There’s a box of old photos of me next to my desk. A handful are sweet, but mostly I have a face only a mother could love: baleful, bejowled baby; beret-wearing, simpering tween; thunderously embarrassed teenager in terrible glasses. They are safely analogue, but would that easily mortified 14-year-old have liked her GCSE geography class to have had access to a picture of her seven-year-old self doing a headstand wearing only a pair of red hot pants?
I’m wondering because a proposed new French law would enshrine the protection of children’s privacy on social media as a parental duty. If parents disagree about what can be shared online, a judge could prevent them from posting without the other’s consent and, in extreme cases where a child’s dignity is seriously affected, could even appoint a third party (such as another family member or social worker) to act on the child’s behalf in relation to images online.
The bill raises awareness of the ways you lose control of pictures posted online – basic stuff that children are taught in primary school now, but many parents still need to learn. It also gives scope to curb the trend for vaguely sadistic, humiliating content: scaring or upsetting small children for likes and laughs is a TikTok thing, grimly.
It makes me uncomfortable. Not because I think it’s wrong in a way that I could explain in 12 elegant paragraphs like a baccalaureate philosophy exam candidate, but because I think it’s probably right, and it’s making me confront whether I have been wrong over the years.
My sons are adults now and I never smeared them in Nutella or dressed up to scare them; the sight of me sleepless at 6am was terrifying enough. But I used to have a blog and put them on it, often. It was just stuff they said or did and the odd picture, nothing too obviously humiliating, but with 2023 hindsight, there were probably things I’d now keep to myself.
I know, because my online behaviour around them has evolved. The last time I posted a pic of my sons was two years ago: a crappy shot of the three of us posing at Halloween (I do not have a well-trained Instagram husband). I scrolled right back for curiosity: in 2013, when I started my Instagram account, I posted 20 photos of them; it peaked at 32 in 2014, then fell off dramatically. I’ve posted three or fewer pics a year since 2017.
There are lots of factors at play. I post less generally, and they got older: sharing pictures of teenagers with their own social media accounts feels very different from posting a shot of your four-year-old’s first day at school. But digital mores have evolved, too: many friends don’t put their kids online at all now, or only with faces obscured with cute graphics. We teach children they have autonomy over their bodies, and having rights over their image is a logical and correct extension of that.
Rightly or wrongly, the internet seemed more benign to me when my sons were little and it filled a hole in my mothering life. My mum was dead, I skipped antenatal classes and the only parenting advice I received was shouted at me on Parisian streets by pensioners in Chanel suits. When I discovered parents online sharing their broken nights, boredom and neuroses along with pics of their children, it felt like oxygen.
I didn’t put my sons online for money, but I did it for myself, absolutely. I was hungry for connection and support; I needed that digital village. I’m certain the internet still fills a hole for people – parenting can be awfully lonely – and I suspect there’s a touch of that behind even the glossiest and most aspirational momfluencer content. But how much of your children’s story it is OK to share is a knotty question and however innocuous my “sharenting” felt, I’m not sure I got it right.
The best revenge would be for my children to post me at my worst all over the internet now: picking crisps out of my cleavage, double-chinned and drooling as I doze or saying unfathomably stupid things about inflation. But they won’t, of course: they’re very careful about what they put online.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
