Posting pictures of your kids on Facebook? Think twice.

Do you need to post pictures of your kids online?

You might think it’s cute to snap a photo of your toddler running around in a playground or having a temper tantrum, and then posting it on social media.

But did you ever think it might be a mistake, or even illegal?

The French government earlier this year warned parents to stop posting images of their children on social media networks.

Under France’s rigorous privacy laws, parents could face penalties of up to a year in prison and a fine of €45,000 ($46,456) if convicted of publicising intimate details of their children without their consent.

This new legality is powerful food for thought for parenting in the Facebook era.

As adults, we often express dissatisfaction at the ways young people post their lives online. But if we turn the mirror on ourselves, do we as parents actually have the right to make our family photos public? If so, which ones?

Sharing pictures

Part of the issue is our tendency for over-sharing. A recent study by Nominet, which handles the UK’s .uk domain name registry, found that parents post nearly 200 photos of their under fives online every year.

This means that a child will feature in around 1,000 online photos before their fifth birthday. We’ve even got to the point where if you don’t upload photos of your baby, others question whether you are a committed parent.

This new norm means that many children will have a powerful digital identity created by someone else. This process can be likened to the manufacturing of celebrity identities, where parents can potentially shape the public persona of their child in any way they want: Child genius, disobedient, fashionista, fussy eater and so on.

How do you think your own mum or dad might shape your online identity? Do you think it would be an accurate portrayal of who you are? There is also the issue of Likes and comments on those photos. Without realising it, are we choosing to upload posts about our kids that we hope will get the most audience attention? If so, how is this skewing the identity we are shaping for them?

The web never forgets

We often tell our kids that once something is on the internet it is there forever, and this is a core concern for kids. Research shows that parents often…

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