Why I Don’t Post Photos of My Kids on Social Media (Even With a Private Account)
Last Saturday, I was leaning against a playground fence by the downtown library sipping lukewarm iced coffee, watching my 5-year-old chase a squirrel through wood chips and my 8-year-old hang upside down from the monkey bars, when my friend pulled out her phone. “That’s such a cute shot,” she said, grinning. “Mind if I post it to my private mom group story? Only people from our neighborhood see it.” I shook my head and said no, gently, and she blinked a little, like that wasn’t the answer she expected. “It’s totally private,” she said. “What’s the harm?”
I was 12 when I found out the hard way what “totally private” actually means. After my first middle school soccer tournament, I’d missed the winning penalty kick and was curled up on the bleachers sobbing. My mom took a photo and posted it to her private Facebook—only 120 friends, all people she’d known for years. She captioned it “My tough little loser, I love you anyway” as a joke. One of my classmates’ moms was on her friends list, screenshotted it, and sent it to a group chat full of 7th graders. It got passed around my entire grade for months. I still remember hiding in the bathroom during lunch to avoid people making crying faces at me. I never told my mom how much it hurt, not until years later, but that memory stuck with me. When I had my first kid, I knew I didn’t want that for them.
A couple months ago, my 8-year-old came home from a birthday party red-eyed and quiet. A girl in her class pulled up her mom’s private Instagram to show off a new hair clip, and there it was: a photo of my daughter from three years prior, having a full meltdown at that same birthday party because her cupcake had fallen on the ground. The mom had posted it with a caption about toddler tantrums and tagged me, even though I’d never asked. My daughter begged me to get it taken down. When I messaged the mom, she wrote back that it was just her private account, I was overreacting. But by then, three other kids in the class had already seen it and saved it to their phones. You can’t un-share something once it’s out there, no matter how locked your account is.
I get the urge to share, honestly. I have a whole folder of blurry photos of my kids covered in cake, holding misshapen first art projects, sleeping crooked in car seats. I’m proud of them. I want to show off their first kindergarten graduation photo to my grandma who lives 2,000 miles away. The difference is, I don’t need to post it to a social media account to do that. I keep all our photos in a password-protected folder on my computer that only my husband and I can access. I add new photos once a month, and send a direct link to just our immediate family—anyone who wants an update can ask, and I send it straight to their text or email. I print hard copies of the big milestone photos for my mom and mother-in-law, who tape them to their fridges next to grocery lists and drawing. It takes five extra minutes, and it’s just as effective as posting, without putting my kids’ images out where I can’t control them.
The biggest thing I’ve learned as a parent is that kids own their own image and digital identity long before they can open a social media account. By age 5, most kids have a strong sense of what embarrasses them, what they want kept private, but they can’t stop you or anyone else from posting their photo. By the time they’re old enough to tell you they don’t want those photos online, half of them are already out there, stored on other people’s phones and hard drives. I don’t ask my 5-year-old for permission to post every cute photo, because he doesn’t understand what “posting to a private account” actually means. That’s my job as his parent: to protect his ability to choose until he’s old enough to make that call himself.
When people ask me if they can post a photo of my kid, I just say, “Thanks for asking! I don’t share my kids online, so I’d prefer you didn’t post this one.” It’s short, it’s polite, and 9 times out of 10, people just say okay and move on. I don’t shame other parents who choose to post, even on private accounts. It’s not my place to tell anyone else how to parent their kids. This is just the rule I set for mine, after seeing how even a “harmless” private post can hurt.
Last week, my 8-year-old asked if she could post a TikTok of herself doing a back handspring, since all her friends have accounts. We talked it over, and we told her she can have her own account when she’s 13, and we can revisit the question of posting photos then. She’s not happy about it right now, and that’s okay. I don’t know if this rule will stay the same forever. Maybe when my kids are teens, they’ll want to build their own online presence, and I’ll step back and let them make their own choices. Right now, though, this works. It errs on the side of keeping their choices in their hands, not mine. And that’s enough for me.
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