Carrie, a mother of three in Northern Virginia, has an old-school mentality when it comes to sharing her family’s life on social media. She regularly posts photos and videos of her kids, ages 19, 16, and 13, on her private Instagram grid for the same benign reasons most parents start doing it: to keep family and friends in the loop and to document the passing years.
“It’s our family album,” said Carrie, who annually turns her Instagram feed into a hard-copy photo book. “If I don’t post it, it’s not in the book. And the kids love the books, by the way.” Her middle daughter, Abby, admits this is true (“More the baby books than the recent ones, though,” she said), but is fed up with the sheer volume of her mom’s content. A teacher who follows her mom once commented to Abby about a photo she’d seen. Friends and cousins have screenshotted Carrie’s posts and texted them to Abby, too. Things grew especially tense once Abby joined Instagram herself in ninth grade. “I could see everything, and I said, ‘Mom, this is crazy. You cannot be posting this much.’ I got mad.” Her biggest issue was that Carrie was posting pictures of events where she hadn’t actually been present. “I’d be at the beach with my friends or at a soccer tournament out of town, and my mom would post pictures I’d sent her. She was basically stealing my content,” said Abby.
Carrie has agreed to stop posting photos Abby texts her but isn’t pulling back completely. “I told her, ‘If I’m at the soccer game and I want to post a picture of your goal? That’s part of my story. You are under my roof, and I pay for your phone,’” she said. “’Chill out.’”
As a parent to two teenagers on the Upper West Side, one of whom got an Instagram account just two months ago, I thought Carrie’s rationale sounded reasonable enough — in theory, at least. How much harm could one moment at one soccer game cause? In all likelihood, it would quickly be forgotten by the vast majority of people who scrolled past it, Abby included. But in talking to parents of older kids navigating social media during the dawning of AI, I’ve discovered that for many, there is no longer anything “chill” about this particular pleasure of modern parenthood — one that this generation of parents happened to invent. The tweens and teens have awakened — via their own social-media accounts and warnings they’ve read about online safety and because they suddenly care deeply how their hair looks in photos — and many are not happy. Parents now face a dilemma that goes to the heart of autonomy and control and who has ownership of childhood memories.
Gwen lives in Birmingham and has a public account that she uses to promote her small business. She told me she struggles with wanting to share glimpses of her family life and knowing that people in the community whom she barely knows can see them. Her 14-year-old daughter, Hannah, particularly cringes at the photos her mom has posted in which she’s playing the trumpet. “I have this instrument against my face! I want to look confident. So now my mother will send me a few photos and I pick the best,” said Hannah, who doesn’t have her own account but says a lot of her friends follow her mom. Gwen recently went back and deleted pictures of her now-teenage sons when they were little, too. “Something I think is sweet might feel too vulnerable for them,” she said. “And we know more about their digital footprint and privacy now.”
Not all parents acquiesce this easily, though. Take Lauren, who lives in Atlanta. About a year ago, she got a pointed request from her 13-year-old, Jake. He began looking at her Instagram feed, which was public at the time, and noticed baby pictures of himself and his siblings. “I wasn’t posting pictures of him in the bathtub or anything. I might have said something like ‘Mommy’s chubby buddy’ in the caption. He wanted me to delete all of them. He threw out terminology about ‘using his likeness.’” Lauren made her account private and told her son he had to put his request in writing if he wanted her to take it seriously. (Like Carrie, Lauren sees her feed as a treasured family album.) Her son never got around to filling out the paperwork. Recently, when she followed up about it, he said, “I don’t think I cared that much. I just wanted to annoy you.” For her part, Lauren is glad she left the pictures up. Thinking about the almost-loss still makes her feel “heartbroken at the thought,” she said.
