Sharenting - Top Tips
21st Mí na Samhna 2025
Parents often view posting and sharing important milestones in their children’s lives as a way of positively connecting with friends and family, but it’s important to remember that sharing online can never be 100% safe and carries many risks.
A good way to share updates with friends and family is by sharing through secure, private instant messaging apps. It’s also easier this way to ask your friends and family not to share photos or videos of your child on social networks without your/their consent.
If you do choose to share about your child online, the DPC suggests the following practical tips so as to limit the risks.
Limit your target audience
Before posting about your child online, it is important to make sure that you are comfortable with who will have access to this information.
Social media platforms allow you to target your content at specific audiences via the privacy settings. Here are ways in which you can limit strangers from accessing private information about your child:
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Setting your profile to “Private”
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Only sharing posts with a limited audience, e.g. creating a “close friends” list.
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Periodically reviewing your followers/friends on social media and asking yourself “Is this someone I would be comfortable sharing a photo of my child with?” If not, delete them.
Location, location
Turning off geo-location settings when posting images of your child can help minimise the amount of private information you are sharing on your social media. Even when you have disabled technical geo-location features, it is important to ensure there is no other information within the image that could pinpoint your location. Some common situations to consider include:
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If you took the photo outside your front door, is your house number visible or are there any identifiable landmarks in the background that might indicate where you live?
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If you’ve taken a photo on school grounds or at a sports club, is the school’s/club’s name visible anywhere in the background that might indicate your child’s location?
Avoid oversharing
Consider the sensitivity of the information you are posting, whether it is about your child’s health, their progress at school or a photo of them at the beach, and the risks of sharing this information with a wide (and often unknown) audience.
A good rule of thumb is – if you wouldn’t hand over a physical copy of that photo or give that piece of personal information to a complete stranger in the street, then don’t post it online.
If you do decide to post photos or videos of your child online: then consider:
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Ensuring that your child’s face is covered/hidden* or positioning them faced away from the camera
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Blurring out any other identifiable information (e.g. school crest, name of sports club)
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Not adding any unnecessary additional information in the captions or tagging your location
*Many parents opt to cover their child’s face with an emoji before posting. While this can go some way towards preserving their privacy, it can also provide parents with a false sense of security as it is not a silver bullet to keeping children, or their personal data, safe. On the one hand, placing an emoji over a child’s face in a generic setting with no other identifiable information might be sufficient. However, a photo that has a child’s face covered with an emoji, but still has a location tagged and the name of the child in the caption can still pose risks. Think critically about exactly what you are posting, and the extent of the information included.
Talk with your child
It is important to have open discussions with your child before posting information about them on social media. Remember, it’s their personal data you are sharing, not yours.
If your child is old enough to understand the implications of their information being shared online, it’s important to seek their consent before posting. By communicating with your child, you can decide together the kind of information you are both comfortable with sharing on the internet. If your child is too young to understand, put yourself in their shoes and consider whether this is something they’d be happy with you sharing if they were older.
Review your posts
It is a good idea to regularly review the posts you have shared on social media and to delete any photos, videos or information about your child that you, or they, are no longer comfortable sharing.