What is sharenting? The real risks of posting your kids online

It’s the first day of kindergarten. A new backpack, a hand-lettered sign with the date, the teacher’s name and the name of the school in marker, a grin missing one tooth. The photo goes up on Facebook, where the account is set to public because it was set that way in 2012 and nobody ever changed it. Grandma likes it. So do 140 other people, including a coworker from three jobs ago and a neighbor who moved away.

That is sharenting, and almost every parent has done it. This article isn’t here to make anyone feel bad about it. It looks at what those photos add up to over the years, why police and child-safety groups in the UK changed their advice in 2026, and what you can do instead without giving up on sharing family life altogether.

What is sharenting?

The word is a blend of “sharing” and “parenting.” It describes parents posting photos, videos and little stories about their children online. That can be a public Instagram, a Facebook album, a story only “friends” can see, or a family group chat with forty members.

Sharenting meaning, in one line: a child’s digital life that someone else starts for them. The word carries no judgment. Behind nearly every post is pride, joy, or the wish to let grandparents three states away feel close. The problem is simpler than intent. A three-year-old has no say in any of it, and a fourteen-year-old may have very firm opinions about the potty-training photo that is still sitting on Mom’s timeline.

The topic reached a wider audience in 2023, when Deutsche Telekom, the German telecoms company, released an ad called “A Message from Ella.” In it an AI-aged, adult version of a nine-year-old girl speaks to her parents and asks them to think before they post. The child was played by a young actress; the adult Ella was generated. It works because it flips the point of view. For once, the child gets to speak.

The profile that grows up with your child

One photo says very little. A few hundred photos over ten years say a lot, and nobody has to dig for them. They simply pile up in one place, in order, often with captions.

Put them side by side and a biography appears. The first name comes from an aunt’s comment. The birthday comes from the yearly “Can’t believe she’s 6!” post. The school is on the first-day sign, the soccer club on the jersey, the neighborhood in the playground that shows up every Saturday. “Swim lessons every Tuesday at 4, so proud!” tells anyone reading where the child will be next Tuesday at 4.

In 2018 the British bank Barclays warned that this kind of detail could feed identity fraud years later. The list it gave reads like a bank’s security questions: names, age and date of birth, home address, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, school, the name of the family pet. Barclays put a dramatic forecast on top of that list, and forecasts are guesses. The list itself doesn’t need one. A child who opens a first bank account at 18 may already have a public file that someone else wrote for them.

Location data is the one people forget. Phones save the location into every photo once the camera is allowed to use it. The big social networks generally strip it when you upload a normal photo. It can stay in when you send a picture as a file or “as a document,” by email, through a cloud link, or when you upload it to your own website or a club page. Our guide to metadata in your files shows how to turn it off and clean up old pictures. If you want to see how small details combine into a full picture, the piece on OPSEC for everyday life walks through it.

Then there is the face. Children change fast, but not completely. Ten years of photos let anyone recognize the teenager in the yearbook as the toddler from the beach. What’s cute today can end up on a classmate’s phone in seventh grade. That doesn’t take a stranger. A curious classmate and a parent’s public profile are enough.

Sharenting dangers: why the advice changed in 2026

For years the rule was: no bath photos, nothing embarrassing, and you’re fine. That rule still holds. It’s just no longer enough, because AI image tools are now freely available and can turn ordinary pictures into images showing a child in situations that never happened. How that works doesn’t matter for parents, and we won’t go into it. What matters is that it happens, and that the agencies dealing with it say so plainly.

In July 2026 the UK’s National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK charity that monitors child sexual abuse material worldwide and runs a reporting hotline, published a guide for parents. Its advice is direct: don’t post pictures of children publicly. Make accounts private or share through a close-friends group. Go back through old posts. Revisit photo consent forms you signed with schools or sports clubs before AI image manipulation became easy. Lorna Sinclair of the NCA told The Guardian: “The average parent or carer does not post a picture of a child online thinking that it might be scraped to be turned into CSAM.” The IWF’s chief technology officer, Dan Sexton, was blunter: “I would be very cautious … because there is no protection.”

The numbers explain the tone. The IWF identified 8,029 realistic AI-made images and videos of child sexual abuse in 2025, up 14 percent on the year before. By October 2026 it had already assessed 6,310 AI images classified as abuse material, 40 percent more than in all of 2025. Most showed girls, and most of the children shown were aged seven to thirteen. Report Remove, a UK service that helps young people get intimate images taken down, had received 420 reports from children who believed images of themselves had been faked, already more than the 397 for the whole previous year. The service also reported cases where ordinary, fully clothed selfies had been manipulated.

