Sharenting: Children's Privacy in the Age of Social Media

What This Research Establishes

• Sharenting represents a form of childhood exploitation where parents prioritize their own social media presence and validation over children’s privacy rights and future autonomy

• Current legal frameworks inadequately protect children from parental oversharing, leaving minors vulnerable to having their most private moments commodified for adult social media consumption

• Children’s long-term interests are systematically ignored when parents create permanent digital footprints without considering future consequences for their child’s reputation, relationships, or opportunities

• The practice reflects broader power imbalances in parent-child relationships, where children become content for adult entertainment and validation rather than being respected as autonomous individuals with inherent privacy rights

Why This Matters for Survivors

For many survivors of narcissistic abuse, Steinberg’s research provides crucial validation of childhood experiences that felt wrong but were difficult to articulate. The concept of sharenting helps explain why having personal moments broadcast for parental validation felt so violating and damaging. Your instincts about these boundary violations were correct—this behavior treats children as objects for adult consumption rather than respecting them as individuals.

This research legitimizes the deep discomfort many survivors feel about childhood exploitation extending into digital spaces. If your narcissistic parent used social media to showcase their “perfect family” while ignoring your privacy or comfort, you experienced a recognized form of exploitation that mirrors other narcissistic patterns of using children for external validation and image management.

The legal framework Steinberg proposes validates your right to privacy and autonomy that should have been respected during childhood. Understanding that your experiences represent systematic boundary violations can help process feelings of anger, violation, and confusion about why these behaviors felt so damaging to your developing sense of self.

Recognition of sharenting as exploitation also helps survivors understand how narcissistic abuse adapts to new technologies while maintaining the same core dynamics: using children as extensions of the parent’s ego, prioritizing adult needs over child welfare, and treating children’s experiences as commodities for adult consumption.

Clinical Implications

Therapists working with survivors should recognize sharenting as a legitimate form of childhood exploitation that can have lasting psychological impacts. Clients may present with confusion about privacy boundaries, difficulty asserting autonomy, or shame about their right to control personal information—all potential consequences of having privacy systematically violated during development.

Clinicians should validate clients’ experiences of digital exploitation and help them understand how sharenting reflects broader narcissistic dynamics. This can include exploring how being treated as content for parental social media affected their sense of agency, privacy rights, and ability to maintain appropriate boundaries in relationships.

Treatment approaches should address the complex trauma of having childhood experiences commodified for adult validation. Survivors may struggle with identity formation when their authentic experiences were constantly reframed for public consumption, requiring therapeutic work on developing autonomous self-concept separate from parental narratives.

Therapists should also consider how digital exploitation continues to affect adult survivors, particularly when narcissistic parents maintain social media presence that includes childhood images or continues boundary-violating posts about adult children. This may require specific interventions around digital boundaries and protecting current privacy rights.

How This Research Is Used in the Book

Steinberg’s analysis of sharenting provides essential framework for understanding how narcissistic exploitation adapts to digital environments while maintaining core patterns of treating children as sources of supply rather than autonomous individuals. This research demonstrates that the fundamental dynamics of narcissistic abuse—boundary violations, commodification of children’s experiences, and prioritizing adult needs over child welfare—seamlessly translate into social media environments.

“When we examine sharenting through the lens of narcissistic family dynamics, we see how digital platforms simply provide new venues for familiar patterns of exploitation. The parent who once used their child’s achievements or struggles as conversation pieces at social gatherings now has unlimited audience for the same behavior through social media. The technology changes, but the fundamental violation of treating children as extensions of parental ego rather than autonomous individuals remains constant.”

Historical Context

Published in 2017, Steinberg’s research emerged during a critical period when social media platforms had become integral to parenting culture but legal protections for children lagged far behind technological capabilities. This timing was crucial as the first generation of heavily documented children were reaching adolescence and beginning to articulate discomfort with their digital presence, making visible the long-term consequences of unrestricted parental sharing that legal frameworks had failed to anticipate or address.

Further Reading

• Blum-Ross, A., & Livingstone, S. (2017). “Sharenting,” parent blogging, and the boundaries of the digital self. Popular Communication, 15(2), 110-125.

• Kumar, P., & Schoenebeck, S. (2015). The modern day baby book: Enacting good mothering and stewarding privacy on Facebook. Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing.

• Ouvrein, G., & Verswijvel, K. (2019). Sharenting: Parental adoration or public humiliation? A focus group study on adolescents’ experiences with sharenting against the background of their own impression management. Children and Media, 13(4), 319-335.