Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are covering their children Archie and Lilibet's faces online. Is 'sharenting' out?
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are never out of the public eye, but their two kids — Archie, 5, and Lilibet, 3 — are another matter. The Sussex children weren’t featured on the family’s 2023 holiday card, and they’re photographed only from the back in one shot included on the just-released 2024 card, which features multiple images of their famous parents.
Given the level of interest in what little physical details we see of Archie and Lilibet — red hair and knee socks, mostly — it’s not hard to see why the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been more hesitant to share images of their children with the world. And they’re not alone. Last week, ABC News meteorologist Ginger Zee addressed a fan’s question about why she now uses emojis to cover her two sons’ faces when posting photos on social media.
“About a year and a half ago [my husband Ben Aaron] and I had a discussion about sharing photos and videos of our kids and realized it’s just not at all what we want to do,” Zee explained. “Artificial intelligence was the impetus,” she said — citing concerns that online images may be repurposed for AI — “but the reasons go well beyond that.”
She and Aaron “wish they never had” [started showing off their sons] in the first place, Zee told the fan. “It was never their choice and feels really exploitive these days.”
For parents who no longer — or never did — feel comfortable “sharenting,” aka sharing stories and footage of their children online, but still want to acknowledge their family life, using emojis to block faces, only showing their kids from certain angles or limiting kid content to a curated group of “close friends” might feel like a decent middle ground that offers some level of anonymity. But others are stepping back from posting about their kids entirely as they reexamine their relationship with social media.
“I think many parents are choosing not to share their children on social media for a variety of reasons, mainly centered around privacy, safety and potential long-term implications,” Sarah Adams of Mom Uncharted, which raises awareness about online safety and child exploitation on social media. “I also believe these reasons (and more, like the advancements in AI) reflect a growing awareness of the potential risks and long-term implications of sharing children's lives online. All of this is prompting parents to adopt a more cautious approach to sharing online.”
Devorah Heitner, author of Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, also sees an “increasing awareness of the risks of sharing” footage of their children online. These include concerns about AI (specifically, that a child’s photo might be altered in an indecent or nefarious way), facial recognition technology and child exploitation. “These are not necessarily common everyday occurrences,” Heitner says, “but I think because we read about them and hear about them, parents are rightly concerned.”
There’s also the “sense of digital permanence,” which means that once a photo has been shared, it can live on in ways we hadn’t anticipated — and may not even ever know about. Parents have seen this in their own digital lives, Heitner notes. “We've all been online for, you know, a couple decades now. And so I think we're experiencing [the realization that] ‘Oh, things don't go away.’” At best, this can be embarrassing — that old party pic that potential employers and dates can find with a few taps of the keyboard; at worst, an innocent photo could be manipulated or posted on seedy or illegal sites.
So why share at all? For most parents, there’s both an impulse and an expectation to document their lives — the good parts, anyway — even if that might open them up to scrutiny or judgments about, say, the vacation they’re taking, what their house looks like or the way their baby is strapped into a car seat. “When we share our kids' photos, it's about us, not just our kids,” Heitner says. “And there's sort of a pressure to share even for those of us who are not celebrities, right? Like, it can feel like if you're not sharing at all and other people in your circles are sharing, are you saying you don't think your kid is cute? Are you not loving your kid? You're not proud? Why aren't you sharing?”
Celebrity parents have the added pressure of trying to straddle the line between personal branding (“‘I’m really busy being an international megastar, [but] I’m also a really great mom or dad,’” as Heitner puts it) and the desire to give their kids more of a normal life. They don’t want their kids to be recognized, but they also want to telegraph their “authentic” selves — though Heitner is quick to note that every post shared is, famous or not, consciously or not, a (usually flattering) performance of sorts that’s not all that authentic. In the case of famous families, there’s a motivation to “give the public sort of what they want,” Heitner says, “or potentially to sort of try to build a narrative of like, ‘Look at this robust family: We're just like you, except that we are not.’”
But obscuring children’s faces is a good first step, Heitner says, as is holding back on posting any photos in which a kid isn’t fully dressed or is wearing something like a swimsuit. For parents of tweens and teens, she adds, getting permission before posting anything online is also “a healthy boundary to have with your kids.” As she notes in Growing Up in Public, kids who might be susceptible to body image issues don’t benefit from having their whole lives archived online and the opportunity to compare their looks at every age.
While it’s hard to make predictions about the future of social media, Heitner has seen some movement toward photo-sharing sites with password protection, like Flickr. Micro-communities might also gain favor, as teens seem to be gravitating toward sharing content in group texts over WhatsApp, she adds.
“I think the hunger to share [photos] with friends and family and trusted people is going to remain,” she notes. “People are not going to want to stop sharing digital photos with the people they care about of the people they love. That's going to continue to be very popular. But I think doing it in a public and searchable way, I would be interested to see if that's still something people want to do.”
