Sometimes I Post Pictures Of My Girlfriend Online Without Her Consent — Is that Wrong?
By: Argumentative Penguin
Tags: Psychology, Children, Social Media, Parenting, Life

CREDIT: Freestocks-Photos on Pixabay

Why we need to talk about this

I’ve worked in children’s rights for a long time as an advocate and as someone who has to weigh up children’s rights vs children’s responsibilities. This is contentious territory.

I’m shocked by the number of people who post photographs of their children online. Children are human beings who often lack sufficient mental capacity to consent. That’s why we don’t let them vote.

They are not a fashion accessory. They are as entitled to privacy as you or I and sharing infinite pictures of them online isn’t sweet. It’s creepy. They’re going to grow up with a digital history of their lives recorded without their consent.

Yes, those pictures may be added to Facebook for family and friends to look at. But this isn’t giving your nearest and dearest a photo. It’s giving them a copy of the photo. Depending on your understanding of cybersecurity, it’s giving the whole world a photo for all of time.

You wouldn’t stand on the street handing out pictures of your child to everyone who walked past. That’s what posting images of your children on social media is.

Consider how much you would want your own childhood documented. And not just documented, also curated. Who should do that? Many of us have family photo albums in the privacy of our own lofts, in our own houses. Most of us have little context for the photo. We don’t have them tagged.

Why should you be allowed to make the decision to publicly curate a documentary about the life of another human being just because you can? Is this an act of love? Some people think so. It could also be argued it’s a way of controlling a unique narrative. My childhood is pieced together through my own memories, photos, and stories from other people. It’s vague. It’s great that it’s vague. It gives me space to understand the grey areas, what was good and what was bad.

What does the adult who suffered horrific secret abuse do with wonderful family photographs? What does the adult who has been a famous child influencer do when interest in them dries up?

Let me be clear. I’m not advocating that nobody ever takes photographs of their children. Not at all. There are plenty of baby photos of me. They are in the loft at my parents' house. My parents have, on occasion, put some up on the walls of their house. They have never, to my knowledge, put them up in the window.

I don’t mind if you want to take photos of your children. Just keep them off the internet. These are your photos of your private family. You are not obliged to detail your lives for other people, or posterity. Enjoy your time with your children instead of trying to capture it.

The act of attempting to demonstrate good parenting online for others to see makes you a worse parent. The more you try to view you and your child’s relationship through the wider lens of everyone else, the worse it will get.

There are two main players in that relationship. You and your child. When you begin curating and creating behaviours for likes, your child learns to perform for you. Therefore they learn to perform for your social media friends, their self-worth can quickly be tied up with how entertaining they are.

When I see a video of a child playing and cooing for the camera, it has the opposite effect on me than most people. Children thrive on adult interaction. They don’t thrive on having devices pointed at them. They will learn to perform. Whatever brings them most attention determines how they act. That’s how tiny primates with simple brain structures survive.

Does the baby enjoy laughing when their parents make a silly noise? No. Probably not. Not the way you’re thinking. It just brings the biggest reaction from the adults around them. Do they still laugh when you’re trying to get the framing right to capture the moment for family and friends? Yes. Will they still laugh the following day whilst you attempt to Instagram it? Probably, but they’d almost certainly be exhausted by then. Laughing isn’t enjoyment, it’s a survival strategy.

Children are not extensions of the adults that birthed them. They are separate individual human beings with the potential of a very long life. Yes, you can delight in them. Yes, you can be proud of them. But you should also respect their right to a private life. Those moments you have with each other are family moments. The sharing them with everyone doesn’t increase everyone’s interest (we are all bored by each other’s children). It simply devalues your experience of each other. That’s very sad.

Your child might want to have their own social media profile when they are older. They might even want to do that when they’re still technically a child. That’s their choice, make sure they understand the implications of what this means — and keep an eye on them.

Young children lack the capacity to understand complex knock-on-effects from their actions. Teenagers are psychologically rubbish at assessing risk because of how their brains restructure during adolescence. Take this into account when you guide their online behaviour.

There are people who have used their children as a money-making tool on social media. Adults who have sold images and stories, granted access to their child’s private lives, and generated mini-money making influencers at the heart of their family. Even if their child said they wanted to be an online influencer, it doesn’t wash with me. They have serious questions to answer about how they guided their children to that thought process in the first place.

If that is you, it will come back and bite you. That I am sure of. Perhaps not for a few years, but it will. When they can contextualise your behaviour in light of having children of their own, they will want to talk to you. When they understand that what you did wasn’t consensual. When they understand that you leveraged their trust to line the family coffers. They will be angry and mixed up. They may forgive you. They may not. It’s the price you pay.

If at the start of this article you felt disgusted at how I was treating my girlfriend, hold on to that feeling. Now is the time to mentally recalibrate your thoughts on your friend’s cute photos and videos of their child. Stop liking. Stop commenting. Stop sharing. Children are far more vulnerable than you think and they don’t deserve exploitation by unthinking family members. Even if those family members have the best intentions at the time.

The digital age is here. We are the custodians of future morality. The way ahead is unclear and we have difficult decisions to make about how we want the future to be. Choices we make in the present are important.

So I’m going to leave you with this: