Abstract
This study offers a novel contribution by examining the micro-level dynamics of
Plain Language Summary
This study explores how Swedish parents share pictures and stories about their children on social media, a practice often called “sharenting.” Through interviews with twelve parents, we examined why they share, what concerns they have, and how they navigate challenges. Parents often want to share moments of pride and joy but are also cautious about their children’s privacy and potential future consequences of sharing too much online. Our research shows that parents use a mix of strategies to balance these needs. These include setting personal rules, consulting family members, adjusting privacy settings, and creating private accounts. Parents also draw on unspoken social norms about what is appropriate to share, as well as their own beliefs about the risks and benefits of social media. These tensions reflect broader cultural values in Sweden, where digital engagement is widespread, but privacy is also highly valued. This study sheds light on how social media has changed family life and parenting in the digital age. It also highlights the importance of designing social media platforms that support responsible sharing, allowing parents to express themselves while protecting their children. Our findings are relevant for policymakers, platform designers, and anyone interested in the evolving role of social media in family life.
Introduction
Historically, social photography has been closely intertwined with family life, with families carefully curating narratives and selecting images for physical photo albums to capture and preserve memories (Cino, 2022). With the transition from analog to digital photography, this practice has transformed significantly. Today, sharing visual content has become central to social media interaction, offering users ways to narrate and share visual representations of everyday life with audiences that extend beyond their immediate family.
The Nordic countries, particularly Sweden, are renowned for their accessible and advanced digital infrastructure and high levels of social media engagement. Nearly all Swedish internet users engage regularly with social media platforms (Andersson et al., 2024), and the number of photos shared daily on social media has grown exponentially with approximately 3.8 billion on Snapchat, 2.1 billion on Facebook, and 1.3 billion on Instagram, with (92.5%) of these estimated to have been taken and shared using smartphones (Broz, 2023). The deep integration of digital technology into everyday lives has sparked concerns about the impact of digital media and information and communication technologies (ICT) on family interactions and child wellbeing. In response, Nordic public institutions have initiated discussions and policy efforts around screen time and family digital practices. In Sweden, the Public Health Agency has issued recommendations on screen time in family settings (The Public Health Agency of Sweden, 2024). Similar efforts are underway in Denmark and Norway, where age-based media restrictions have been proposed to promote healthier digital engagement (Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2024). These actions reflect an increased interest in implications of ICT use and an urge to develop national policies and guidelines to support healthy digital practices within families across the Nordic region. With a high adoption and increasing attention directed toward digital media’s role in family dynamics, the Nordic context provides a unique perspective on balancing children’s autonomy and the ethical concerns of digital sharing. Understanding how families manage these tensions is therefore increasingly relevant. Kumpulainen et al. (2022) emphasize the need to understand digital childhoods within Nordic cultural values, addressing how policies and communication practices shape children’s digital engagements across Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland (Kumpulainen et al., 2022). While children’s engagement with social media has been the primary focus in much of the existing research (Jungselius, 2024), less attention has been directed toward how parents themselves navigate the digital landscape in everyday family life. Building on this, the present study investigates how Swedish parents engage in
Related work
The term “sharenting” was coined using the words “share” and “parenting” (Brosch, 2018) and refers to the act of “sharing representations of one’s parenting or children online” (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017, p. 110). While previous work has begun to establish understanding of motives, concerns and tensions of sharenting, less is known about the nuances, details and varieties of the activities involved as parents practice, manage and negotiate this practice.
In terms of representation among parents as informants, the most common voices are those of mothers (Fox & Hoy, 2019; Lazard et al., 2019), while a few studies have examined sharenting among fathers (Campana et al., 2020; Fox et al., 2023). Also, studies of adolescents’ perspective on parents’ sharing of pictures of them (Ouvrein & Verswijvel, 2019) as well as studies combining parents’ and their children’s perspectives on sharenting have been conducted (Janssens et al., 2024; Lipu & Siibak, 2019). Studies have covered both cross-platform sharenting (Verswijvel et al., 2019) as well as platform specific practices, such as sharenting among parental bloggers (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017), on Instagram (Holiday et al., 2022) and on Facebook (Cino et al., 2020).
