Social Media 05: Should I Post This Picture of My Kid? Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Laura Wifler: There was this 10-year-old study of American parents who found out that 92% of two-year-olds have an online presence. That is crazy.
Emily Jensen: That’s crazy. You know what that means, Laura?
Laura: What does that mean?
Emily: We're all putting pictures of our kids online.
Laura: Exactly. Even if someone's not an influencer, people are putting pictures of their kids online. It's something that we've got to start talking about. I read this thing that said, "the average"—this is in quotes—"digital birth of children worldwide happens at about six months, with a third of children having photos posted of them online within the first two weeks of birth." I mean, that's where my kids land. I'm not excluding myself here.
Emily: No, I got Instagram in 2012. I remember—I think I got Instagram for the first time that spring and then had our first child that summer. All my kids have been online since birth. They get so cute before they're six months old. You've just got to share.
Laura: I know, there's so many double taps on those pics.
Emily: We found out that there's a word for this, because there's always these cute combo words for everything. It's called "sharenting." I bet you guys can figure out what the definition is. The definition we found is that sharenting is the practice of parents publicizing content about their children on internet platforms. Again, this doesn't have to be something an influencer does. This fits everyday online activity, like what Laura and I are saying—this is just what we do. We are proud moms.
Laura: Yes, we're moms!
Emily: It's not malicious. We think our kids are adorable and we want others to see it too. I think there's also this desire for comradery and for community and we want help and support and to be in this thing together. There's a lot of reasons why people sharent, but it's very, very, very common.
Laura: Yes. I think that those are good reasons to share for sure. The problem is that it's raising a lot of ethical questions right now. I know that there are people who have had their children get recognized—like a micro-influencer's kids have been recognized. My kids have actually been recognized when I am not with them, and nothing weird has ever happened, but someone has come up and introduced themselves to whoever's with my kids and said, "Oh, is that…blah, blah, blah…from the internet?" It is a little unsettling. People steal images of kids. They use them for weird, inappropriate things. Identity theft happens.
In Europe right now, there is a growing push for legislation to legislate sharenting, this actual act. It's interesting because, you think about it—a lot of people are comparing it to child actors and how there are a lot of regulations in the entertainment industry. A lot of kids now, online, are making a ton of money for their families. There are questions of consent. There are questions of child labor. It can look exploitive. Is that the word? Exploitative. I don't know.
Emily: —Expletive? That sounds like a bad word.
Laura: It does. Oh my goodness. Exploitive. Anyway, so people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars off—this is the extreme case—but making tons of money off of these kids that requires their child to work. People are starting to talk more and more about, like, "Hey, how do we need to handle this? What government regulations should we have?"
Also, what we want to talk about today is the down and dirty for the regular mom. What do we need to be thinking about?
Emily: Absolutely. What we're talking about is, in its form today, probably only about a decade old. I think what's interesting is that there are now a lot of children of mommy blogs from the 2005 to 2010–'15 era who have grown into adulthood. These were children whose moms posted pictures of them on blogs, told all the stories, complained, celebrated, and did all these things online. They are growing up and now speaking out and saying, "I have a bad relationship with my parent," or "I feel like this, again, exploited me. I don't like all the things that are out there about myself. I feel like my parent did this for the wrong reasons."
I think what is starting to happen is people are applying that to social media, which we don't really quite know yet. We haven't had any kids who literally grew up from digital birth, become 18 yet and say, "This is how, in hindsight, I feel about how my content was used." It's really new territory.
Laura: Even just the general, digital photo album that a lot of us are sharing—we don't have anybody talking about the simple pace of sharing photos, not even just "I worked for my mom."
Emily: Yes. I think that we can apply a couple of pieces of wisdom to this because I think historical wisdom would say that technology tends to outpace laws and ethics. Meaning, any time something new comes into society, often, it takes time— sometimes even decades—for healthy boundaries to be put in place, whether this is federal regulation or it's just people get different social norms and realize, "Oops, we shouldn't have been doing that." Also, biblical wisdom would say that we should love our children as ourselves, love our neighbors as ourselves, treat them the way we would want to be treated, and also just treat them as a Christian.
