-No. -Er, sharenting? No.

Sharing about being a parent?

Those parents that share everything about their children online?

Sharenting.

It's something that I do quite regularly to be honest.

People come to this country, they haven't been back,

they have kids and make their life here.

Some of my family back home have never seen them before.

If I didn't put them on social media they wouldn't see them.

Sometimes I get really embarrassed

when my mum posts stuff on her Facebook page

or her Instagram or whatever, very embarrassing.

Very.

-Very? -Mmm.

They might not want their friends to see them that way.

They want to have some kind of control over their image.

There's a famous case of Gwyneth Paltrow

posting a picture of her daughter Apple and it was a selfie.

There was nothing really, you would think, contentious about it,

yet her daughter complained about it.

Wow, I'd be in trouble.

They're posting about people who are not themselves

and that could impact us when we go out into the real world

and try to get a job, for example.

There is an element of trust there between a parent and a child

I'm not comfortable with my face being shown

without me knowing what actually I'm being perceived as on their platform.

It may not seem like something which is particularly significant.

It may be very personally upsetting to individuals

what parents put up on the internet.

For people of our generation,

your online identity isn't so much seen as separate

from your real-life identity but just an extension of it.

Social media profiles are identity projects.

I don't think that the government as well as parents

should take control over our online identities

because it is a part of who we are

and we use our posts and stuff like that to express ourselves.

-It draws attention to

the kind of complex everyday work that those posts are doing

which are not about showing off.

Sharenting isn't new. Those of us that can remember cringy moments

seeing kids' photo albums handed around to friends and family

know all too well that this is a fairly fundamental urge

on behalf of parents to share their pride about their children.

It's a way of showing that you're doing that parenting.

What is new about sharenting in the digital context is of course that

we are leaving a fairly extensive and lengthy digital stream

of photos, comments, stories.

We didn't want to invade her privacy, even though she's just a baby.

That's going to stay online forever.

Any image you post now is going to be on the internet forever

and then we don't know what's going to happen in the future

with things coming up like deepfake

and you're just giving your kid's image away.

Especially now with face-recognition software

by posting facial images online

you're helping them create a database.

You don't know how these images that you've posted are going to be used.

Unfortunately we have paedophile groups who will literally

sort of scan videos to take out single shots

which seem to expose parts of a child's body or--

And that's a horrifying thought

so I think a lot of this is about education and changing social norms.

One of the strategies that I use is

taking pictures of them when they're not actually facing the camera

so you can't see her face.

These new digital tools enable us to look back on

nice moments from our child's early days,

early years, development, etc.

Funny little things that you write on there and then it's like,

"Oh yeah that happened then, like a whole year ago."

It's pretty good to let all her friends know that

I did this, oh, I went to this school and like,

knowing that, oh like, I'm really happy.

If sharenting is done in a responsible way

and it enables families to have conversations,

for example with their kids as they get older

about what you want to have online, how you portray yourself,

then actually I think it can be a really important step

towards keeping kids themselves safe

as they become digitally enabled adults.