Those are by far the easiest to stop. Or ignore.

I have no doubts that one of the plagues of the current age is sharenting: parents sharing pictures or information about their children, from the moment they are born. Without caring that those pictures and information may become, years later, “embarrassing [but] freely available to prospective homecoming dates”. Or “affect their ability to get into a good college”, because “admissions counselors review Facebook profiles and a host of other websites and networks in order to make their decisions”. Or, in the worst cases, lead to stalking, or physical abuse.

Sharenting is bad, but the biggest reasons why it is bad are very different. Fact is, the concerns above are as true as they are by far the SMALLEST of your REAL problems, if you are a parent or are becoming one.

Never mind humans. Those CAN be stopped

There are much bigger problems than other human beings analysing pictures and data of your children. It doesn’t matter if those human beings are potential dates, admissions counselors or even paedophiles. The reasons are very simple to explain.

To begin with… Yes, it is a big “if”: but if even half-decent data protection laws in place preventing all those human beings from seeing those data is extremely easy. Just make everything you post about children private.

The least you post, the more your kids will thank you later, of course. But if you really, really have to share photos of your kids through for-profit social networks, turning all the conceivable privacy settings on will go a long way to solve the dating and college problems. If nobody else posts the same pictures, of course.

Second, even with child abusers, your possibilities to stop all of them from getting a picture of your child, and abusing of that picture, are exactly the same you have to stop a mountain-sized asteroid from crashing on Earth some day: NONE.

Even if there weren’t thousands of stock photos of babies freely available online, all an abuser should do to get more is take pictures with a hidden camera. On the nearest public beach, or any other public place where you have already carried your child.

Third, even if someone did get a picture of your kid and abused of that picture… it would be 10000% wrong and disgusting. No question about this. But it is almost certain that it would have no consequence whatsoever on the wellbeing of your child, now or in the future. Just as somebody ONLY having dirty thoughts about you when they saw you on the beach, or in the subway, twenty years ago, without you noticing it at all… had no consequences over you.

So, don’t do sharenting…

but not for certain reasons. For other ones: continues here.