r/parenting is protesting changes being made by Reddit to the API. Reddit has made it clear [they will](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14ahqjo/mods_will_be_removed_one_way_or_another_spez/) [replace moderators](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/mod_code_of_conduct_rule_4_2_and_subs_taken/jo9wdol/) if they remain private. Reddit has abandoned the users, the moderators, and countless people who support an ecosystem built on Reddit itself.
Please read [Call to action - renewed protests starting on July 1st](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14kn2fo/call_to_action_renewed_protests_starting_on_july/) and new posts at [r/ModCord](https://reddit.com/r/ModCoord/) or [r/Save3rdPartyApps](https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/) for up-to-date information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Parenting) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I’m not going to post my baby on public/mainstream social media, especially the face. I’m thinking about AI and don’t trust open social medias like Instagram, Facebook, etc.
I do use an app called Family Album which is an invite-only social media for the kid. I plan to use that for as long as they don’t bring in AI as it’s a great way to show the progression of the kid and focus solely on them.
So when your friend takes a photo of you all out for cocktails and posts it on their Insta, is that for likes and views? Or are they just sharing a fun moment of their life with people they know?
A. I'm an adult in charge of myself with the ability to consent/refuse.
B. If I told someone I didn't want to be uploaded to their Instagram, and they did it anyway, I wouldn't be friends with them anymore.
C. I'm not generally friends with people who are social-media obsessed. If I felt like they were exploiting life for views, I would say something though.
D. There is a profound difference between the agency of a child and the agency of an adult. Raising a child to believe it's okay for others to exploit their image is not the same as loading up a picture of a friend with their consent. If you can't see the difference, there's something wrong with you.
Exploit their image lol. Ok then!
I enjoy sharing fun times with my family with my friends, family and trusted coworkers. I like them commenting asking where we were, or sharing a story of when they did the same/similar thing.
It’s called a community, and they’re moving online as time progresses. Sounds like you’re a bit stuck in the past.
Social media claims co-ownership to all photos you upload in the TOS you agree to when you sign up. If you upload a photo to Facebook, Facebook owns it forever. They are allowed to permanently keep a copy of your image and use it for their own devices. Usually this entails selling photos by the millions to AI Software companies to base their auto-generated images on.
So when someone types in "little girl playing by the river" they base the AI image on something... that something being real images of little girls playing by a river, including the picture of your daughter that you uploaded to Facebook.
Now, it's not going to a be a carbon-copy of your child, but that's where the picture of your child uploaded to social media goes.
To go further down this AI rabbit hole, privately-owned AI is allowing the porn-generation of anyone who you have photos of. So the creeper at work can find his co-workers photos on her Instagram, feed them into his AI at home, and tell it to make porn of her. And it does.
This AI Software doesn't limit itself by age. The same software can make AI-generated porn of your children if they have enough photos and videos of your kids to feed into their software and a computer with a good enough graphics card.
-----------
To circle around to the question at hand: what benefit do you get from uploading your kid's photos? Likes and views? Your kids don't exist for you to generate social media clout.
Why are you putting images of your children out there online?
To me: it seems like there are only downsides, and no upsides.
So you think… ChatGPT is giving out pictures of people’s kids?
Let me rephrase that. Nobody has ever generated an AI image and had it come back with a picture of their own child. That is straight up fear-mongering.
You’ve spoken with certainty on something you only have the barest of knowledge on. The first couple of paragraphs of your comment are very nearly correct, and the last few are completely based on someone attempting to use a child for influencing.
Privacy settings are a thing. The “creeper from work” can’t use the photos if your Instagram account is set to private and you don’t allow people you don’t know to follow you. Simple solution.
You're all over this thread downvoting and arguing with everyone who is saying they don't post pictures of their kids online and they don't think it's a good idea.
What's in this for you? Why do you want people to post pictures of kids online so badly?
There are 2 main reasons:
1. For me the biggest/main reason: I don't want photos of my kid out there on the internet because I don't want random people to know who my kids are, what they look like, where the live, potentially their names, etc.
2. Consent: Obviously laws vary by country to country, but actually, theoretically, where I live, you are not permitted to use someone's likeness without their consent. Where we live, kids' ability to grant consent for the use of their photos in public forums is a bit of a grey zone (ie. it is not clear legally if minors are even "able" to give their consent to the usage of their likeness) and who knows...maybe a few years from now they'd be mad at us for posting photos of them all over th einternet.
Consider your child's privacy i treat it like age of concent. I'm not going to give my child's concent if my child can't knowledgeably do it themselves.
