Why We Removed All Traces Of Our Child’s Face And Name Online
Early yesterday morning, I started drafting the first post in this mini-series for the fifth or sixth time. Each time, I have what feels like a little vent, then I close the tab and forget about it for a few more months, anxious that I’ll offend fellow parenting bloggers - including my own friends. I feel worried they’ll take it personally, when really my words are directed at my new-mama 2018 self - and any other parent who shares her view - including but not limited to the following beliefs:
My child is an extension of me.
I love my child and want to protect them.
I’d never do anything to harm my child.
I want to share the exciting journey of motherhood, learning to parent sustainably.
When my child is old enough to say they don’t want their photo taken, of course I’ll respect that.
Why wouldn’t I share innocent photos of my child wearing cloth nappies? Cloth nappies are great for the planet.
I’m sure you can see that the above points come from a place of love. You might also be able to see that they come from a place lacking thorough consideration of child privacy, and what it means for a child to ‘be online’.
On top of this, here are a few mild opinions I had on parents who would hide their kids’ faces in photos, or not mention their child’s name:
It’s annoying seeing an emoji on top of a child’s face. Just upload it as is. What’s the problem?
It feels a bit self-absorbed to not mention your child’s real name. They’re not special. It’s just a name, like any other kid’s.
Sharing Our Newborn
When our daughter was born, I posted the usual Instagram announcement: our adorable potato swaddled, her grey eyes looking into the distance, with her first and middle name, the day she was born, and her birth weight. I tagged the brand we bought the swaddle cloth from, in case anyone liked it and wanted to check them out.
Over the next three days or so, I posted snippets of our girl on Stories. One evening, after posting a close-up of her little spud face, I received a message from a stranger with a link to an article on the dangers of sharing children’s faces online. I said thanks and had a good read. It wasn’t a very specific or scary article, but mentioned children’s privacy. It sowed seeds for me, although I felt a little intruded upon that a stranger was judging my parenting so soon. I wish I could find and thank that person again now.
The Reward Centre
Over the following 5 months, I posted a handful of photos where our daughter’s face was clearly visible. Every single time, the posts got a lot more likes and comments about how cute she was - so lovely for a mother to hear, rewarding me for sharing our family life. It reinforced that this was the way to go, helping me to connect to this special community of mums online - especially as I was at a stage where I’d started posting paid partnerships on my Instagram page. Ding! The reward centre of my brain was activated every time I posted my child’s likeness.
My husband, however, felt increasingly uncomfortable with me posting photos of our child. He changed his profile to private and deleted anyone he wasn’t close with, so that he could share a single picture of her. He asked me to delete a couple of photos, and requested that I check with him before uploading anything where our daughter’s face was in shot.
Setting A Boundary
Around 6 months in, we decided to stop posting her face entirely, as it was a clear boundary we could set that we didn’t need to question. An Instagram friend had stopped sharing photos of her lovely daughter, and we were discussing the issue via DM. She told me she had learned about the kind of images p**dophiles often use: close-ups of faces with other bodies photoshopped on; anything with a child looking directly into the camera; children looking up from a lower angle. I’ve not thought that much about what she said from that moment until now, but writing it out makes my stomach knot up.
It became clear that nobody out there needed to know what our daughter looked like. Not immediately, but over time, my old views turned into something like this:
My child is an extension of me.
My child is her own person, even though she can’t really think for herself right now. She’s a young version of her adult self, and deserves to be treated as such.
I love my child and want to protect them.
I love my child and want to protect them.
I’d never do anything to harm my child.
I’d never do anything to harm my child.
I want to share the exciting journey of motherhood, learning to parent sustainably.
I can share the journey of motherhood, including sustainable parenting, without sharing photos that make my child identifiable.
When my child is old enough to say they don’t want their photo taken, of course I’ll respect that.
I will not post any photos of my child publicly until they are able to truly understand what it means to be online - including having an understanding of the issue that no parent wants to think about: p**dophilia, and of how an online identity can have an effect on one’s professional life. I’m guessing a person needs to be at least 16 years old before they really understand this, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Why wouldn’t I share innocent photos of my child wearing cloth nappies? Cloth nappies are great for the planet.