Problematic aspects of sharenting, such as implications for privacy (Fox et al., 2023; Fox & Hoy, 2019), possible dangers (Ferrara et al., 2023) and risks following sharenting (Briazu et al., 2021), as well as challenges related to protecting of children’s rights (Autenrieth, 2018; Brosch, 2018; Fox & Hoy, 2019) has been the main focus in previous work. Contrasting this, some scholars have highlighted more desirable outcomes of sharenting, such as the possibility to receive social support as a new parent (Archer & Kao, 2018; Barkhuus et al., 2017; Lazard et al., 2019) and information-archiving (Verswijvel et al., 2019). While the problematic aspects of sharenting have been emphasized, studies also shows that parents are often driven by positive intentions (Ferrara et al., 2023) such as the possibilities of documenting memories, building community, seeking support, expressing creativity, and occasionally generating income (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017). It has also been suggested that engaging in sharenting bring positive outcomes for parents. For instance, Lazard et al. (2019) acknowledge that social media has “provided a space for parents to share experiences and receive support around parenting” (Lazard et al., 2019, p. 1). However, although being motivated by positive interests and gaining some positive outcomes, the actual consequences of sharenting have been shown to be complex and difficult do grasp (Ogbanufe et al., 2023), leading to parents sometimes putting their children at risk even when not intending to (Ferrara et al., 2023). A few studies have begun unpacking these kinds of moral tensions and dilemmas that parents describe experiencing as they engage in sharenting, such as juggling self-presentation with protecting their children (Holiday et al., 2022) negotiating privacy (Walrave, 2023) and managing the balance between their own needs and their children’s well-being in public online spaces (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017). Steinberg (2017) contributes with a solid problematization of the tension that occur for parents as they cherish both protecting their children’s rights to privacy, while also wanting to practice their own right to free speech and social interaction. In a seminal study, Blum-Ross and Livingstone (2017) highlight how parents navigate the dilemmas of sharing personal and family-related content online as they reveal that parents balance the risks and benefits of sharing while managing complex motivations and demands from various spheres: their own needs, their children’s present and future well-being, their physical and digital communities, and sometimes, commercial pressures. That study also emphasizes the blending of the individual self (the parent) with the relational self (the parent-child relationship), presenting challenges in defining ownership of online representations. On a similar note, Cino (2022) identify examples of tensions as digital dilemmas by conceptualizing these as “Social Media Dilemmas” (SMDs) which parents associate with governing their families’ and children’s digital presence (Cino, 2022). Emphasizing this struggle, Cino (2022) writes: “Sharenting is a common habit for parents in the digital age. Despite common discourse describing parents as naïve about it, empirical data supports many of them grapple with digital dilemmas concerning these digital narrations” (Cino, 2022, p. 128).
Most of the previous work on sharenting has been focusing on a Western context, yet some recent work has begun to examine sharenting practices within additional demographics, such as among Middle Eastern (Esfandiari & Yao, 2023) and Turkish (Aydoğdu et al., 2023) parents. While digital media practices within Nordic family life settings are still an emerging research area, a few recent studies have examined parental challenges and digital interactions in this context and have explored how parents balance the use of digital devices with young children’s activities and family dynamics, examining both struggles and meaning-making processes within everyday routines (Autenrieth, 2018; Lundtofte, 2021; Sandberg et al., 2021; Strandgaard Jensen, 2016). A recent study by Reich et al. (2024) provides valuable insights into parent-child dynamics in Nordic digital family life, highlighting tensions between Norwegian parents and children in sharenting practices and how children’s perspectives can conflict with parental behaviors. In this paper, we focus on the internal struggles Swedish parents face, balancing personal values, societal expectations, and concerns about safeguarding their children. By shifting the lens inward, this study provides a complementary perspective on the self-regulatory challenges parents navigate, deepening the understanding of the social media dilemmas they experience when sharing family life online, and addressing the gap in prior research which has often focused on motivations and risks in isolation rather than on the detailed practices and negotiations that constitute sharing.
Theoretical framework: Understanding sharenting as a social media practice
For this paper, we conceptualize sharenting as a social media practice when identifying and describing the activities that constitute sharenting. Social media practices refer to the numerous and varied activities that social media users engage in, including how people balance, plan and monitor social media use before, after and in-between their interaction (Jungselius, 2019). In addition, this study employs Ilana Gershon’s concepts of idioms of practice and media ideologies to explore the intricate dynamics of sharenting among Swedish parents. The concept of idioms of practice relies on an assumption that communities have shared and often unspoken expectations and refers to “the agreed upon appropriate social uses of technology that people create, learn and negotiate through asking for advice and sharing stories with each other” (Gershon, 2010, p. 6). Also, the concept refers to “how people have implicit and explicit intuitions about using different technologies that they have developed with their friends, family members and co-workers” (Gershon, 2010, p. 6). As new technologies emerge, idioms of practice develop through negotiation and shared social practices among the users who engage with them. In the absence of clear, outspoken social rules for use of ICTs, users collaborate and negotiate meanings, establishing idioms that guide the social practices associated with these technologies. Related to idioms of practice is the concept of media ideologies, which refers to the beliefs users hold about what media can and should do, why we assume these ideologies influence how parents perceive the role of social media in family life (Gershon, 2010). As Gershon acknowledges, “Studying media ideologies is not new, but calling the metalanguage that emphasizes the technology or bodies through which we communicate a ”media ideology” is” (Gershon, 2010, p. 283). In the context of sharenting, these ideologies shape parents’ understandings of what constitutes responsible sharing and regulate boundaries. Meanwhile, idioms of practice represent the unspoken norms that users develop through repeated interactions within specific media environments. For sharenting, this means that parents not only operate based on individual media ideologies but also adhere to a set of shared, evolving norms about what is socially acceptable to share within the community of those engaging in the social practice of sharing. By examining how these concepts intersect, this study aims to unpack the social frameworks that guide parents’ practices in online sharing. Extending the existing literature and building upon this theoretical framework, the contribution of this paper lies in its detailed examination of the complexities of the social media practice of sharenting from the perspective of Swedish parents. While prior studies have explored motivations and concerns related to sharenting, they often lack a nuanced understanding of the diverse activities, strategies, decision-making processes, and negotiations parents employ as they navigate social media. This study fills this gap by providing insights into ways Nordic parents balance the desire to share family moments with concerns about integrity and long-term impacts on their children’s digital identities.
Method
This paper investigates the social media practice of sharenting by asking: “What activities constitute the practice of sharenting and how do Swedish parents perceive, experience, and manage sharenting?” To explore this, we conducted a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with 12 Swedish mothers and fathers, focusing on their sharing of visual representations of children and family life on social media. The aim was to systematically identify and describe the activities that define sharenting, contributing with empirically grounded insights into understanding of this social media practice. In-depth interviews were chosen as the methodological approach due to their capacity to uncover rich, nuanced understandings of individuals’ motives and strategies in social practices (Dempsey, 2010; Seidman, 2006). This approach allows participants to articulate their own definitions and interpretations of their practices, making it particularly suited for studying complex, context-specific activities (Silverman, 2006). In line with established qualitative traditions, the sample size was determined not by representativeness but by the study’s aim to gain depth and detail rather than breadth. As such, twelve participants provided sufficient information power (Malterud et al., 2016) to generate insight into the multifaceted and often contradictory reasoning behind sharenting decisions.
