Kids Don’t Have Parents Anymore—They Have ‘Sharents’

by Guest Sat Dec 23, 2017 10:09 pm

Your kid could be your ticket to likes, fame, and money. Or your kid could be your kid.

Who and what is a “sharent” exactly? If you have both a child and a smartphone, it’s probably you.
Sharenting, a term to describe parents who actively share their kids’ digital identities online, is rampant in the United States, with 92 percent of toddlers under the age of 2 already having their own unique digital identity. As 2017 comes to a close, it appears to be a phenomenon that shows no sign of slowing down.

“When I first started looking into the topic, I was wrestling with the issue as a mother myself,” says Stacey Steinberg, one of the most noted researchers on the issue and the author of “Sharenting: Children’s Privacy in the Age of Social Media.” “The more I looked into it, the more I realized, this isn’t just a moral issue, this is actually a public health issue.”

It’s no surprise then that international child advocacy organization UNICEF released a report this month lamenting the dangers of the “bedroom culture” which is leading to reckless sharenting—one that can have profound implications on safety and psychological welfare, not to mention a child’s right to privacy now, or later in life, their right to be digitally erased.

The statistics are stressful to consider:

One in four children said their parents’ sharenting made them feel embarrassed, anxious, worried, or sad.
Fifty percent of images shared on pedophile sites are stolen from social media sites.
Eighty-eight percent of teens think people are sharing too much online.
Fourteen percent of American moms maintain their own blogs of which there are an estimated 3.9 million in North America—with the top 10 percent making six figures.
The pull to sharent—for profit, fame, and approval—is increasingly lucrative. “InstaMom” influencers make thousands of dollars with every campaign while YouTube’s top family vloggers make hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Examining sharenting is more about truly understanding the implications of what we are doing and how it’s affecting kids,” Steinberg says. “This is a huge children’s rights issue, but we can’t alienate parents who are doing this. Most parents truly crave more information to make informed decisions.”

Not just amongst parents but internationally, opinions are often mixed. In the United Kingdom, opinion on the topic is split right down the middle, with half of parents keeping their kids’ identities private. In France, it might get you sent to jail. In Austria, a woman sued her parents for the embarrassing photos they posted of her on Facebook. And in America, it’s a topic sometimes treated with very jaded eyes, even in the press, such as The New York Times’ piece asking the question, “Why Isn’t Your Toddler Paying the Mortgage?”
Upon closer examination, however, sharenting is less fun trend-piece or made-up media portmanteau (it was an official word of the year in 2016) and much more wake-up call as to how few protections exist for children in this emerging space. Unlike, say, in Hollywood, which employs the Child Actor’s Bill (sometimes known as Coogan Law) as protection, for all those babies who are now being literally born on YouTube or kids who daily are being asked by their parents to shill for brands for money, there is no equivalent protection.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/kids-dont-have-parents-anymorethey-have-sharents?ref=home

More to read on the link.

by Syl Sun Dec 24, 2017 12:09 am

Life is lived online now, everything, no matter how mundane is shared with the world and its wife.

Parents who chart their kids progress on the internet to anyone who gives a toss are idiots.

The world has gone mad.

by 'Wolfie Sun Dec 24, 2017 8:18 am

Parents who continually post reports on every sjngle hiccup or stumble their poor sufferjng bubs make; along with endless selfies of every stoopid and pointless thing that they themselves are doing...

They really do have serious emotional, even mental problems..

Are their lives really so empty and meaningless, that they are forever craving approval and acknowledgement from so many virtual strangers ?

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Kids Don’t Have Parents Anymore—They Have ‘Sharents’

Kids Don’t Have Parents Anymore—They Have ‘Sharents’

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Re: Kids Don’t Have Parents Anymore—They Have ‘Sharents’

Re: Kids Don’t Have Parents Anymore—They Have ‘Sharents’