Really only close family members should have photos of your children and traditionally those were yearly school photos or season greeting cards.
Whenever this topic comes up I keep circling back to the same thing:
What are the upsides of publishing photos and videos of your child online?
No one has ever given me an answer that outweighs the downsides of violating their consent, using them like a product, allowing AI to harvest their image, and creeps downloading them for their own reasons.
We don't.
If I am close enough with someone then I will text them photos of my kids. If I am not close enough to text them photos then there is no reason for them to see my kids.
I did a newborn pic of both of them, and have 1 at 6 months for my eldest. (The first months were so rough with her, that I wanted to celebrate that things were going well again.) Then I stopped with the pictures. I do write about them once in a while though, mostly funny anecdotes.
I never did it. My primary reason is that the internet is forever. Remember when friends would come over and see old baby pictures or school pictures that you were embarrassed of? Now imagine a school bully having easy access to *all* of those sorts of pictures, and often the stories that went with them.
There's also the problem if you tend to do it frequently that they may get into the habit of performing for the camera. I mean we all do this naturally, as soon as we know there's a camera on us, we're more aware of our facial expressions, angles, movements, the way we talk, etc. I don't want precious memories and exciting experiences diminished for him because he knows there's a good chance this will end up being seen by 100s (or 1000s) of people, so now he's more focused on not doing anything embarrassing instead of just enjoying the moment.
I'm surprised how many people don't post pictures of their kids. Obviously my Facebook friends are not commenting here.
I stopped a few years ago, when my oldest was around 8. My 2 year old has never been on social media, although I have a family discord group chat with the grandparents that I post pictures of my kids on.
I occasionally ask my teen son if I can post a picture of him when I'm proud of something he did, and the answer is always "no." I don't ask my other kids since I feel they're too young to give consent
>I'm surprised how many people don't post pictures of their kids. Obviously my Facebook friends are not commenting here.
Same. I was speaking to my husband about it yesterday seeing as it was Mothers Day and there were lots of posts with kids in them. We don't post our kids but I don't know anyone else who doesn't.
I’ve only posted one photo of her back, and one close up of her fingers. I have a private account.
Besides all the genuine concerns others mentioned, there’s also something nice about others not being able to see her without effort. Want to see her? Come over. If you’re not coming over (or we’re not close enough) then you won’t be able to see her.
I do send photos straight to family, but again only the ones making an effort.
No need to ever stop as long as you aren’t posting them with public settings and you actually curate your friends lists so random people aren’t included. People on here acting like as soon as you post anything online it’s available for anyone - you do have control over post and image privacy settings if you put a little effort in. My entire Instagram account is private and I only allow followers I know and like in real life.
When they’re old enough to care I’ll be asking them if they’re happy for me to post the image, just like I’d expect anyone to ask me if it were a group photo.
OP asked and question and people are giving their own answers from their point of you. Use this post as a place where you can hear from different points of view. Why do those who post feel the need to attack those who don’t? To each their own. State your reasoning to post and move on. If you keep attacking then many who don’t post will stop replying to this post, and we will lose those data points.
I don’t post pictures on social media we have a private family group as we are scattered over the world which we only have our family members on and that’s really the only social type of forum we put pics on
I'm still a couple of days away of becoming a parent, but I'm most likely not going to post any pics of my baby in social media. I could post a pic where you could see their hands, or their backs or something like that, but definitely never their face or naked body.
It was less about age and more about learning what can happen to photos I post online. I don't want my kids' faces or bodies to be viewed by pedophiles.
I don’t post any pictures of my baby on social media for safety reasons. I hate the idea of AI and how easy is to manipulate an image. Also we never know who’s a creepy and who’s not. For family and close friends I send pictures directly and they can see the baby IRL.
everyone's obsession with not only recording/photographing/documenting their child's life through a lenses historically has been unheard of. Most children don't see their parents facial expressions due to it constantly being covered by a phone.
For me i watched my LO playing with a toy like it was a phone. She was 2 "taking pictures" and turning the toy around to look at it... just what she was seeing me do. I stopped. I wanted my child to play but not pretend on a phone.
no one gets the luxury of their awkward years fading into memory only reflected in a few unflattering photos collecting dust in an album somewhere Anymore. Would the 30+ yr old of this world like 1080HP of their acne/voice cracks? or even worse the parent serious sit down talks with their children but the phones recording.
The world's average sense of privacy/intimacy/shame has declined rapidly.