That means we should be prudent, live quiet lives, disciple our children in the Lord and be mindful that, if we don't know how something is going to impact them, perhaps we should proceed with a different level of caution.
Laura: Em and I have had a lot of conversations about this over the years. We want to share with you some of our thought process, and we're going to admit upfront that we don't have a great answer for you. There is no cut and paste, "Hey, this is what all Christian moms should do," or anything like that. All we're trying to do today is raise some questions for you to go back and evaluate, because I think the biggest thing that Em and I have noticed—and if you haven't heard us harp on this throughout the series, you haven't been listening. [Laughter]
We are basically feeling like, "Hey, we need to think more deeply about social media. We have to start analyzing it, considering it, and applying biblical wisdom to it." For too long, we've just said, like, "Huzzah, this is just a fun, little carnival!" We need to start being more serious about it. Our kids are a huge one. We know that as moms. I hope that all of you guys are starting to think about this and considering it. We want to start off by just saying, hey, sharenting is a matter of conscience. There is a really wide spectrum of things that we see people doing right now that we are not going to say, "Hey, this is right or wrong," necessarily.
Em, do you want to just walk through some of the lay of the land?
Emily: Oh, yes.
Laura: Okay.
Emily: Lay of the land with practices on sharenting. Certainly, there are people who have private, personal accounts for friends and family. Then on the other side of that, we've got public platforms where people are actively saying, "Hey, I'm going to build a brand around my family and my kids." There are people who might say, "I'm only going to post one picture a year," or "I always put a little heart or a little—"
Laura: —cover their face.
Emily: Yes, cover over my kid's face. I will never share my picture online. There are people who will post dozens and dozens of even stories and a play-by-play of their whole family life. There are people who would never link or share a resource or a product and people whose entire family income—sometimes six, seven figures—rests on the kids' participation in social media campaigns and linking it to products. I think, similarly, we have people that land differently in terms of how they approach this. I know that I have a friend or two that I only get to see their kids' pictures when they are mailed to me at Christmas every year. They don't post. That's where they've landed.
Laura: They have an online presence, but their child is only in print.
Emily: Right. They've just said, "I'm going to draw the line at: my kid is never going to be online." Then there's people who would say, "You know what? Everybody just needs to relax. This is a digital world. Parents should be able to do whatever they want and post as much as they like because this is harmless. Nothing bad is probably going to happen. I've decided that it's okay for my child to be in this."
Then there's everything in between. It’s just the lay of the land. A lot of times, this has to do with someone's goals, their culture, what their husband says, what he thinks, their own heart motivations, their career trajectory. There are so many factors that play into this.
Laura: We want to start—again, no matter what your personal practices right now, you probably landed somewhere along the lines of what Emily shared. How do we begin thinking about this as Christian moms? Emily and I will admit that we are thinking about the middle years right now. That's where our kids are at. We don't have the burden of monetization. Some of our thoughts will probably come from that angle of things, but I definitely think my thoughts have changed significantly since my children were babies and sharing what a newborn photo might look like versus what they look like now.
I am certain that my opinions will change for when my kids are teenagers. Just know though, as we talk, that's the lens that we're speaking through. You may have some different conclusions, but the first question is just: where is our identity found when we are sharing our kids online? This is a question—I forget what episode now, but we talked about it a lot like, "What is your why?" At the end of the day, we really have to start asking, "Why am I sharing pictures of our kids?"
We've already said this, but if it's, "Hey, I think they're really cute," I think that that is an okay why. There will be other questions that will help you filter frequency and things like that, but at the end of the day, if it is like, "I just really love my kids and I love sharing them online and I like to make my"—oh, what's that album place that they have?
Emily: Snapbooks, Chatbooks.
Laura: Chatbooks. I use Chatbooks.
Emily: I can't remember what they're called.
