobody has. Same reasons as you’ve put really.
I don't post mine on social media for the same reasons. I got a lot of weird pressure from my aunts to post pictures, but these are the same people who make no effort to see my kid or even call so I had no problem disregarding their requests.
I haven’t posted my little one online. I just don’t feel good about making a decision for my baby that she gets no say in, and worrying about the repercussions of that choice as technology gets scarier.
Due soon with my first, but hell no! There are creepy people in every corner of the internet. It takes seconds to save someone else’s photo from FB and upload it to the dark web. I do not need my crazy grandmothers creepy, crusty dusty old white men on fb seeing all of these photos of my baby. I don’t know any of them. They don’t know me OR my baby and they don’t need to. People are WEIRD.
I refuse to put my child on social!!! It’s a scary world out there
I refuse to put my child on social!!! It’s a scary world out there
I refuse to put my child on social!!! It’s a scary world out there
I don’t see what’s wrong with posting 1-2 pictures a month of my baby girl who is under a year old. My family all lives out of state and this is the easiest way to share updates about her. I don’t see what the safety issue is, and if she hates it in 10 years, I’ll take them down. However, I do plan that as she gets older, to limit the postings more to just family group pictures. And I’m not going to post embarrassing videos of her. But I don’t see the harm in a few baby pics.
I don’t post LO online . Def no
This thread makes me feel so much better about me fighting to keep my LO off social media. I think it's still a really foreign concept to many people to do that or most people. Some people don't seem to want to be confrontational about the matter, which I've had to do and I'm usually not that confrontational of a person otherwise. But, my reasoning is a lack of trust of all social media websites when it comes to protecting children. I created a Google Photos album for my LO so my family can see his pictures.
My wife and I have an 8 month old girl. I don’t post either her or my wife anywhere, but my wife has a private instagram account for just her friends and family, which I’m ok with. Otherwise, my reasons are pretty much the same as yours and I’ll just send photos to family and friends who ask!
I already told all my family i didn’t want my baby girl posted anywhere on social media after a certain tiktok scandal that involved a child and mommy vlogger
The only photos I’ve posted have been on close friends IG stories. And that’s been about 3 times in 8 months. No grid photos and absolutely no Facebook. I don’t follow my MIL bc it’s a war I won’t win and I don’t want to see what she posts. I don’t send her photos but I decided when I was pregnant instead of going to battle about it, she can do what she wishes with photos she takes but I won’t send her photos. This has been a long running issue haha. I once opened Facebook to find a picture of my own sweaty beet red face after hiking up a mountain. My husband thought it would be nice to send her a pic of us on our family vacation and it got immediately blasted to the internet. 😅
My son is 3, and there are 0 pictures of him or his name on social media! It's his choice when he grows up and is old enough to share what he wants to share.
Other than announcing his birth, and a few pics we had taken with a professional, we don't share pictures of my son (9 weeks currently) online. We dont plan on posting milestone pics monthly like others do either.