The participants were recruited through posts on Facebook and Instagram, containing identical information posted on three different occasions in March 2023, where parents’ meeting the criteria of (a) having at least one child in the age of 0 to 10 years old and (b) being a regular user of social media, were asked to participate. The interviews followed a semi-structured guide divided into three parts. The first part focused on general reflections about sharenting and social media use, as well as specific questions about participants’ own and others’ sharing of visual content involving children and family life. In the second part, participants listened to a 2-min snippet from a Swedish podcast where a well-known influencer discussed her approach to sharing pictures of her children on social media. This was done to stimulate deeper reflections on sharenting norms and encourage participants to share their opinions. The third part delved into more specific questions about participants’ own practices of sharing visual content featuring their children. The data collection adhered to the latest Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) ethical guidelines (franzke et al., 2020) including obtaining informed consent, allowing informants to opt out at any time, and anonymizing names and handles in all excerpts. At the start of each interview, informants received brief information about the study and reviewed an informed consent form, which they approved before proceeding. Conducted in April 2023, the audio-recorded interviews lasted 45 to 60 min each. Participants were aged 26 to 46, including nine women and three men. For further participant details, see Table 1.
The Participants.
Data analysis
Following the interviews, the audio files were anonymized and transcribed using the voice-to-text feature in Microsoft Office Word. The second and third author conducted the interviews and collaboratively carried out an initial thematic analysis, following the steps suggested in the framework by Braun and Clarke (2006), in consultation with the first author. For transparency, it should be mentioned that the data for this paper was initially collected for a bachelor’s thesis written by Fröjelin and Johansson and supervised by Jungselius. The collaborative approach allowed for shared reflection on the material and the development of a joint interpretation of emerging patterns. The first step involved familiarizing oneself with the data and included reading, re-reading, and revising the transcripts, adjusting misspellings and noting tentative analytical reflections. The second step focused on inductively generating initial codes and categorizing data into sections and subsections. In this step, the material was coded for examples of how participants described their own and others’ sharing of pictures of children in social media. All coded quotes were then printed, sorted, and re-sorted manually. New categories emerged while others were discarded, resulting in eleven preliminary categories (e.g., “Potential consequences for the child,” “Parent bragging,” and “Personal motivations for sharing”). The third step involved developing themes by collating coded and categorized quotes and grouping them into themes, and gathering all material relevant to each potential theme (Braun & Clarke, 2006). This iterative process led to the emergence of three representative themes, and five analytical points discussed in the Bachelor’s thesis. During this process, the themes were mapped against the complete data set and the research question. Next, each theme was defined in terms of its relevance and analytical contribution before selecting “vivid and compelling extract examples” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 87) to illustrate the final results. In this paper, we build on this previous work through an extended analysis conducted by the first author, who extended the analysis of the material through the lens of the theoretical framework, that is, the concepts of sharenting as a social media practice, media ideologies, and idioms of practice. This process allowed us to refine and deepen the analysis, resulting in the three analytical themes presented in this paper. Figure 1 visualizes this analytical development, from initial coding categories to refined analytical themes.
Progression of thematic analysis.
The extended analysis was further supported by NVivo, a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS), which enabled systematic organization of the material, facilitated comparisons across cases, and helped identify cross-cutting patterns less easily observed in manual analysis. While the core thematic structure remained relatively stable across phases, NVivo enabled a more granular analysis and closer engagement with the full data set. Additionally, following this extended analysis, a shorter version of this paper was presented and published in conference proceedings in 2024 (Jungselius et al., 2024).
Findings: Ambiguous reasonings on sharenting
Our findings indicate that the evolution of digital social photography, particularly the increased sharing of family life beyond immediate circles, has introduced new challenges for parents. In line with previous work (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017; Cino, 2022; Holiday et al., 2022), we observed ambivalence and conflicting reasonings among parents who expressed both a desire to share and interact around visual representations of their children on social media I would never post a picture of my children naked (Informant 12)
while another noted:
I don’t think you should take pictures and film your child in a sensitive situation, like during an argument or if the child in going through a defiant period. (Informant 4)
Concerns about using social media as a platform for parental boasting were also common, as explained by one participant:
Pictures of the children’s grades. Like, look at how good my daughter was in sixth grade or yeah like those kinds of things. Because that would not be for the children that you put that out, that’s more bragging as a parent I would imagine, so those kinds of things are just strange posts (Informant 1).