Laura: I just want my Chatbooks. That's okay. We can be proud of our families and the good things that God has given us. We're not supposed to hide them away, but when we share these pictures of our children, are we thinking about, like, "Oh, this kid got more likes, or this child didn't?" There's this popular Instagram mommy blogger who literally posted this about raising her five children and triggered a huge firestorm of outrage where she talked about how one of her children is not as popular as her other children on Instagram, meaning one child consistently got less likes.
She defends herself later after people got really frustrated with her. She was saying, "What I was trying to explain is that my love does not depend on how many likes my child brings in on Instagram or even how much money I can make off of them." She expresses that, "Hey, the business of being on Instagram—that puts pressure on parents to make them start to think about their kids in economic terms." That's a quote from her. I think that that's something we need to be very aware of. Even if it's not dollars—it's not economic dollars—it's likes and comments and shares or compliments or even offline compliments of, "Oh, I saw your daughter in her dance dress. It looks so cute and so good."
If that's why you're sharing, for that affirmation, then there probably needs to be some heart check of where your identity is found.
Emily: I think we're all a little blind when things benefit us. Whenever something is working in our favor, we tend to make more excuses or gloss over the negatives. I think some of it is just trying to be honest with ourselves about the good things and the bad things, about the rewards and the risks. Sometimes we can only focus on one or the other. I think too, in terms of identity, we should remember people that we know who are perhaps really faithful and they're going about really quiet work and there's maybe nothing glamorous about their lives. I know there's someone at our church who I see serving the homeless community, and this person is just a really normal person who would blend in with life.
I don't think anybody's patting them on the back and saying, "Wow, you're doing such a good job and it's not getting liked and reshared online." This person has helped countless people out of really, really hard places in the name of Jesus. They're not on social media. They're incredibly humble and faithful and quiet. I believe that person's reward is coming in heaven. We just have to remember that when we are looking for identity to be found online, for people to affirm us, all those different things—especially through the content that we're sharing, even with our kids—no, our worth is secure in him.
Laura: The question is just such a gut check. The next question that we have for you guys is: hey, if we know that our children are our neighbors, how would we want to be treated if we were them? I'm reminded of the golden rule: Matthew 7:12. "In everything, do unto others what you would have them do to you. This sums up the law and the prophets." I think that for me, one of the bigger—I don't know, the bigger pushes that I've had to start to protect my kids a little bit online and how they've changed—it's just understanding the risks—like you were saying earlier, Emily—the risk versus reward. The reality is that identities are being stolen. Kids are getting recognized out in public.
For me, I walked through the question of, hey, if I were my kid, if I tried putting myself in my children's shoes, what would I not like that my mom did? Or for me as a mother, what would I regret that I posted or shared? Because for me, no picture is worth a bad thing happening. Again, we can't take this too far as this goes back to our Fear mini-series. I'm reminded of sometimes playing the "suppose, suppose, suppose" game, the "what if, what if, what if" game, can really get us nowhere and you end up just being completely paralyzed. It is a really valid question to ask of, like, "How will my kids feel about it someday?"
I think when my kids were babies—I'm just going to be really honest—I felt like it wasn't as big of a deal. They change so much. People won't recognize them someday. I had a lot of photos of my kids out online. I was posting a lot more about lifestyle and motherhood prior to starting Risen Motherhood. Actually, over the years, I have slowly removed their internet footprint. I went and did that on Facebook. I went onto Google, and—you can actually tell Google, if you claim your name—you can tell Google what to show of you and what not to. I went through all that and it's been a couple-year process, because it's a significant amount of work.
I think that it's really important that every year or so, we re-ask this question of, "how do I love my children as my neighbor right now, and how do I feel about this today?" Because I think that it will change over the years, and you can continue to reevaluate and make changes. Another question that I asked my kids is—I'll ask them, "Hey, what does mama love?" It's a dangerous question, but even just to see, hey, is it taking tons of pictures of them or "Mom loves for me to pose for pictures" or "Mom loves to be on her phone?" Some of those questions I think can also be helpful in evaluating if it's taking a higher priority in your life than it should.
