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Should Any Parents Be Instagramming Their Kids?

Sure, those of us who do may not all be Myka Stauffers. But we’re all selling some kind of story about ourselves, and using our children to do so.

Credit...Jordan Siemens/Stone, via Getty Images

Contributing Opinion Writer

Once upon a time, there was a scandal.

It feels like it happened years ago — before law enforcement gassed protesters to clear a path for President Trump’s Bible-clutching photo op; before George Floyd was killed, gasping for air; before Amy Cooper, before Ahmaud Arbery, before, before, before. Still, in the midst of this current concentration of misery and information overload, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the strange, sad case of Myka Stauffer.

Myka Stauffer, for those of you who blinked and missed it, is an influencer, a Midwestern mom who posts about organization, fitness, home decorating and managing her brood of young children. At her peak, she had more than 715,000 followers on her monetized YouTube channel and 200,000-plus on Instagram.

Many of those viewers came to watch Ms. Stauffer and her husband, James, chronicle life with their adopted son, Huxley.

The Stauffers started to post about their quest to adopt a child from China — or in YouTube-speak, their “emotional adoption” journey — in 2016. They brought home the 2½-year-old boy they named Huxley in October of 2017 and began posting videos about life with their new toddler and the challenges of parenting a child with autism and a sensory processing disorder.

The emotional journey was also a lucrative one: From 2017 to 2018, the audience for Myka Stauffer’s channel doubled, and she was able to turn those numbers into deals with brands like Dreft and Glossier, fancy vacations, luxury cars and a new four-bedroom, 5,700-square-foot home.

But by early 2020, viewers noticed that Huxley had disappeared from family videos. Late last month, Myka and James posted a video in which they tearfully explained that they were ill equipped to handle Huxley’s challenges. There were vague allusions to the safety of their other kids and the confession that they’d found Huxley a new home, with a new family. Cue the outrage.

The scandal has prompted debates about international adoptions, about whether a second home can ever be in an adopted child’s best interest, about racism and white saviorism — all valid and important. But the piece that has stuck with me is the question of whether anyone’s children — influencer’s or not — belong on a parent’s social media feed at all.

Scroll casually through your platform of choice and you’ll see kids. Kids protesting on Pinterest; kids posing on Instagram; kids socially distanced proms and graduations on Facebook. Kids of people you know I.R.L. and kids of people you don’t. Kids who most likely haven’t given their permission for you and me to see them or who have simply accepted this exposure as part of modern life.

Every time we post a picture, we’re telling a story, crafting the myth of our own life. Images of our children become part of that mythology. A shot of kids frolicking on the beach or posing at Disney World tells a story about prosperity, happiness and ease. A photo of well-scrubbed kids on the first day of school says My children are thriving. I’m a good mom.

With normal people — those of us who aren’t running monetized YouTube channels or posting “emotional” videos of our “motherhood journeys” — things are not as clearly commercialized as they were for the Stauffers. We aren’t partnering with brands, we aren’t selling goods or services. But we are always selling ourselves.

It’s complicated — especially if you’ve got any kind of public profile. When my older daughter and blogs were both in their infancy, I posted pictures of my new baby and wrote about new motherhood. I found community and support from other new mothers.

But as my daughter got older, as she went from a sleeping, pooping blob to an actual person, and as the world soured on so-called mommy blogging, the sharing got harder to justify. After all, my daughter had never consented to appearing on my blog. How would she feel when she got old enough to Google and discovered her entire life online?

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If You Didn’t ‘Sharent,’ Did You Even Parent?

Children are concerned about online privacy violations. The culprits? Their parents.

I’m Lucy. I’m 7 years old and my mom posts pictures of me. on Insta– online. I’m Elmer, I’m 18 years old. My mom shares too much about me online. I’m Zoya. I’m 16 years old and my mom shares my whole life. If you’re going to be so worked up about it then I’ll take it down. But I don’t agree with you, just for the record. Why are we here today? To talk about the photos. Yes. Let me show you a few. This. What’s the big deal? I think you look so cute. And it was a nice moment. What’s wrong with it? Yeah because you didn’t ask. I also think of it as connecting to other people that I know in real life. You know, like just think, like Abu and grandpa? How else do they know about you guys, except to see you there? You can call and FaceTime. You can – You can do many other stuff to see them instead of through social media. Yeah, that’s true. That’s a really good point. By age 5 the average kid has 1,500 photos of them online. Technically yes. It’s a photo where I’m shirtless and I’m not ready for a photo. All it takes is one person and one hack and there goes all your privacy. Remember when I was getting my debit card? No, I know you didn’t, but it was like the ... By 2030 parents sharing about their kids online will account to two-thirds of identity fraud. What is everybody so worried about? The sauce-on-the-face photo like what is it going to do that is like wrecking everybody’s life in their imagination? I think the sauce-on-the-face photo ... that’s just an embarrassing photo, but you know the photo of me in a bathing suit ... Someone out there could look at my body and think something of me that I wouldn’t want them to think. But you go on the beach in those clothes, and strangers could take photos of you on the beach and do what they want with those photos. But you’re my parent, you’re my mom ... Right. Yeah, I would think about that. Yeah. You would? So now you would say that you would consider ... I would maybe. Not really. Unless we stop taking vacations together, and stop having good times together, that it would actually, honestly would be depressing, if I couldn’t document it for Insta. If it’s not on Insta, it didn’t even happen. You really feel that way? Yeah because ... yeah. Yeah. Do you think kids should have veto power, the ability to say, please take that down. You have to. I absolutely think that kids should have veto power. And again, it’s because of how aware I am of the implications of the digital footprint that I say that. Some facts: In France, kids can sue their parents for sharing too much about them. I mean, I would. What should I say? They just don’t know what they’re doing, France. If I’d asked you about that picture would you be O.K. if I posted it? Uh, Yes. Oh, really? So it’s actually, about the asking not about the picture itself. Uh-huh. Posting any private information or anything online should be my call. I really try to limit the amount of things I aggravate you with. And if a photo or an upload is causing so much aggravation, is it worth it? It’s probably not. So I understand where you’re coming from.

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Children are concerned about online privacy violations. The culprits? Their parents.CreditCredit...The New York Times

So I went the other way. For years, I didn’t post my daughters’ faces. I rarely even mentioned their names.

Then came lockdown. With the kids home all day, the boundaries relaxed, and my 12-year-old, who is a ham, decided (correctly, I suspect) that plenty of my followers would rather interact with her than with me. Who am I to deny her the pleasure of an adoring fandom — or the fandom the pleasure of my adorable kid?

Except now I’m thinking about Huxley.

In her 1977 book “On Photography,” Susan Sontag wrote: “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder — a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

Sontag died the year Facebook started, before influencers were a thing. But she would have recognized the violation; the way Myka and James Stauffer turned Huxley into a character on a show for which he’d never auditioned — an extreme version of what all new parents do when they “debut” pictures of their new babies.

We are undeniably living in a sad and frightened time. Now, more than ever, children on social media are a bright spot, offering respite, comic relief, connection with far-off friends and sheltering-in-place relatives, even hope for the future.

But it’s true that so many of us have gotten used to posting and consuming and sharing those images constantly, endlessly and thoughtlessly.

Maybe, at the very least, we should be giving it a little more thought.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Should We Instagram Our Kids?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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