These examples reflect boundaries and an awareness of “the dos and don’ts” of sharenting, where parents actively curate their own and their children’s online presence. However, our data also revealed examples of where these boundaries were less clear, and sometimes reflected tension, ambiguous nature and negotiation. In the following sections, we examine these tensions more closely through three themes. First, we address parents’ efforts to navigate the sometimes-unforeseeable consequences of sharenting. The second theme explore the parents’ ambiguous reasonings as social media dilemmas (SMDs) (Cino, 2022). Finally, the third theme concludes the findings section by detailing strategies that parents employ to manage social media dilemmas of sharenting.
Unforeseeable consequences of sharenting
A concern raised by multiple parents was the challenge in foreseeing potential consequences of sharenting. Several participants expressed concern over the difficulty, and sometimes even impossibility, of anticipating potential consequences of their sharenting. This aligns with previous work that indicated that the consequences of sharenting can be difficult to comprehend due to its complexity, leading sharenting parents to putting their children at risk, even when unintentional (Ferrara et al., 2023; Ogbanufe et al., 2023). Although we did not directly ask our participants to elaborate on possible consequences of sharenting, every informant referred to such, often with a sense of caution and an awareness of their unforeseeable nature. For example, one parent remarked:
My personal opinion on putting out pictures on children under 18 is like, there can be consequences or whatever later on when the child is over 18 and then they might be like: ‘why did she put this out? I didn’t approve of that’ or like. That there are. It can get complicated (Informant 11)
This response illustrates a sense of responsibility to guard against potential risks, yet does so through a vague and speculative formulation, reflecting the difficulty parents face in articulating concrete outcomes while still expressing caution. Another informant said:
I think there will be consequences, but that it is too early to know what these consequences will be for those who are exposed to this now because it is a completely different world today than it was 10 20 years ago, but I think there will be consequences but to what extent? Remains to be seen (Informant 3)
Another participant expressed concerns about specific images, noting:
And like that picture that you yourself find cute, when they are in a small bath bowl or something when they are one [year old] and it is just innocent […] but then it ends up wrong, online, later […] especially nude pictures I think you need to be careful with, because you don’t know where these might end up later (Informant 12)
These examples illustrate parents’ concerns about future consequences, particularly their desire to prevent potential embarrassment or risk for their children while managing the uncertainty of digital permanence. The inability to predict and control how images may later be used or interpreted leads many parents to adopt a cautious approach to sharenting, often limiting what they share or avoiding posting certain types of content altogether. This kind of reasoning echoes previous research showing that parents, even when motivated by positive intentions, often face uncertainty about the potential long-term consequences of sharing (Ferrara et al., 2023; Ogbanufe et al., 2023). This caution reflects a concern with the possible long-term impact of digital identity in a shifting online landscape. This difficulty in foreseeing consequences, especially for the child, seems to restrain the sharenting practices, with parents opting to be “safe rather than sorry”. Every participant acknowledged potential risks of sharing on social media, and even without certainty about specific outcomes, they expressed a sense of responsibility to guard against them.
