Social Media Practices in Parenting Narratives
Summary
Parents increasingly use social media to document, reflect on and share everyday experiences of family life. This phenomenon encompasses a spectrum of practices, from spontaneous family selfies and milestone announcements to curated lifestyle representations and commercial collaborations. Such parenting narratives serve multiple functions: they construct parental identities, foster peer support networks and enable communal exchange of advice. At the same time, they raise complex questions around children’s privacy, digital labour and the potential for unintended harms. Research has illuminated how platform architectures influence sharing behaviours and how parents negotiate between self-presentation, social expectations and protective strategies. Globally, these dynamics have practical implications for policy debates, digital literacy education and the design of safer online environments for families.
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Social Media Practices in Parenting Narratives publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in social media practices in parenting narratives across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Sharenting: The practice whereby parents or guardians share personal, often sensitive, information or images of their children on social media platforms.
Social Media Parenting (SMP) scale: A validated instrument designed to measure parents’ perceptions, attitudes and behaviours related to sharing content about their children online.
Sociotechnical harm-prevention framework: An interdisciplinary approach that combines social science insights with technical measures (e.g. algorithmic safeguards) to reduce risks associated with online sharing practices.
Mindful sharenting: A parental strategy that seeks to balance the advantages of child-related sharing with deliberate steps to minimise potential harms to privacy and future autonomy.
References
- Social media parenting scale: Validity and reliability study. Education and Information Technologies (2024).
- Sharenting and social media properties: Exploring vicarious data harms and sociotechnical mitigations. Big Data & Society (2024).
- Mindful sharenting: how millennial parents balance between sharing and protecting. Frontiers in Psychology (2023).
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