I asked Jacqueline Nesi, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University and author of the newsletter Techno Sapiens, whether getting consent from kids to put up their photos is necessary. Aren’t we just shifting a burden onto them instead of making the decision ourselves? And what does consent even mean, coming from a human being who is a decade away from having a fully formed cerebral cortex? Her answer surprised me: She said the ritual is important not because it provides safety to our children, but because it models digital-citizenship skills. “Kids may not fully understand the implications of agreeing for something to be posted, but they are seeing that we should be thoughtful about what we post and that we should always ask others for permission,” she said.
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Some parents of younger kids, whose children are definitely too young to consent, have opted not to post her kids at all. “I just don’t want to leave a trail. The digital footprint freaks me out. But I do feel like I’m in the minority,” said Elise, who has two daughters, 7 and 4, and covers her kids’ faces with heart emoji if she posts them. Even with a private account, she worries that someone could hack it and turn her child’s face into a nude photo — a concern cited by every parent I spoke to who has decided not to show their kids’ faces. Nesi said it is hard to quantify how significant this risk really is, with such a vast web of deep fakes and rapidly changing technology. A 2024 survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology found a “substantial amount” of sexually explicit deep fakes of students circulating in schools but didn’t include any hard data.
My friend Margot, who has three kids, ages 17, 14, and 11, recently deleted her Instagram account not to protect her kids or because of safety issues but because as her friends’ children grew up, her feed had grown boring. Now, she says, the algorithm mostly feeds her ads and pictures of influencers’ kids, and even the posts from people she knows tend to all look the same.
I’ve noticed this too. The teen-approved graduation/school dance/vacation/birthday posts tend to blur together. It’s not that I don’t enjoy seeing my friends’ children on their way to homecoming. I do. But very little is candid or messy or weird or funny anymore. Photos of kids are no exception to the general flattening of aesthetics happening everywhere online. Plus, sharing itself is less fun. As one friend told me about the soul-sucking process of getting permission from her two college-age daughters for that just-right shot of them in their dorm rooms or at parents’ weekend: “It’s like going to the DMV for every photo.”
While influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers are seemingly unmoved by the concerns about privacy that “regular” parents face, there are parents who fall into a more ethically-complicated gray area: They have un-monetized public accounts with a few thousand followers. Tabitha, a writer who lives in San Francisco, is one such case. She has a public account with about 8,000 followers. Before she had kids, she often posted photos and videos of her nieces. “My sister never cared. Most of my friends and family who aren’t as chronically online as I am don’t think about the downsides,” she said. But now Tabitha has her own 1-year-old — and she has started obscuring her face. “Being on Instagram is part of my job. I don’t monetize my kid, but still, there are a lot of people who follow me that I don’t know. If I had 200 followers and a private account, I might feel differently. But whatever I put out there, my daughter’s future classmates can find.”
Caroline, who is biracial and has a public account with about 6,000 followers, has two biological children and three adopted Black children. She told me she sees posting her kids as a form of public service. “I believe strongly in sharing them to disrupt the narrative of how they are often portrayed in the media, which can be negative, or how adoption is typically seen,” she said. Caroline talks to her kids, who range in age from 4 to 12, about why she shares what she does and checks in with the older ones every so often to make sure they are okay with her posts.
I thought about my own Instagram habits and how I’ve aligned with every one of these parents at some point. My now-15-year-old has a particular beef with a post on my permanent, public Instagram feed from 2022, when she was 11, with braces. I’m not taking it down, and she has largely stopped complaining. I supposed I would ask permission from either of my teens before posting now, but I’ve watched how long it takes them to edit their own personal photos, and I’m afraid I’ll be eligible for Medicare before I get the green light. Instead, I’ve mostly stopped posting my family altogether, not just due to teenage pushback but the general boredom that Margot described. It’s freeing. The most satisfying reactions to any photos I take are from the people closest to me — delight from my mom over a vacation photo, merciless mocking from one of my kids over a bad selfie — and these are readily available in my family’s group chat.
I remember a beautiful thing Elise said to me, which is surely a road map for us all: “There’s an aspect of life that no longer feels sacred. I don’t judge anyone for posting pictures of themselves in the hospital with a new baby. I wanted to. But we don’t always guard the sacred moments.”