Social media dilemmas of sharenting
These reflections on the unforeseeable consequences of sharenting highlight the cautious and often restrained approach parents adopt in navigating their children’s digital presence. However, beyond concerns over long-term risks, our findings also reveal a deeper layer of complexity: the dilemmas parents face as they negotiate the social and moral boundaries of sharing family life online. While parents were explicit about some aspects of sharenting, such as specific content they would never create and share, they also expressed ambivalence around other aspects. Previous work has shown that parents experience social media dilemmas (SMDs) as they engage in sharenting practices (Cino, 2022). As in Cino’s (2022) work, our informants described grappling with conflicting aims. For instance, one informant initially expressed a critical stance against sharing pictures of children on social media but later elaborated more ambivalently:
But in a way you do feel that like, it’s a twofold feeling. Because at the same time, I think it’s fun to see my friends’ children and it’s not that I get provoked when I see them or angry or that I am strongly against what they do, it’s more of, that I think, I don’t, I think, when I think about it, I don’t think that it is right to post pictures of one’s children but at the same time, I think it is fun to see the children (Informant 5)
This highlights an additional dimension, where personal boundaries and community norms intersect with broader societal expectations and media ideologies (Gershon, 2010). Similar to the parents in Blum-Ross and Livingstone’s study (2017), who navigate conflicting motives and societal pressures when sharing family life online, our informants also articulated how external expectations influence their social media practices. One informant, for example, reflected on the societal pull toward approval and recognition, noting:
I think that the society that we live in is very like, we are in constant need of approval so I guess using your children to get approval is pretty natural in that sense since its sort of a part of yourself and maybe easier sometimes to get approval via ones children because they are more likeable than yourself so you use those cute faces to get some approval maybe. Then it can also be that you want recognition from others and like not just the validation in terms of ‘look at these cute children’ but also approval in terms of being a parent, to share things you want to discuss and there are definitely forums for getting support and cheers and understanding from other parents so that’s an additional reason for posting about your children and family life (Informant 9)
Here, the informant expresses both an appreciation for, and skepticism toward, validation and social support gained from sharenting. Another example of a similar conflicting reasoning emerged as one mother described following “Pinterest moms,” appreciating their posts for ideas about routines, meals, and DIY crafts, while simultaneously acknowledging the societal pressure to meet these curated standards. Later during the interview however, she referred to these mothers again and continued her reasonings, painting a more complex picture. She said:
I kinda think that you, because you know, you do want to be one of them. You want to do things with your child. Or like, you do want to be one of those Pinterest moms. But then when you get out of this Instagram bubble and like meet reality and it’s like okay you need to juggle work and studies and it’s like how do people have time? […] And then it’s like you almost expect that you’re supposed to be able to have another kind of reality and that’s always a bit of a pressure (Informant 4)
These reflections reveal the characterizing ambivalence in our data, where parents appreciate the community and interaction gained from sharenting, but remain wary of the motivations behind it and implications of it. This latter example illustrates a broader “grand social media dilemma,” where parents navigate personal desires, moral boundaries and societal pressure to meet idealized standards of family life online, underscoring the complex, ongoing negotiation involved in sharenting.
Managing sharenting
As other social media practices, sharenting involves managing social media, before, during, after and in-between sharing (Jungselius, 2019). In the previous section, we showed examples of parents facing social media dilemmas (Cino, 2022). For this section we will move on to explore how parents describe meeting and managing these dilemmas. From our data, it is clear that the activities that take place before content is being shared online play an important part of the sharenting practice. We found numerous examples of parents describing having a set of self-imposed guidelines that they turn to and follow to navigate their sharenting activities. For example, one father described one of these guidelines as:
Yeah, but like a rule really, if the child will want to read it when they are older, would I be able to show the kids what I write or share? That’s like, I have that as my own rule for what I think is okay to post and then there are exceptions of course but like a principal thing sort of (Informant 1)
In addition to following their own internal rules, some parents mentioned consulting co-parents or other family members for guidance. One informant said:
…maybe have a dialogue with the family, like your mother or father or something, like have a dialogue with someone, like close relatives what do you think and maybe you discuss some pros and cons (Informant 11)
