Why I Don’t Post Photos of My Kids on Social Media (Even With a Private Account)
The crumbs of Lila’s 7th birthday sprinkled the blue picnic blanket last month, when Sarah, the mom I carpool with, held up her phone and grinned. “Got the best shot of her covered in frosting, eyes all crinkled,” she said. “Mind if I post it to my private account? Only family and a few close friends follow me anyway.” I wiped a smudge of cupcake off my jeans and shook my head, gentle as I could. “Thanks for asking, but I don’t have any photos of my kids online anywhere. Would you mind keeping this one off too?”
She blinked, surprised. “Oh, it’s totally locked. No strangers can get to it.” I nodded. I get the question. I get the assumption that private means safe. That used to be my assumption too, back when my oldest, Sam, was 3 and I had an Instagram with 120 followers, all people I’d met in person. I posted a 15-second video of him singing off-key in the tub, rubber duck perched on his head, to my private feed. A week later, my aunt texted me saying she saw it in a public “Toddler Cuties” Facebook group my cousin had shared it to. No harm done, really. No one bothered us, it just made my skin prickle. I’d thought private meant controlled, and it turned out I’d given away all control the second I hit post. I deleted every photo of the kids that day, and I’ve never put one up since, even when people insist private is different.
A couple of years later, Lila was 5, and a cousin posted a 10-second clip of her snorting laughing at a family wedding to her private Instagram story. A friend of my cousin downloaded it and sent it to her own sister, who showed it to her kid who was in Lila’s kindergarten class. A month later, Lila came home crying because a boy in her class asked her why she laughs like a pig. She started covering her mouth when she laughs for almost a year, even after we talked about how silly that comment was and how wonderful her laugh is. That wasn’t the cousin’s fault. She didn’t mean for that to happen. But it made me see: even small, unintentional spreads can have a big impact on a kid who’s still figuring out how they want to show up in the world.
It’s not that I don’t have thousands of photos. I have a big encrypted external hard drive that I back up to a password-protected cloud service no one but me can access. Once a year, I put 50 of the best photos into a password-protected online album and send the link to grandparents and aunts and uncles who want to follow along. If I want to share a quick silly moment with my siblings, I send it in our private family group text. No algorithms, no public indexes, no accidental shares. If someone asks to post a photo at a playdate or birthday party, I just say what I said to Sarah: “I really appreciate you asking, I keep my kids off social media, would you mind holding off?” Ninety percent of the time, people say no problem, I get it. The other ten percent are surprised, but they agree. I don’t argue, I don’t judge them for posting their own kids. That’s their choice, this is mine.
What I’ve learned as a parent, watching my kids grow into their own people, is that posting photos of kids from birth onward builds a digital history they never got to agree to. By the time a kid is old enough to want their own social media account, there are already hundreds of photos of them online, from their first diaper change to their most embarrassing middle school meltdown, all out there for anyone to find. Kids are still working on their sense of autonomy, on understanding that their body and their image belongs to them. When we post their photos without asking, even to a private account, we send a quiet message that their right to privacy matters less than our desire to share our joy as parents.
Sam is 10 now, and last month he brought home a giant crayon drawing of our dog for art class. He asked me if I was going to “put it on the internet” like his friend’s mom does with his art. I told him no, that this drawing was his, and if he ever wants to share it with anyone when he’s older, that’s his call. He smiled and said good, because he didn’t want random people seeing it. A few weeks before that, he told me about a kid in his class whose mom posted a photo of him having a full-on meltdown over a bad test in third grade. The kid still gets teased about it at recess, two years later. Sam said he’d hate if that happened to him.
I know the argument: my account is private, I only let people I follow see it. But how many people do you have on your private account? 100? 200? Every single one of those people has their own phone, their own ability to screenshot, to save, to share. Even if everyone you know is careful, the social media platform itself still stores your photos, even after you delete them. There’s no such thing as totally private once you hit post.
This works for us right now. I don’t know what the future will hold. When Sam and Lila are teenagers, they might want to post their own photos, start their own accounts, share their own moments. That’s their choice, and I’ll support them then. Right now, while they’re too little to fully understand what it means to have your image shared across the internet, my job is to hold that space for them. It’s not about being paranoid, it’s not about judging anyone else. It’s just about giving them control of their own story, before anyone else gets to write the first chapter.
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