Schools are a target too. In May 2026 the IWF described a UK secondary school whose website or social media photos had been altered with AI and sent back to the school with a demand for money. An early-warning group of child-protection organizations, government bodies and police said the problem isn’t widespread yet, but called it “only a matter of time” before more schools are hit.

The picture is similar outside the UK. In Germany, the Federal Criminal Police Office runs a campaign whose title translates as “Children’s pictures don’t belong online,” and the national youth-protection center jugendschutz.net handled more than 15,000 cases of child abuse imagery in each of the past two years.

Stories, group chats and “private” accounts

Plenty of parents have already stopped posting publicly and moved their kid photos to Instagram close friends, private stories, or the family group chat. That’s a real improvement. It just feels more private than it is.

Think about who is actually in the audience. A private Facebook account built up over fifteen years can have 600 friends, from college roommates to the contractor who redid the kitchen. A WhatsApp status, by default, goes to all of your contacts. A family group chat adds the cousins’ partners and that one uncle who forwards everything. Each of them can save an image, take a screenshot, or send it to a different group you are not in, and you usually won’t be told.

Disappearing stories don’t change that much. A screenshot takes a second. Most of the time nothing bad is meant: an aunt forwards the photo to a friend because it’s adorable, and the friend sends it to her daughter. The child is now in the phones of people the parents have never met.

So use the tools, because they help. Set accounts to private. Use a close-friends list on Instagram and a custom audience on Facebook. Limit your WhatsApp status to a short list of contacts instead of everyone. Just keep the honest version in mind: private lowers the reach, it doesn’t make a photo uncopyable.

Profile pictures deserve their own sentence. They are the most widely and longest visible image you have, often to people who only know your number. A photo of your child is about the worst thing to put there.

Schools, sports clubs and photo consent forms

Not every photo of your child online comes from you. Schools post the science fair on their website, coaches share the team photo after the tournament, the daycare app sends pictures to every parent in the group. Somewhere along the way you probably signed a form, likely on day one between the allergy list and the emergency contacts.

After the school blackmail case, the UK early-warning group gave schools concrete advice: stop using front-facing photos of pupils, shoot from a distance, from behind, or slightly blurred, don’t put names next to pictures, review old images regularly, and ask parents again. The NCA guide tells parents the same from the other side: look at the photo consent you gave, since much of it may have been signed before AI changed what a photo can be used for.

You can simply ask. Where do the photos go: the public website, social media, a closed app? Are names used? How long do pictures stay up? Most schools and clubs answer that kind of question openly, and many are glad a parent brought it up. You can also tell them you’d like your child left out of public photos from now on.

Stop sharenting? A decision guide

Some readers will decide to stop posting their kids altogether, which is what police in Germany and the UK now recommend. Others want a middle path. Both are reasonable, and you don’t have to stop taking photos either way. The question is how many people see them and what they reveal. Four questions before you share do more than any app:

1. Would my child be fine with this photo at sixteen?
2. Who will really see it, and who could pass it on?
3. Does the background show something I don’t want to share, like a school, a street, or a team?
4. Does the face need to be in it at all?

A different angle often solves it. A kid seen from behind on the beach, two small rain boots in a puddle, a hand holding a crayon over a drawing: those photos tell the story without showing who the child is. A solid sticker over the face works too, as long as you save the edited version as a new file and share that. The original still sits on your phone and probably in your cloud backup.

The safest place for kid photos is a circle you actually know. Text the picture straight to Grandma instead of posting a story. Use a shared family album with five invited people instead of a group chat with forty. It sounds small, and it cuts the number of copies dramatically.

Then talk to everyone else with a camera: grandparents, godparents, babysitters, the other parents at the birthday party. A friendly message works better than a rule sheet. Something like: “We’ve decided not to post Mia online anymore, not even in stories. Please send us any photos directly, and please don’t forward them. Thanks for helping!” Most relatives are happy to go along once they know why.

And ask your child. As soon as they understand what a photo on a phone is, you can ask whether it’s okay to share one. Taking a “no” seriously is one of the best lessons in digital life you can give them, because one day they’ll be the ones holding the camera.

Cleaning up what’s already out there

If you’re reading this with a slight knot in your stomach because there are years of photos online already, you’re in good company. A lot of it can be reined in. The NCA guide calls it an audit: go through every account once, calmly.

Start with anything public. Old Facebook albums, an Instagram from the baby years, a parenting blog you abandoned in 2017. Switch the account to private or delete the posts with your child in them. Then move on to accounts shared with friends and to group chats. Ask relatives to delete or restrict their own posts of your kid. People react better than you’d expect when you explain the reason without blaming anyone.

To check where a specific photo of your child appears elsewhere, run a reverse image search on your own picture. Our reverse image search guide explains how it works and where it falls short. For the wider cleanup, see how to really delete data.