Another common strategy involved adjusting privacy settings, with one parent noting:
You never know who will watch the pictures, so on Instagram for instance, there, you can shut that down a bit, be sort of private […] so that like if you are not friends then they can’t see it either. So, like you can fix it like that. And that is kind of how you have to think, that you have to shut it down a bit then if you want to like bombard with kid pictures, especially if you can see their faces or if they are sensitive (Informant 4)
These examples illustrate a few sharenting management strategies that parents employ and include relying on own personal guidelines, consulting others’ before posting and adjusting the profile privacy settings. In addition to these strategies, additional tactics included creating additional (private) accounts specifically dedicated to sharing pictures of their children, asking others to remove pictures of their own children, reporting other people’s posts of sensitive content, anonymizing by hiding or removing identity revealing content (such as hiding faces by adding emojis, blurring faces, or only posting pictures of children’s hands or backs). These actions all include rather active measures, yet the data also included examples of a slightly different, more silent, nature. One specifically interesting example described was the act of refraining from “Liking” their children’s photos to avoid identification. One mother said:
I never Like pictures online. If I see one on for instance Instagram or anywhere, then I don’t Like it because then I think that I, then I tie them more obviously to me. (Informant 5)
Additional examples involved consulting their children for sharenting guidance. However, while children are consulted about approving pictures for social media, they don’t always have the final say:
If it’s a picture of them I would want to talk to them. To just take their picture, that can be done anyway […] but of course, if they say that you should remove that picture, you listen…usually, if it’s not a very good picture. But if you were to put it out on Facebook or Instagram or something then I would have asked (Informant 1)
This informant noted that while taking a child’s picture “can be done anyway,” sharing it on social media would involve consulting the child. However, the reasoning highlights parental ascendancy, as the desire to post may still override the child’s opposition in certain situations.
This finding aligns with Reich et al. (2024), who note that tensions in sharenting often stem from differing views on consent and control, as children assert their desire for agency while parents maintain decision-making authority, though sometimes unintentionally overriding their children’s wishes.
Discussion
This study set out to explore what activities constitute the practice of sharenting and how Swedish parents perceive, experience and manage sharenting. Our findings show that sharenting is a multifaceted practice involving both concrete actions and subtle negotiations, where parents reflect deeply on motivations, boundaries, and perceived risks. Central to these practices is a recurring ambivalence: while parents wish to participate in social media interactions by sharing images and moments from their children’s lives, they are simultaneously driven by a strong sense of responsibility to protect their children’s privacy and digital identity. This dual concern reflects the grand social media dilemma of sharenting, where personal expression, ethical responsibility and social pressure intersect and create a nuanced negotiation process that guides parents’ decision-making. By examining sharenting as a dynamic social media practice, this study reveals how parents actively engage in a balancing act that involves setting boundaries, anticipating future risks, and following both explicit and implicit norms. The findings align with and extend earlier research that frames sharenting as shaped by conflicting values and social pressures (e.g., Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017; Cino, 2022). While previous studies have pointed to the double bind parents face between self-expression and child protection, this study offers a more granular perspective by unpacking the small-scale negotiations parents engage in before, during, and after posting. In doing so, we contribute to a growing body of work that situates parental media practices within local idioms of practice and Nordic media ideologies (Gershon, 2010), highlighting the culturally embedded nature of sharenting in a highly digitalized society. This initial exploration sets the stage for a deeper analysis of the specific activities and decision-making processes that shape sharenting practices.
Exploring sharenting beyond posting
In this study, we conceptualize sharenting as a multifaceted social media practice that involves a range of activities extending beyond the simple act of posting images. These activities include adjusting privacy settings, consulting co-parents or family members, and self-regulating by limiting “Likes” on certain photos to protect children’s integrity. This intricate process aligns with Gershon’s (2010) notion of idioms of practice, wherein norms, both explicit and implicit, develop within communities through ongoing negotiation and shared understanding. Parents in our study demonstrate a sophisticated engagement with these norms, balancing self-expression with a commitment to ethical sharing practices.