Emily: This is a question to really linger on because, again—not casting judgment, just airing the questions that I'm asking myself. When I look back and think, what would my regrets be, or what as a kid might I look back on if our roles were reversed? I wouldn't ever want my kids to grow up and feel like I used them to grow my own platform or business or fame. I think sometimes kids, when they're young— they get their picture taken and they're cute. They're like, "Cool photo of me." They like the likes and they like the comments, but you know how sometimes as an adult, even in—I'm approaching 40, and I am now starting to look back on my childhood and realize—
Laura: —Did you say you're approaching 40?
Emily: Yes. 35 is on the way to 40.
Laura: I feel like we're jumping a little. Let's sit at 35 for a little longer. [Laughter]
Emily: Okay. I'm only 35.
Laura: Wow. That was a leap.
Emily: I am climbing the mountain towards 40.
Laura: I'm not with you. I'm 35. I am not almost 40.
Emily: I'm rolling down the hill towards 40 with a bad back. That was a big side note.
Laura: Okay. Sorry. I knew you were my same age.
Emily: I know that the older I get, the more I look back on things from my childhood and go, "Wow. I was really young when that happened," or "Wow, that was really bad that that happened when I was that age." I just think, for our own kids, as they get older, will they look back and be like, "Gross that my mom used that and made money off of that?" I don't know the answer to that question. I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad, but that is a question that I am asking: when my kids are 35, are they going to feel like all of this was really gross? Or is it going to be like, "No, it happened to everybody. It's no big deal." I don't know.
Laura: That's what Em and I have talked about a few times as we were talking about this off-air and I was like, "Yes, it's going to be"—I can't think of a comparison right now, but it's going to be much like other things where it's like everybody's got photos floating out there of them. Perhaps it won't be nearly as big of a deal, but we don't—Emily's right—we don't know, so it's worth asking the question and I think what it is is just settling in your heart of like, "I still feel good about sharing pictures with them, I still want to. I'm putting these protections around it and now I can walk in freedom."
Trust it to God with what your decision is because you know you can't predict your children or you can't control their response. The other note that I think plays into loving our children as our neighbors is—this is maybe my own little personal soapbox, but a lot of times I will hear people say something like, "Well, I asked my child for permission, and they said that I could post it." It was a trendy thing maybe a year ago, where there'd be pictures of kids who were 6 to 10, 6 to 15, and it would say, "Posted with permission" or different things like that.
I just have to ask the question of—do these children have the agency and understanding of what it means to offer permission to their parent to post online? Obviously, that very much depends on how the parent is engaging with the platform, whether they're making money and they're a huge influencer versus a private account. Those are different.
Emily: Is it okay if grandma sees this? [Laughter]
Laura: It is different, but I just think it's another good question for parents, because I think we use that as an excuse of like, "Hey, can I post that to Instagram?" At least—I know, for my eight-year-old, he knows what Instagram is at an ethereal level. It's this thing that exists, but he cannot understand or comprehend what the consequences are, which is why I'm his mother. That's why I still have protections. That's why he doesn't have an account, because he does not have the responsibility or agency at this point to run that.
I wonder, if we're not allowing these children to have accounts and run them fully autonomously, why would we say that their yes to us posting a picture is valid? I think, as a mom, I would be nervous that what would happen, like what you're talking about, where someday—they're 35 and I say, "But I asked you for permission," but it's like, "Yes, but I had no idea what I was saying yes to, and you as my mom—you were supposed to protect me."
Are we fulfilling our God-given roles in that? Again, I have pictures of my kids online, so I want to come from that standpoint, but again, you're asking the question and saying, "How can I respect them, love them, care for them in a way that perhaps they can't do for themselves right now?" That's the question.
