It has been almost two decades since we have had access to the internet at scale and we are rapidly changing how we are using it as a medium. In 2005, a study on Turkish families, found that parents were supportive of their elementary children’s use of the internet and did not find it to be threatening. Parents found the internet to be a useful educational tool and only unsafe when used in the internet cafe. In relation to safety, parents started to worry about how to control internet use, how it might affect family interaction as well as the behavior of children.
Some of the parental mediation strategies might be useful to discuss here, as over the years, parents became more aware of the dangers of the internet. By 2012, parents were monitoring the internet use of their children, especially their daughters. They wanted to restrict internet use to prevent their teenagers from exposure to cyberbullying, pornography, and other unsafe avenues. The study encourages a model of active mediation where the parents explain to their children about safe ways to use the internet, monitor their activities while they are online. This technique ensures that children get the benefits of using the internet but are also protected from risks.The study compared people from lower socio-economic status (SES) to higher SES in their mediation efforts. They found that in the UK, parents were more restrictive in their method, if they were lower SES, and that if they were higher SES, they would sit down with the children and allow them to have the opportunities and protect from unsafe internet uses. However, it is interesting to note that monitoring the activities of their children’s internet use only works for 9-12 year olds and even if parents try to mediate their children’s safe use on the internet, it is met with only increased harm and risk.
Through the years, as we gained knowledge on the internet, and how it impacts families, there seems to be a slow change towards understanding what role parents play in keeping their children safe online but also how they might inadvertently harm them too.. A group of researchers sought to find how parents manage children’s online identities. Though there is increasing pressure on parents to keep up to date on safety measures, managing rules, and giving opportunities using the internet, there is a shift observed by researchers that it might be parents themselves who overshare about their children. This implies that it is not enough for social media sites to make individual privacy settings stronger if it does not include what content a person shares about another person, especially in the case of underage children. Parents have the liberty to disclose and share about their children freely, but this might impact the children negatively and be an infringement upon their privacy. The discrepancy between parents is that mothers often share more frequently and more pictures than fathers. Fathers were additionally more likely to be concerned about the pictures of their teenagers, especially daughters, receiving crude sexual comments.
Coming around to the present day, investigators, policymakers, and researchers find that parents have become more comfortable using the internet and with that, comes an influx of questionable ways to handle online presence. “Sharenting” is a term referring to parents sharing child-related content that can be harmful. In the age of Instagram, parents and children want to get on board with social media and share content with vast audiences. In this study, researchers explore whether parents’ privacy concerns affect how much they share child-related content. In their study, they found that privacy concerns did not prevent parents from sharing child-related content. Lipu and Siibak (2019) compared the opinions of children with their parents on sharing practices. They found that while parents might think of it as a harmless act, children feel embarrassed and find their privacy violated by parents. They also found that parents might restrict their children from putting private information such as name, relationship status, home address, email, and so on, but this does not extend to all family members, i.e. adults. This indicates a clearer negotiation of rules between the family members.
The positives of “sharenting” is that it can create a sense of belongingness, community feeling, social support for like-minded peers but on the negative side, ethical concerns of disclosure and privacy guidelines have to be considered.
Global estimates suggest that we have 3.5 billion internet users with one-third being children across the world, including children in lower income countries. In conversations around safe internet use, we need a strong evidence base for understanding these practices in lower and middle income countries. The consensus is that the evidence base is contrasting to policies in place across the world. The policies need to fit with the populace and take into consideration what might be an issue with children and parents of a certain culture compared to others. For example, children do not seem to be affected by sexual imagery as much as violence and bullying in some countries and contrastingly children in other countries are disturbed by privacy violations of marketers that target ads personalized to them. These findings exhibit how policymakers might have to fit the evidence base into revamping the regulations. It is also apparent that policies do not include civic rights of children. They do not address how to protect data collected from children, how they can engage and have freedom of expression depending on age and maturity.
The internet is changing everyone’s lives irrevocably and it is undeniable that it has immense advantages. In developing countries, we are able to harness the internet for the education of underprivileged kids, improve the conditions of lower SES families, promote women’s self-help groups to become economically independent, help small businesses grow with a social media audience, and form social communities to share information and experiences. Children are able to use online virtual classes during the pandemic and are able to continue schooling, and online tutoring and the educational advantages have come far and wide.
This is happening rapidly and simultaneously alongside social media addiction, video game addiction, increasing difficulty in monitoring children while they use the internet, child abuse, and child pornography, which is severely under-regulated by the platforms responsible. It is important to note that as we learn more about the internet, we cannot overlook the trepidations that come from an online presence along with the permanence of a digital footprint. Parents might think it is an innocuous act to share child-related content, but it is only increasing conversations around revisiting boundaries, obtaining consent from kids, preventing them from risky encounters online, and trying to be aware of the detriments of a social presence alongside the positives.
Ruchira Ragavan