I can share a photo of cloth nappies without my child modelling them. It won’t get as many likes or comments, but I can relax in the knowledge that it won’t be shared on any horrible websites or Instagram pages that repost pictures of half-n*ked kids.
What About Their Name?
A few months later, I realised that I have a duty as a parent to ensure that sensitive information about my child won’t show up on Google if anyone searches her name. Really, there should be nothing about her until she starts creating her own online identity.
No stranger to our family should recognise my child in the street - for example, if she was out in the park with her grandmother - and certainly nobody should be able to put a name to her face. This falls more into Part (2), which I’ll elaborate on at a later date.
John Smith
When we’re talking about sharing a child’s life online as an extension of “mummy blogging”, we’re talking about the following scenario being possible:
John Smith opens an Instagram account for a skincare brand, posting a few pictures and captions taken from another skincare brand’s page. Follows a ton of people, gets some followers back. Looks like a small startup.
John Smith contacts Mummy Blogger under Skincare Brand’s name, asking if Mummy Blogger wants some samples for a post on Instagram Stories.
Mummy Blogger agrees, and sends over her mailing address, phone number, and email address to John Smith, AKA Skincare Brand.
John Smith makes a note of where Mummy Blogger goes every Friday morning for her coffee while Baby plays: Creche at Winchester Church Hall.
John Smith gets Karen Smith to call up Creche, explaining that Auntie Karen is picking up Baby early today due to a family emergency. Karen gives the Creche Supervisor Baby’s full name, parents’ names, date of birth, home address, and even allergies. Creche Supervisor is satisfied that Karen is family.
I know that seems quite far-fetched, but you can see the danger, right? Even without the Creche scenario, John Smith knows where Mummy and Baby live, and what they’re up to day-to-day. When Baby is a bit older, John Smith could easily convince them in the street or playground that he’s a family friend, based on the intimate knowledge he has of the family and Baby herself.
In my opinion, this is nothing less than f***ed. We need to protect our kids. Yes, we can blame Instagram for not having the technology to recognise when kids’ photos are being reuploaded by dangerous websites, but we also need to navigate this with more common sense than we’re currently exercising.
So, back to my original view that hiding a child’s face is annoying and a bit self-absorbed.
It’s not that I hide my child’s face and name because I think she’s special. It’s because I know she is *not* special. To anyone but me, at least. She’s just another face.
A Rights Issue
This is a rights issue that I believe intersects with many others, but, because social media is a relatively new sphere, it has so far gained barely any exposure. I saw a post by Glamour today, highlighting how p**dophiles are stealing and reposting images on p**dophilia websites, which has prompted me to finally post some of my own thoughts on this issue.
The article mentions that mummy bloggers feel “helpless” and that “this is not just a parent responsibility” - but, if we’re really worried about children’s images being used inappropriately, we can at least take the basic precaution to be responsible parents and help by not uploading pictures that p**dophiles could use in the first place. It’s a sad workaround - in an ideal world we could upload to our hearts’ content - but it works. We need to sacrifice the likes and comments for our children’s safety. Additionally, we need to support parenting bloggers who respect their children’s privacy by engaging with their posts just as actively as we would with a picture of a cute child. Help protective parenting bloggers become better-known than those using their children for ads and brand collaborations. Stop engaging with posts that use children as a prop.
I hope this hasn’t come across as too judgemental. I’m still coming across old posts and photos that I need to remove. This is coming from a place of love for parents and their children, and it’s what I wish I read when I was expecting my first child.
It would mean a lot to me if you were to keep this brain-dump in mind - whether you’re a parent, hope to be a parent one day, or if you have friends who are expecting their first child, and maybe this is a topic you can bring up to sow the same seeds that stranger did when replying to my Story in 2018.
Thank you for reading.
Serena Lee
P.S. There are also the very important issues of children's rights/consent, and security e.g. identity theft. I couldn't cover them all in one post, so here's the most emotive one for now, at least! I'm hoping one day, when the little one finally lets me have 5+ hours' sleep each night, I'll get onto the subsequent posts.
