Posting about children online can go too far: study

While many parents get useful advice and support online about raising their children, some may be posting too much about them. Researchers at the University of Michigan conducted a survey and found concern that some parents post embarrassing moments, photos that may be perceived as inappropriate, or information that could identify a child’s location and compromise their security.

“Sometimes people feel a little bit squeamish if they feel that a family or parent has shared a little too much information about a child—maybe very personal information, the concern being how is the child going to feel about that information being shared now or in years to come if they Google themselves and they come across something maybe they wish wasn’t out there,” says Canadian Ann Douglas, author of Parenting Through the Storm.

Concern about ‘oversharenting’

While almost 70 per cent of the parents surveyed said they used social media to get advice, three-quarters of them expressed concern about “oversharenting,” the phrase coined by the researchers to describe parents putting too much about their children online.

There can be “amazing benefits” to social media, says Douglas, noting that she herself derived great comfort by sharing her experience of a stillbirth with others online. “We don’t want to throw the out the whole internet with the bathwater,” she says.

“We want to know that sharing is really helpful, that tapping into advice and that kind of thing is really helpful, but just to be conscious about what we want to share, how we want to share it, who we want to share it with and whether some conversations are best taken off line.”