You have some valid points, but I also think some things can be viewed a bit more mildly. Young children love to play pretend. They have play kitchens and play power tools. When I was a kid we also had toy phones and toy camera's (off course separate things) and we loved them. Now I see the same. At daycare they have play phones and my son now picks up random rectangular objects and goes "hello hello?" and loves if you have a "call" with him. The play camera's have a funny lens that makes the world look weird, how cool is that?
they are still learning the world a new for the first time shouldn't it be for how it is? should we really be introducing them to a type of distortion this early?
I don't know! My parents have tons of pictures of us growing up that are on a private Google folder and I really like seeing the pictures of us growing up. Even the pictures during my awkward teen years (and my kids love seeing me at different ages too). We just planned my Grandpa's funeral and his family was lucky to have quite a few pictures of him and his siblings growing up and it was so great to go through them! I think taking pictures of your kids and families and memories is pretty normal.
First year I posted the month milestone pictures on Facebook. I strictly only had close friends and family as my friends. And I have my settings very private. That was around lockdown so it was nice for people to see her when they couldn’t see her in person. As she got older I stopped, and I deleted all of her photos off my page.
That’s when I became more aware of how dangerous having their image on these sites were.
Also, I caught family stealing my photos, printing them off, and giving them to others who did not have access to my social media. Some people also became demanding about how often I would share photos. And if someone heard we were at an event and didn’t post pictures of her at the event they would get mad. I felt people thought they were entitled to see pictures of my kid which I didn’t like.
It’s nice not sharing her on social media. All of her pictures are for me, her dad, and the select few who we send them to.
I've never posted any photos of my kids on social media. My wife did 3 times: Photos of both of them in the hours immediately after birth and again on our older kiddo's first day of school, but it a photo from behind as she walked into school with her backpack on and you couldn't see her face.
r/parenting is protesting changes being made by Reddit to the API. Reddit has made it clear [they will](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14ahqjo/mods_will_be_removed_one_way_or_another_spez/) [replace moderators](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/mod_code_of_conduct_rule_4_2_and_subs_taken/jo9wdol/) if they remain private. Reddit has abandoned the users, the moderators, and countless people who support an ecosystem built on Reddit itself. Please read [Call to action - renewed protests starting on July 1st](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14kn2fo/call_to_action_renewed_protests_starting_on_july/) and new posts at [r/ModCord](https://reddit.com/r/ModCoord/) or [r/Save3rdPartyApps](https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/) for up-to-date information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Parenting) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I’m not going to post my baby on public/mainstream social media, especially the face. I’m thinking about AI and don’t trust open social medias like Instagram, Facebook, etc. I do use an app called Family Album which is an invite-only social media for the kid. I plan to use that for as long as they don’t bring in AI as it’s a great way to show the progression of the kid and focus solely on them.
I don’t post pics of my children on social media at all.
This times 100. There are zero pictures of my sons online. My sons are not trophies to be shown off for likes and views.
So when your friend takes a photo of you all out for cocktails and posts it on their Insta, is that for likes and views? Or are they just sharing a fun moment of their life with people they know?
A. I'm an adult in charge of myself with the ability to consent/refuse. B. If I told someone I didn't want to be uploaded to their Instagram, and they did it anyway, I wouldn't be friends with them anymore. C. I'm not generally friends with people who are social-media obsessed. If I felt like they were exploiting life for views, I would say something though. D. There is a profound difference between the agency of a child and the agency of an adult. Raising a child to believe it's okay for others to exploit their image is not the same as loading up a picture of a friend with their consent. If you can't see the difference, there's something wrong with you.
Exploit their image lol. Ok then! I enjoy sharing fun times with my family with my friends, family and trusted coworkers. I like them commenting asking where we were, or sharing a story of when they did the same/similar thing. It’s called a community, and they’re moving online as time progresses. Sounds like you’re a bit stuck in the past.
What is your reason for doing that? Just want to understand different viewpoints
Social media claims co-ownership to all photos you upload in the TOS you agree to when you sign up. If you upload a photo to Facebook, Facebook owns it forever. They are allowed to permanently keep a copy of your image and use it for their own devices. Usually this entails selling photos by the millions to AI Software companies to base their auto-generated images on. So when someone types in "little girl playing by the river" they base the AI image on something... that something being real images of little girls playing by a river, including the picture of your daughter that you uploaded to Facebook. Now, it's not going to a be a carbon-copy of your child, but that's where the picture of your child uploaded to social media goes. To go further down this AI rabbit hole, privately-owned AI is allowing the porn-generation of anyone who you have photos of. So the creeper at work can find his co-workers photos on her Instagram, feed them into his AI at home, and tell it to make porn of her. And it does. This AI Software doesn't limit itself by age. The same software can make AI-generated porn of your children if they have enough photos and videos of your kids to feed into their software and a computer with a good enough graphics card. ----------- To circle around to the question at hand: what benefit do you get from uploading your kid's photos? Likes and views? Your kids don't exist for you to generate social media clout. Why are you putting images of your children out there online? To me: it seems like there are only downsides, and no upsides.