Emily: Context matters. Like all risks, context matters, and in some contexts, there are greater risks than others. I know I have a private account where only people that I've accepted can follow me, and I am a lot more free on there, because I know everyone who's following me and it's friends, family, and acquaintances. I have a public account that I treat differently in terms of what I share. Then, even in my newsletter—you and I have talked about this—that's an invested subset of people who want to know what's going on in your lives. That I treat even a little bit differently.
I think it's okay if we don't have a one-size-fits-all answer, but if we take things a situation at a time and say, "In this context, what does it mean to love them? In this context, what does it mean to love them?" Because where there are greater risks, we want to increase our protection, and, depending on the size of your platform or whether it's monetized or not monetized, that may affect that answer.
Laura: That's good. Let's talk about the actual taking of the photo. This is one especially—again, coming from a content creator standpoint or an influencer standpoint—that can probably be more problematic, but I even know moms have been doing this for millennia of trying to—well, not millennia. What? Hundreds of years. How long have pictures, cameras been around? They've been around since the 1800s or something. I don't know, go Google it. The point is: for hundreds of years, well before social media, parents have been trying to get their children to pose well for a photo.
Emily: Or a painting. You've got to pose 70 times for this painting.
Laura: That would be so terrible.
Emily: That's a real story. Were we at the art—
Laura: —museum?
Emily: —building. Museum. You know the building with art in it, Laura? Remember when you went to the art museum?
Laura: Yes, but I don't recall that stat.
Emily: I don't know where I got that, but there was this painting I was looking at where the history of it was that there were like 70 sittings and so the kids look really irritated in the painting and the painter made the artistic decision to capture their faces.
Laura: Yes, that was at the museum! I read that same thing.
Emily: He made the artistic decision to capture the annoyance of their faces because they were being made to sit over and over and over again. There you go, there's your historical—
Laura: And that is totally legit, right? Come on, that they would look mad after 70 sittings—but the point being: we may take 70,000 photos of our kids to get the right shot and, oftentimes, that might be to post it on Instagram so that we get more likes. I know that I have been guilty of this before where I really want to get a good shot and so I take a whole bunch of pictures.
I think for me, one of the guardrails that I've put up is that I'm not going to pose my kids for pictures. I'm never going to ask them, "Hey, go sit over there. Hey, look down. Hey, whatever." I feel a temptation towards that—I especially have in the past—but what I do is I'll try to catch them in action and take a ton, a ton, a ton of photos with the thought that—this is me just being super vulnerable—"Hey, one of these might work for Instagram." I've landed in a spot where I'm okay with that. I'm taking pictures of what real life looks like, but I'm working hard for the photo.
Well, I can't believe I'm admitting all this, but I put a guardrail in place to say, "Okay, I'm not going to direct them in these photos." Unless it's a family picture that we're snapping for Easter. That's totally different, but I think, thinking through those things—are your kids annoyed by, "Hey, Mom's always got her phone out and she's always taking pictures of me?"
Are you getting irritated or angry whenever your children are not obeying you and really the obedience that you're asking for them is pretty unfair? I was thinking about this too, the balance between—my children should obey me if I say, "Hey, can you stand still? Hey, can you do XYZ?" But a lot of it, I think, stems from my own pride and what I'm asking for is incredibly unfair. Taking inventory about how are you thinking about pictures and how are your children perceiving your actions?
Emily: I think another facet of this is—more so from a mothering perspective, not actually us as mothers—but are we raising countercultural kids? In a world of sharenting, in a world that highly values social media and your presence on social media—how many likes and how many followers—if that's what we're striving for, and that's what we're putting a lot of time and energy into, that models something. That communicates something to our kids about what it looks like to be successful in life.
I know I heard somebody say just recently that the number one thing kids are saying they want to be when they grow up is a YouTube star or TikTok star, and that is now the pinnacle of success. When we were younger, remember, it was like a doctor, a lawyer, an astronaut. That was the biggest thing we could possibly think of and now it's like, basically, I want to be famous. That's the norm, that's the baseline of our kids and culture. How are we going to raise them as Christians to say, "Actually, we're not aspiring in this life to be famous. We're not aspiring in this life to be an entertainer." Again, not wrong to be famous, not wrong to be in entertainment, but that's not what we're aspiring to.
