WHY I STOPPED posting pics of my daughter online

Elaine Kasket's daughter wasn't very happy with her ‘sharenting’

- ELAINE KASKET METRO

I didn’t like you posting funny conversations on Facebook,’ my then nine-year-old said over a pub lunch five years ago. I shifted uneasily in my seat. Over the years, I’d become vaguely aware of the increasing clues that she was uncomfortable with the photos, anecdotes and family dialogues that I routinely posted on social media. I’d shrugged it off and carried on anyway.

‘So if a parent’s shared things in the past…’ I said, ‘what should happen to those posts?’ She smiled wryly, suspecting I wasn’t going to like what came next. ‘They should be deleted immediately,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘And the parents should be put on the naughty step.’

I felt sick. Was it the guilt of knowing that I belonged on the naughty step? The pain of deleting a carefully curated archive of a decade of family life? Or the weirdly frightening prospect of never sharenting again?

For those who don’t know, sharenting is a fusion of ‘sharing’ and ‘parenting’ – it’s the digital-age practice of parents and carers posting children’s information online. A minority of sharenters are pros – the mummy bloggers, Insta-families, and parent influencers who post for profit. The rest are amateurs, who for various reasons just want to share their family life.

I was in the latter category from the moment when I shared my daughter’s sonogram with Facebook friends in 2009. Her arrival coincided with the birth of my sharenting habit.

Social bonding

The more verbal, sweet and hilarious she became, the more I posted. The more I posted, the more likes I got. If someone wrote to say my daughter had made their day, it made my day.