Why I Don’t Post Photos of My Kids on Social Media (Even With a Private Account)
The chocolate birthday cake was oozing frosting, my 4-year-old had smudged blue icing all the way up her forearm, and my sister held up her cracked iPhone to snap a photo of the two kids leaning in to blow out candles. “Going to post this to my private Stories, cool?” she asked, stepping back to frame the shot. The dog was busy stealing a stray cupcake off the coffee table behind me, so I wiped frosting off my jeans and shook my head, laughing. “Nah, you know I don’t do that. Send me the photo, though, I’ll add it to the album for grandma.”
She didn’t push it, which is good, but I get the question all the time. If your account is private, what’s the big deal? It’s just a few photos of your kids, only people you know can see them. I used to think that too, until last fall’s parent-teacher conference with my oldest, when I learned exactly how private a private account really isn’t.
I sat in one of those tiny plastic kid chairs that crunches your lower back, and his teacher pulled me aside after we’d gone over his reading levels. She said she wanted to talk about something small that upset him on the playground earlier that week. A couple of kids had been teasing him about wetting his pants when he was 3. I stood there blinking, because we’d been past that milestone for four years, I hadn’t mentioned that accident to anyone outside our family in ages. I couldn’t figure out where a group of 7-year-olds would have even heard about it.
It took me two days of digging to trace it back. We’d been at my cousin’s lake cabin the summer it happened, my cousin snapped a photo of him red-faced and crying, hiding behind a lawn chair after the accident, posted it to her private Facebook with a joke caption. I laughed at it at the time, didn’t think twice. She has 180 followers on that account, most of them people from our hometown. One of those followers is a mom whose kid is in my son’s class. She saw the photo, recognized my son’s name, mentioned it to her kid, and that’s how it ended up on the playground.
That incident is why I deleted my own social media accounts that had photos of the kids, and why I don’t post any new ones, even to locked, private profiles. It’s not that I think people who post are bad parents, I get it: when your kid takes their first step or scores their first soccer goal, you want to share that joy with people who live far away. I’ve been there. But that week in the fall, when my son came home from school crying and asking why everyone knew something that embarrassed him from when he was little, it clicked that private doesn’t mean private.
Most of us approve follow requests from people we barely know: the mom from the playgroup we attended once, our old coworker we haven’t spoken to in five years, our cousin’s new partner we met once at a barbecue. Even if you only let people you trust follow you, anyone can take a screenshot, anyone can forward a photo to anyone else. There’s no lock that keeps it contained to the people you meant to see it.
Working in after-school care for five years before I had kids, I saw over and over how hard it is for kids to shake the labels people get from small, embarrassing moments from when they were little. It’s one thing for your grandma to have a cringey old photo in a physical album on her shelf. It’s another thing for that photo to be floating around where your classmates can pull it up, years after you’ve grown past that moment. When my kids are little, they can’t consent to having their most embarrassing, vulnerable, or silly moments shared with a hundred other people online. That consent isn’t something I can assume just because I’m their parent. It’s their face, their story, their identity to build as they get older. I don’t get to stake a claim to that before they can decide what they want shared.
People always ask what I do instead, since my parents live across the country and want to see new photos of the kids. It’s simple: I have an invite-only Google Photos album. Only my parents, my sister, and my in-laws have access. Once a month, after the kids go to bed, I spend 10 minutes adding 10 to 15 new photos. I started asking my 7-year-old now, before I add any photo of him, if it’s okay to put it in the album for grandma. Most of the time he says yes, but last month he said no to the photo of him crying after he fell off his bike, so I left it out. It’s a small habit that gets him used to having a say over his own image early.
When other people take photos of my kids and ask if they can post them, I have a go-to line that doesn’t start a fight: “We keep our kids off social media, but I’d love a copy of that photo for our family album!” No one has ever given me a hard time about it, and it sets a clear boundary without shaming anyone else’s choice.
I don’t know if this choice will matter in 10 years. I don’t know what will happen with all our data, or if my kids will even care that I kept their photos off the internet when they’re teenagers. They might even decide they want to post their own photos when they’re older, and that’s fine—that’s their call. Right now, this is the smallest, easiest thing I can do to hold that boundary for them until they’re old enough to make that choice themselves. All our messy, funny, cringey, happy photos are still here, stored on my external hard drive, waiting for them to decide what to do with them whenever they’re ready. For now, that’s enough.
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