How can I share photos of my kids online?
Caught between the impulse to share my kids’ lives with loved ones and the desire to respect their privacy.
My family and I had an adventure this summer: we spent nearly two months in Europe, visiting family and friends. It wasn’t as adventurous as it sounds: we have two toddlers, which is exciting enough in and of itself! Our lovely friends hosted us in Germany, so we were able to get into a routine. But still, regardless of our daily routine, we were in a new environment full of exciting things like public transport and mall robots that deliver your ice cream! We were walking distance to the Kiel Canal, where we watched ships big and small float by. It was a whole new world for our boys, and they had so much fun soaking it all in.
If you’ve checked my Instagram or Facebook page recently, you might not even know that we’ve been abroad. You won’t see smiling photos of the boys by the canal, or videos of Norbert blowing out his birthday cake surrounded by our family. In fact, scrolling through my photos, you may not even be aware that I’m a mom of two. This essential part of my life is not represented online, and that has been a conscious choice on my part.
Since having kids, I have often wrestled with this question: how do I share photos and videos of my babies with friends and family in a way that feels safe and aligns with my values?
I used to lead quite the nomadic, adventurous life. Back in those days, I wouldn’t think twice about posting a photo to social media from a far-flung place. For me, it was a way to document my experiences and also share it with others. Keeping blogs and using social media, my friends and family were able to keep up with me as I traveled all over the globe.
But now that I have two young children, that doesn’t seem so easy anymore. Since they were born, I have been strict about not posting photos of them on any social media accounts (and I have asked others to refrain, as well). We recently did a family photo shoot, and I chose to pay the extra privacy fee to ensure that our photos would not be used on the photographer’s social media pages.
I’ve seen some of my friends start out this way when the kids are babies and then loosen their stance as the kids get older. I can understand the impulse to start sharing more as our babies grow into precocious and hilarious toddlers, inquisitive about the world and having their own adventures.
Our children are a huge part of our lives – if we maintain a social media presence for ourselves, how can we possibly exclude our children from it?
If you know me, you know that I’m a mega Beyonce fan. Over the years, I’ve observed the way she’s engaged with social media and how she’s navigated the questions around kids and privacy. Bey was notoriously private about her baby Blue Ivy. While she shared one photo of her newborn with the public, she didn’t post pictures of her daughter on social media, or if she did, she was strategic about them. When Blue Ivy was nearly two, Bey shared the photo above with social media – her baby daughter hidden by a cowboy hat.
As of yet, she hasn’t publicly shared photos of her twins (besides the most amazing mama & baby photo shoot in the history of forever), but she will post photos like this one taken in March 2021, of her and her son at the beach. Her son is facing the ocean and away from the camera, his little boy face hidden from view.
Now, I don’t have millions of followers waiting on edge for me to post pictures of my beautiful children. But still, when it comes to sharing photos of my children on social media, I’ve taken my cues from Beyonce. The few photos I have shared have usually hid their faces. While I have been cautious, other people in our lives are less so. My mother has posted countless photos of her grandbabies “accidentally” on social media🤦♀️, but she has been gracious when I ask her to remove them.
Call me overly cautious.
I want to protect my babies’ privacy. I am scared of what will become of their image and their personal identity if I share it online. Will their identity be stolen? I never wanted to post their full name or birthday online, for fear of what could happen if it falls into the wrong hands. Making my social media accounts private doesn’t necessarily solve the issue for me, unless I scrub my accounts to rid them of the hundreds of people who follow me that I don’t personally know.
To get around this, several of my friends have created private Instagram accounts to share photos of their kids, only sharing these accounts with friends and family. While I enjoy checking in from time to time and seeing the photos and videos that they share, I don’t think that this would be a good solution for me. I try (try being the operative word) to keep my own social media use to a minimum, and I know that if I started an Instagram account for sharing photos of the kids, this would keep me needlessly addicted to the app.
I have written before about my love-hate relationship with WhatsApp—it’s my Achilles heel, the one app that keeps me beholden to my smartphone. I’m on that app all day, chatting with far-flung friends and family, making dinner plans with my husband, checking in on the au pair and the kids. Group chats have been a lifeline during the pandemic and my postpartum experiences. Navigating motherhood with other mamas has been crucial to my sanity.
About a year ago, I created a WhatsApp group to share photos of the kids with people that I loosely dubbed “the grandmas.” WhatsApp has a setting where only the group admins (in this case, my husband and I) can post in the group chat. This cuts down on what can often be overwhelming group chat chatter, especially in larger groups. Since then, the group has ballooned to 70 people – friends and family all over the world. I have used it to post regular life updates and also missives from our travels.
But now that the group has gotten so big, I feel self-conscious about the pictures and videos that I’m posting. Unlike with Instagram, anything I post to the WhatsApp group is automatically downloaded onto people’s phones – the one major downside. I don’t want to clog up people’s precious phone memory with videos of my silly kiddos! And yet, the purpose of the group is to share these sweet moments of my kids’ lives with our loved ones who live far away.
I don’t know what the solution is. I know there are lots of photo apps geared at parents for this very purpose, but I dislike the idea of asking people to engage with yet another app. At least, WhatsApp is an app that mostly everyone already uses. Also, I’m a writer and I like writing narratives to go along with the photos. Basically, I want to blog about my kid’s lives – but not have it be available publicly.
Instagram would be an easy alternative; most of the people I know are on there. I could make the account private and trust that Instagram will respect that choice (lol). WhatsApp feels safer to me somehow because I’m sharing it directly with my loved ones, rather than posting it on a platform. But how different is it in the end? Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – is there really a differentiation between these apps and their relationship to user privacy?
Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe it doesn’t have to be so complicated. If you have any suggestions or advice, please share in the comments! I am open to any and all recommendations.
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We use and love Family Album!
So many good points. I admit that when the kids were babies and we were all less cautious (14 years ago) I shared EVERYTHING online. Now on my IG I've tried to avoid showing my kids' faces without their permission (they are 12 and 14 now). The really sticky thing is using their names in my writing. Like right now, I'm working on a camping memoir and the story is so much less authentic and relatable if I don't use their names. (I do avoid it on the blog/Substack.) But I'm also trying to focus on it being my story, not theirs, although they play a role in it 🤷🏼♀️