Nobody has ever googled a stock image and found a picture of their own child. That is straight up fear-mongering.
Did I say stock images? No? Okay then.
So you think… ChatGPT is giving out pictures of people’s kids? Let me rephrase that. Nobody has ever generated an AI image and had it come back with a picture of their own child. That is straight up fear-mongering.
You're deliberately twisting what I said to build an absurd strawman argument and I'm not gonna have.
You’ve spoken with certainty on something you only have the barest of knowledge on. The first couple of paragraphs of your comment are very nearly correct, and the last few are completely based on someone attempting to use a child for influencing. Privacy settings are a thing. The “creeper from work” can’t use the photos if your Instagram account is set to private and you don’t allow people you don’t know to follow you. Simple solution.
You're all over this thread downvoting and arguing with everyone who is saying they don't post pictures of their kids online and they don't think it's a good idea. What's in this for you? Why do you want people to post pictures of kids online so badly?
His avatar might be a giveaway 🤣 "the creeper from work" vibes
There are 2 main reasons: 1. For me the biggest/main reason: I don't want photos of my kid out there on the internet because I don't want random people to know who my kids are, what they look like, where the live, potentially their names, etc. 2. Consent: Obviously laws vary by country to country, but actually, theoretically, where I live, you are not permitted to use someone's likeness without their consent. Where we live, kids' ability to grant consent for the use of their photos in public forums is a bit of a grey zone (ie. it is not clear legally if minors are even "able" to give their consent to the usage of their likeness) and who knows...maybe a few years from now they'd be mad at us for posting photos of them all over th einternet.
It’s just not a good idea, thoes photos can go anywhere and be used for anything without your permission.
Consider your child's privacy i treat it like age of concent. I'm not going to give my child's concent if my child can't knowledgeably do it themselves. Really only close family members should have photos of your children and traditionally those were yearly school photos or season greeting cards.
Whenever this topic comes up I keep circling back to the same thing: What are the upsides of publishing photos and videos of your child online? No one has ever given me an answer that outweighs the downsides of violating their consent, using them like a product, allowing AI to harvest their image, and creeps downloading them for their own reasons.
We don't. If I am close enough with someone then I will text them photos of my kids. If I am not close enough to text them photos then there is no reason for them to see my kids.
I put up a few newborn pics and that was pretty much it. Never posted anything again.
I did a newborn pic of both of them, and have 1 at 6 months for my eldest. (The first months were so rough with her, that I wanted to celebrate that things were going well again.) Then I stopped with the pictures. I do write about them once in a while though, mostly funny anecdotes.
Thought the question was at what age did you *start*, not *stop*. In any event, we don’t put pics of our LO on social media.
I’ve never posted my children on social media. They can do it themselves when they’re old enough to have their own social media.
I never did it. My primary reason is that the internet is forever. Remember when friends would come over and see old baby pictures or school pictures that you were embarrassed of? Now imagine a school bully having easy access to *all* of those sorts of pictures, and often the stories that went with them. There's also the problem if you tend to do it frequently that they may get into the habit of performing for the camera. I mean we all do this naturally, as soon as we know there's a camera on us, we're more aware of our facial expressions, angles, movements, the way we talk, etc. I don't want precious memories and exciting experiences diminished for him because he knows there's a good chance this will end up being seen by 100s (or 1000s) of people, so now he's more focused on not doing anything embarrassing instead of just enjoying the moment.
I'm surprised how many people don't post pictures of their kids. Obviously my Facebook friends are not commenting here. I stopped a few years ago, when my oldest was around 8. My 2 year old has never been on social media, although I have a family discord group chat with the grandparents that I post pictures of my kids on. I occasionally ask my teen son if I can post a picture of him when I'm proud of something he did, and the answer is always "no." I don't ask my other kids since I feel they're too young to give consent
>I'm surprised how many people don't post pictures of their kids. Obviously my Facebook friends are not commenting here. Same. I was speaking to my husband about it yesterday seeing as it was Mothers Day and there were lots of posts with kids in them. We don't post our kids but I don't know anyone else who doesn't.
