Posting your kids online: sharenting risks and safer habits
Sharing photos of your children is natural. Here's how to keep doing it while protecting their privacy, safety and future dignity.
- Photos you post today become part of your child's permanent digital footprint.
- Avoid posting uniforms, school names, home exteriors, bath photos and real-time locations.
- Share with a small audience: close friends lists, private family group chats, or private albums.
- Ask older children before posting about them.
Filipino families love to share: first days of school, recognition day medals, birthdays, beach trips. For families with relatives abroad, these posts keep everyone close. "Sharenting", parents sharing about their children online, is natural. It just deserves a little care.
Why it matters
- Safety. Public posts can reveal a child's school, home and routine.
- Misuse of photos. Ordinary photos of children, especially in swimwear or at bath time, can be saved and shared in harmful places, and AI tools can now alter innocent images. See deepfakes and nudify apps.
- Permanence. A funny tantrum video may embarrass a 14-year-old whose classmates find it.
- Identity theft. Full name, birthday and photos are the building blocks of fake accounts.
- Consent. Children have a growing right to decide how they appear online.
Safer habits
What to avoid posting
- School uniform, school name, ID or report cards
- The outside of your home, street signs or plate numbers
- Bath, swimming or partially dressed photos
- Full birth dates together with full names
- Where you are right now. Post after you've left.
- Medical details, behaviour struggles or discipline moments
Who sees it
- Set posts to Friends or a Close friends list, not Public.
- Review your friends list. Do you know everyone on it?
- Use a private family group chat or a shared album for everyday photos for relatives abroad.
- Ask relatives not to repost photos publicly.
How you post
- Turn off location tagging in your camera and when posting.
- Crop out identifying backgrounds.
- Use a nickname rather than full names.
- Think about the future: would your child at 16 be happy this exists?
Ask your child
From about age 7 or 8, ask before you post: "Can I share this with Tita and Lola?" It teaches consent and shows your child that their image belongs to them. If they say no, respect it, and you've taught them more about privacy than any lecture could.
Already posted a lot?
You don't have to delete everything. Spend twenty minutes going through your public posts: change the audience to Friends on anything showing your child, and delete the few that reveal school, home or very personal moments.
If a photo is misused
If you find your child's photo on a page or account you don't recognise, report it to the platform as a privacy violation or impersonation. If it's been sexualised or altered, report it as child sexual abuse material and to the CICC (1326). See how to report online child abuse and getting an intimate image removed.
eGuard sets up screen time, bedtime and app rules on your child's phone and checks that each one is really on. Free for one child.