MY DAUGHTER, now a young teenager, wasn’t responsible for the start of her digital footprint. I created that myself, when I posted her 12-week ultrasound on Facebook.
This decision was unthinking, nudged into being through the ambient pressures of social proof. In the US, for example, over a third of expectant parents were posting sonogram images that year, so my digital environment sent the message that sharing about a child from the first scan was acceptable.
Advertisement
Since then, publishing prenatal identity markers has become yet more normalised and common, including biological sex, “gender reveal” videos, the name of the eventual baby, due dates and data from pregnancy-tracking apps.
When today’s expectant parents post a sonogram image – mine featured the hospital’s name as well as my name and date of birth – the surveillance-capitalism system is alerted to the imminent arrival of a new person. Text and metadata from ultrasound posts provide additional context for a new profile: the one that a social media platform immediately starts privately compiling about the future consumer.
This is unsettling, but it is the lesser of my worries. While our attention economy may hunger after children’s data to supply the burgeoning behavioural futures market, I am more concerned with social and psychological futures. When my social circle showered me with positive reinforcement for my ultrasound post, the trajectory of my digital-age parenting style was set. It was the birth of a habit – a consequential one for my child’s psychological development.
With my post, I launched a “datafied baby”, whom I would continue to digitally monitor for years. I didn’t have the high-priced babyveillance tech of today, but social media was her baby book. With her knowledge and increasingly begrudging consent, I still use phone location tracking to monitor her as she travels alone, grasping towards independence. Almost all teenagers desire freedom, but there is an additional reason she may so crave hers.
A sonogram share discloses information about someone who has no input or agency in the decision. And what could be a one-off instance of taking a free hand with someone else’s information is more likely to harden into an established practice. For the decade that followed my prenatal post, I cultivated and curated my child’s digital persona in my preferred image. Sometimes, she engaged in protest behaviours that indicated her discomfort, most of which I ignored.
When an expectant parent shares images, information and other identity markers online before birth, they create a cyborg fetus with a social life of its own. The parent’s online community nudges them to offer up more. Understandable, then, that it is hard to reel in “sharenting” once your baby is born – and the more parent-authored sharing there is, the more difficult it may eventually be for the child to assert their own identity.
Persistent parental sharenting, especially when a child is resistant, can convey to children that they have no power or right to set their own boundaries. At an early stage, they may realise their experiences are fodder fuelling someone else’s social capital. Strangers know all about their lives, may expect them to conform to an image curated by the parent and may seem disappointed if they don’t fit with this. Sharented children have a celebrity’s understanding of parasocial relationships: people think they know you, but you don’t know them.
My own child absorbed these unfortunate lessons well. When her protest behaviours diminished, I now realise, it wasn’t because she was content. It was because she was resigned: she had developed what psychologists call learned helplessness. And it all began with a sonogram on social media.
Elaine Kasket is a psychologist and author of Reboot: Reclaiming your life in a tech‑obsessed world