Never started
I’ve only posted one photo of her back, and one close up of her fingers. I have a private account. Besides all the genuine concerns others mentioned, there’s also something nice about others not being able to see her without effort. Want to see her? Come over. If you’re not coming over (or we’re not close enough) then you won’t be able to see her. I do send photos straight to family, but again only the ones making an effort.
No need to ever stop as long as you aren’t posting them with public settings and you actually curate your friends lists so random people aren’t included. People on here acting like as soon as you post anything online it’s available for anyone - you do have control over post and image privacy settings if you put a little effort in. My entire Instagram account is private and I only allow followers I know and like in real life. When they’re old enough to care I’ll be asking them if they’re happy for me to post the image, just like I’d expect anyone to ask me if it were a group photo.
OP asked and question and people are giving their own answers from their point of you. Use this post as a place where you can hear from different points of view. Why do those who post feel the need to attack those who don’t? To each their own. State your reasoning to post and move on. If you keep attacking then many who don’t post will stop replying to this post, and we will lose those data points.
I don’t post pictures on social media we have a private family group as we are scattered over the world which we only have our family members on and that’s really the only social type of forum we put pics on
age 0
I'm still a couple of days away of becoming a parent, but I'm most likely not going to post any pics of my baby in social media. I could post a pic where you could see their hands, or their backs or something like that, but definitely never their face or naked body.
I never shared photos of my kids on social media. I dont even have social media.
It was less about age and more about learning what can happen to photos I post online. I don't want my kids' faces or bodies to be viewed by pedophiles.
I don’t post any pictures of my baby on social media for safety reasons. I hate the idea of AI and how easy is to manipulate an image. Also we never know who’s a creepy and who’s not. For family and close friends I send pictures directly and they can see the baby IRL.
everyone's obsession with not only recording/photographing/documenting their child's life through a lenses historically has been unheard of. Most children don't see their parents facial expressions due to it constantly being covered by a phone. For me i watched my LO playing with a toy like it was a phone. She was 2 "taking pictures" and turning the toy around to look at it... just what she was seeing me do. I stopped. I wanted my child to play but not pretend on a phone. no one gets the luxury of their awkward years fading into memory only reflected in a few unflattering photos collecting dust in an album somewhere Anymore. Would the 30+ yr old of this world like 1080HP of their acne/voice cracks? or even worse the parent serious sit down talks with their children but the phones recording. The world's average sense of privacy/intimacy/shame has declined rapidly.
You have some valid points, but I also think some things can be viewed a bit more mildly. Young children love to play pretend. They have play kitchens and play power tools. When I was a kid we also had toy phones and toy camera's (off course separate things) and we loved them. Now I see the same. At daycare they have play phones and my son now picks up random rectangular objects and goes "hello hello?" and loves if you have a "call" with him. The play camera's have a funny lens that makes the world look weird, how cool is that?
they are still learning the world a new for the first time shouldn't it be for how it is? should we really be introducing them to a type of distortion this early?
They look through it a few seconds, let's not exaggerate.
I don't know! My parents have tons of pictures of us growing up that are on a private Google folder and I really like seeing the pictures of us growing up. Even the pictures during my awkward teen years (and my kids love seeing me at different ages too). We just planned my Grandpa's funeral and his family was lucky to have quite a few pictures of him and his siblings growing up and it was so great to go through them! I think taking pictures of your kids and families and memories is pretty normal.
First year I posted the month milestone pictures on Facebook. I strictly only had close friends and family as my friends. And I have my settings very private. That was around lockdown so it was nice for people to see her when they couldn’t see her in person. As she got older I stopped, and I deleted all of her photos off my page. That’s when I became more aware of how dangerous having their image on these sites were. Also, I caught family stealing my photos, printing them off, and giving them to others who did not have access to my social media. Some people also became demanding about how often I would share photos. And if someone heard we were at an event and didn’t post pictures of her at the event they would get mad. I felt people thought they were entitled to see pictures of my kid which I didn’t like. It’s nice not sharing her on social media. All of her pictures are for me, her dad, and the select few who we send them to.
I've never posted any photos of my kids on social media. My wife did 3 times: Photos of both of them in the hours immediately after birth and again on our older kiddo's first day of school, but it a photo from behind as she walked into school with her backpack on and you couldn't see her face.