Recently, I was in this public area where I was waiting for something, and in this waiting room, there were quite a few kids—I would say between the ages of 10 and 18—and every single one of them was staring at their phone. I had actually brought a book. I'm doing a humble brag right now for you guys. [Laughter] I brought a book because I was thinking to myself, "Hey, I have this unknown amount of time to wait. I'm going to read instead of looking at my phone." I'm really trying to challenge myself: If I have to wait for something, I'm going to be bored. I'm going to look around. I'm going to read a book.
I just thought to myself how countercultural it would have been for me to have one of my kids there with them with a book in their hand. Books are countercultural, people, amazingly. Having your kid take a pad and paper and doodle or stickers—that is countercultural. I don't want to romanticize or be like, "Oh, you're so good. You brought your kid a book." Just to say, "What does it look like in whatever world or culture we're in to be raising children who are not like the world?"
Laura: Absolutely. I think Em and I—we definitely don't want to put any "you need to read books and never have tech," because we have tech. We use tech, but there is an element of thinking about the rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide and how they are going up, especially among adolescents, and how this is irrevocably, completely tied to social media use, to gaming, to being on screens. It is proven that, so often, these things have connections, and you have to connect that with gospel truths that God made us for in-person relationship. He made us for conversations, for physical touch, to see facial expressions, to laugh and cry together. Can we raise kids that know these things, that are comfortable with these things, that prioritize other people and that value living a tangible life?
That's what we want to challenge you guys—not only thinking through your own use, but how are you modeling that behavior for your children? Because you will raise a child that is completely countercultural if you do that. It will be hard, it will be a fight, it will be something that is not easy to do, but if you think about the last show that we did on faithfulness, Emily and I firmly believe from the bottom of our heart that that is going to set your child up for success in order to be faithful in their own life.
We're having these conversations that—moms, how do we detach from social? How do we not live such digital lives? How do we not let social media control us and what can we be doing now to help our children also flourish in the patterns that we're wanting to emulate and the things that we're starting to see? That's something that you can even be doing now as a mom to change the course of their future.
Emily: I've even been thinking lately about showing them not going to my phone but going to the Word. What does it look like for them to see us and know that we're getting our first-hand information, trying to work through problems, working through our own questions with the Word of God and through prayer, humbly saying, "I'm waiting on the Lord for this," not, "Oh, I'm going to go to Google."
I have had one of my older kiddos, especially, if I don't know the answer to something, he'll be like, "Mom, just ask Google." I'm like, "No, it's okay that mom doesn't know the answer, first of all. Second of all, I'm driving; I'm not going to do that. Third of all, yes, there are things that it's okay to wait on or learn over time. We don't have to have the answer instantly." We don't need to live in a world where it's like, "Oh, just go to Google. Done." No, we cannot turn our brains off, children. Anyways, I think there's a lot of teaching them to go to the Word of God and to wait on things and to let wisdom come.
Laura: We're going to wrap up there. We know that we probably left you a little bit hanging and that personal application with this type of show is really tough, but we're okay with that. We are totally okay with that. We don't know what the right decision is for you or what changes you might need to make, but we want to encourage you to at least begin asking the questions. How are you using your kids' pictures on social media and is it good for them? Is it benefiting them? Take time to pray. Talk with others. Talk with your husband and see what he thinks. Get wisdom from moms, not just in your generation, but in other generations.
Also, we have our workbook, of course, that will have some kind of X-ray-type questions in there that you can process through. You're going to probably land differently than some of your friends on this and that is really okay. At the end of the day, it's between you and the Lord, just trusting that he will guide you and lead you in this and that he'll be sovereign over the future, whatever it holds. However all of our kids react to the ways that we were acting online, just trust God to cover that in his grace.
