Sharenting: Should You Post Photos of Your Child?

The school-gate photo gets posted to the family group chat, then to Instagram, then to Facebook with a wider audience — first day of reception, in uniform, school name visible on the jumper.

That child is four. By the time they are fourteen, they cannot easily delete any of it.

This guide is about the choice in front of you, not the guilt. UK law gives your child rights over that image, and those rights strengthen as they get older. Nobody enforces them on your behalf while you are the one posting. So the decision is yours, and it deserves more than a default setting.

What "sharenting" actually means

A portmanteau of "sharing" and "parenting". The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as sharing news, images or videos of your children on social media. It covers the private WhatsApp group and the public TikTok alike.

The volume is well documented. Research cited by the UK regulator Ofcom suggests the average parent shares more than 70 photos and around 29 videos of their children each year. A survey quoted in the same work found 41% of parents report engaging in sharenting.

Multiply that across childhood. The Children's Commissioner has previously estimated that the average young person will appear in roughly 70,000 posts about them online before turning 18. Treat that figure as an illustration rather than a precise count — but the order of magnitude is not in dispute.

Why it is not simply a harmless choice

Three distinct harms, and they are worth separating because each needs a different answer.

Identity and fraud risk. Information about children — full name, date of birth, school, address, pet's name — is exactly the material used to answer security questions. A provider-level warning that "sharented" data can feed identity fraud has been widely reported in the UK. A birth announcement with a full date, full name and mother's maiden name is a strong starter kit for an impersonation attempt fifteen years later.

Image misuse. A photo posted publicly can be saved by anyone, copied to other platforms, and in the worst cases used for sexualised imagery. This is rare relative to the total volume of photos online, but the consequences are severe and the removal work falls to you, not the platform.

Loss of control — the part that matters most. This is the one parents most often miss, because it does not feel like harm today. Your child has no say in a digital identity that was created before they could speak. Embarrassing bath photos, medical posts, struggles at school — these become part of a record they carry into adult life, into first jobs, into relationships. The photo is permanent even when the audience was small.

What UK law says

This is where the UK guidance is often vague, so here is the honest position.

UK GDPR includes photographs. A photograph of an identifiable person is personal data. Where the person is a child, their data carries additional protection.

But the household exemption is real. UK GDPR does not apply to processing by an individual in the course of purely personal or household activity. A photo in a family group chat is not a data protection matter. Posting to a public account with thousands of followers is a much thinner claim to that exemption, though there is still no regulator actively policing parents' social feeds.

The rights belong to your child. They have a right of access to their own data, and a right to erasure, under UK GDPR. When they reach the age at which they can exercise those rights independently, they can ask for content to be removed. Whether a parent must comply is legally murky; morally it is not.

Platform terms, not law, do most of the work. Most major platforms set 13 as the minimum age for an account. A parent opening and running an account on a child's behalf, or posting about them, sits in a grey area that the platforms themselves have not settled.

The regulatory direction is towards stricter protection. The ICO's Children's Code (the Age Appropriate Design Code) applies to online services likely to be accessed by children and requires privacy protections by default. The Online Safety Act adds duties on platforms regarding children's safety. Neither directly governs your Instagram account — but the direction of travel is clear, and the assumption that children's data deserves extra protection is now a settled regulatory principle in the UK.

Some countries, including France and Italy, have moved towards stronger legal protections around children's image rights. The UK has not followed. Do not assume the position is fixed.

The questions worth asking before you post

Not a checklist to satisfy — a filter to run a photo through.

1. Will this still be fine when they are 16? If the answer is uncertain, do not post.
2. Would I post this about an adult without asking? If not, why is it acceptable for a child who cannot object?
3. What does the image actually reveal? School badge, street sign, house number, a medical wristband, a club logo. Locations are usually given away by the background, not the caption.
4. What does the caption add? Full name, date of birth, school, a diagnosis, a behaviour. The text is often more revealing than the picture.
5. Who can see it, really? "Friends only" includes every person you accepted in 2011.
6. Am I posting for them or for me? Both are legitimate. Only one of them is their interest.

Practical steps that reduce the risk

Strip location metadata before uploading. Most phones embed GPS coordinates in photo files. Turn off location access for the camera app, or strip the metadata before posting. Screenshotting the image also removes most embedded data.

Turn on the strictest audience setting you can live with. If a post does not need to be public, do not make it public. On Instagram and Facebook this means reviewing who follows you, not just what you post.

Never post full-face, full-name and full-DOB together. Any two are usually tolerable. All three is an identity packet.

Avoid identifiable school uniform and badges. The single most common leak in UK parenting posts.

Do not build a public account for a child. Accounts run "by" a parent on a child's behalf accumulate an audience the child did not choose and cannot easily step out of later.

Agree a family rule and revisit it yearly. The rule for a five-year-old is not the rule for an eleven-year-old. Ask them. Their answer is the one that counts, and it counts more each year.

Ask before posting other people's children. Other parents have their own boundaries and you are not obliged to guess them.

If images have already been shared and misused

If a sexualised or intimate image of someone under 18 has been shared, do not save, forward or re-share it — doing so can itself be an offence. Report it instead.

• Internet Watch Foundation — iwf.org.uk/report — for child sexual abuse imagery hosted anywhere.
• Report Remove (Childline and IWF) — for a young person to get an intimate image removed from the internet. Access via Childline.
• CEOP — ceop.police.uk — for reports of online grooming or sexual communication with a child.
• Take It Down — takeitdown.ncmec.org — a free service that helps remove or stop the spread of nude or partially nude images of people under 18, without requiring the image to be uploaded.

For non-sexual content you want taken down — an old photo, an account, a post made by someone else — use the platform's own reporting tools first. If it is a search result, the delisting routes in our guide to removing your personal data from the internet apply equally to a child's image.

If you want the wider picture

The most comprehensive public guide to sharenting that prompted this article is the CyberGhost Privacy Hub guide to sharenting. It covers the international context, the psychology of why we share, and some tools for blurring faces and stripping metadata. It is produced by a commercial VPN provider, so read the advice and skip the product recommendations — the substance is still useful.

The short version

You are not doing something wrong by posting photos of your child. You are making a permanent decision on behalf of someone who cannot yet consent to it.

Make it deliberately. Post less than feels natural. Ask earlier than feels necessary. And when your child tells you to take something down, take it down without arguing — that is the moment the whole principle becomes real.