Be honest with yourself about the limits. Deleting removes your post. It does not pull back copies. Anyone who saved, screenshotted, or forwarded a photo still has it, phones often back up received images to the cloud automatically, and search engines or web archives can show older versions for a while. Cleaning up is worth it. Deciding before you post is worth more.

If an image of your child is misused

We hope you never need this section. If you do, knowing a few things in advance helps, because people make mistakes in the first moment of shock.

• Don’t download, forward, or send the image “as evidence.” Not to friends, not to the school, not to yourself. Write down where you saw it, with the address, date and time, and ask the police or the hotline what they need.
• Report it to the NCMEC CyberTipline at report.cybertip.org. NCMEC’s 24-hour call center is 1-800-843-5678 (1-800-THE-LOST).
• Use Take It Down. NCMEC’s free, anonymous service at takeitdown.ncmec.org helps remove or block nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit images of anyone under 18, and that includes images that were faked. The picture never leaves your device. Only a digital fingerprint, called a hash, is shared, and participating platforms use it to find and take down matching copies. The image has to be on your device already, so don’t download it just to submit it. The service can be used from anywhere in the world. It works on public and unencrypted platforms that have signed up, not on encrypted messaging apps. For images of people who were 18 or older, the equivalent is StopNCII.
• In the UK, report to the IWF at report.iwf.org.uk.
• Call the police right away if there is blackmail, a threat, or any immediate danger. In the US that’s 911, in the UK 999.
• Report the post through the platform where it appeared. Every major service has a report button on the post itself.
• Back your child up. If your child is affected, the most important thing they need to hear is: you did nothing wrong. The person who misused the image did.

The bottom line

Kids get to be seen. They belong in family photos, in albums, on Grandma’s fridge. The real question is how big the circle is and whether your child would one day agree with it. A public post for 600 people is a different decision from a photo sent to two. Keep that difference in mind and you don’t have to give up on the good moments. You just keep them where they still belong to your child.

Sources: Internet Watch Foundation, AI Child Sexual Abuse Imagery: Parent Safety Guide · The Guardian, UK parents warned over posting images of children amid AI sexual abuse fears, July 3, 2026 · The Guardian, Internet Watch Foundation reports huge rise in AI child sexual abuse material, October 5, 2026 · The Guardian, UK schools should remove pupils’ online photos as AI blackmail threat grows, May 8, 2026 · BBC, ‘Sharenting’ puts young at risk of online fraud, May 21, 2018 · Deutsche Telekom, A Message from Ella, July 3, 2023 · Bundeskriminalamt, Kinderbilder gehören nicht ins Netz (German) · jugendschutz.net, Annual report 2025 (German), May 19, 2026 · NCMEC, Take It Down and Take It Down FAQ · NCMEC, Generative AI · NCMEC, CyberTipline · WhatsApp Help Center, How to manage status privacy

Frequently asked questions

What does sharenting mean?

Sharenting is a blend of "sharing" and "parenting." It describes parents posting photos, videos, and stories about their children online, on public Instagram or Facebook accounts as well as in group chats, stories, and family threads. The word itself is neutral. Almost every post comes from pride or love; the risk builds up over years and over how many people can see it.

Can AI misuse ordinary photos of my child?

Yes. The UK National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation warned parents in July 2026 that everyday, fully clothed photos can be altered with freely available AI tools. The IWF assessed 6,310 AI images classified as child sexual abuse material in 2026 by early October, 40 percent more than in all of 2025. Both organizations now advise parents not to put photos of their children on public display.

Should I post my child on social media?

Police and child-protection groups increasingly say no, at least not publicly. If you do share, keep the audience small and known: a private account, a close-friends list, or a shared family album with a handful of invited people. Leave out names, school, location, and anything your child would find embarrassing at 16.

How do I get photos of my child removed?

Start with your own accounts: delete posts or switch them to private. Ask relatives to remove theirs. Report posts by other people through the platform. If an image is sexual or has been manipulated to look sexual, report it to the NCMEC CyberTipline and use Take It Down. Copies that others saved or screenshotted can't be recalled, which is why deciding before you post matters most.

What is NCMEC Take It Down?

Take It Down is a free, anonymous service run by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. It helps remove or block nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit images taken of someone under 18, including fakes. The image has to be on your device already, and it never leaves it; only a digital fingerprint called a hash is shared, which participating platforms use to find and remove matching copies. It does not work on encrypted messaging apps.

Is a private account enough?

It helps a lot, but it is not a lock. A private account shrinks the audience to people you approved. Any one of them can still take a screenshot, save the image, or forward it, and you will not be told. Private lowers reach; it does not make a photo uncopyable.