The dual framework of Gershon’s (2010) concepts of media ideologies and idioms of practice helps illustrate how parents’ sharenting practices evolve in response to both personal beliefs, community norms and societal expectations. As Gershon (2010) notes, new social media practices often emerge without predefined guidelines, prompting users to negotiate appropriate ways of engagement. Through this process, parents in our study have adopted and adapted shared, sometimes unspoken, rules to govern their use of social media, particularly when it comes to sensitive content involving children. These idioms help parents navigate the tension between engaging in social media and safeguarding their children’s privacy, especially as digital sharing increasingly transcends traditional family boundaries. In addition to idioms of practice, our findings reveal that parents’ decisions are also shaped by media ideologies, or their beliefs about what social media should and should not do. This dual influence is evident in parents’ hesitation to share certain types of images, such as those involving nudity or vulnerable moments, reflecting a collectively understood boundary that governs what is seen as appropriate or ethical in digital spaces (Gershon, 2010). This layered approach, balancing personal values, community norms, and broader societal expectations, illustrates the complex nature of sharenting, where individual choices are intertwined with socially negotiated standards.
The interplay between media ideologies and idioms of practice within this Nordic context highlights how parents navigate digital sharing as a deeply embedded cultural practice. While individual beliefs guide parents’ decisions about their children’s digital identities, idioms of practice provide a collective framework within which these decisions are made, especially in highly digitalized societies like Sweden. This culturally situated perspective is critical for understanding how social media use in family life has shifted from private photo albums to more public, digitally mediated spaces. This shift from intimate home screenings to widely shared social media posts expand family photos’ reach, raising new challenges related to privacy, ethics, and children’s digital presence. Cino (2022) notes that each new medium introduced into the household, from printed books to smartphones and tablets, has historically sparked societal and parental concerns and has raised questions about managing its role in family life (Cino, 2022). Similarly, in the early days of amateur photography, photos were shared within close circles, typically at home through slideshows or home screenings (Chalfen, 1975, 1987). Today, however, social photography has transitioned into digital platforms, where family photos circulate widely through social media. While the core aspects of social photography, how people capture, organize, and share “snapshots of life” (Chalfen, 1987) remain, the expanded visibility of these photos has introduced new challenges in navigating children’s presence in digital spaces.
Perceptions, tensions, and management strategies
Our findings illustrate the nuanced ways in which Swedish parents perceive, negotiate and manage the practice of sharenting, often experiencing a tension between their desire to share meaningful moments and their concerns for their children’s integrity. To navigate these tensions, parents develop and rely on management strategies that include setting personal limits, consulting with family, and adjusting privacy settings. This balancing act underscores how parents engage in constant negotiation, where they attempt to fulfill both personal desires for social connection and responsibilities to protect their children. This complexity reflects the multifaceted landscape of contemporary digital parenting and echoes Cino’s (2022) observation that sharenting should not be “simplistically viewed as a shallow and irresponsible” practice threatening parents’ and children’s intimacy and safety, but instead recognizes sharenting as a new extension of parenting practices whose dilemmatic components involve social expectations of both “performing” the role of a good caregiver and “safeguarding” one’s family privacy, thus highlight a new potential double bind for parents in the digital age” (Cino, 2022, p. 143).
In addition, previous work has shown that sharenting may offer comfort and support to parents, providing a sense of belonging to a community, and give children a sense of pride by receiving “Likes” from family and friends, while also raising concerns in terms of management of privacy risks and consequences difficult to foresee (Ogbanufe et al., 2023). Our informants described managing sharenting through measures like consulting others, adjusting privacy settings, creating additional private accounts, requesting removal of their children’s photos, reporting sensitive content, and anonymizing or concealing identities. While these actions all include active measures, we have also presented examples of more “silent” actions. For instance, one informant described avoiding “Liking” photos of her children on social media as a way to not reveal the identity of her children. This silent action of acknowledging, yet consciously not Liking due to foreseeing the consequences of doing so (i.e., possibly providing a digital trace that could reveal the identity of the children visible in the pictures) require an understanding of the intertwined and complex relationship between privacy and technology discussed by Ogbanufe et al. (2023) and represents an example of a idiom of the social media practice of sharenting, developed through engaging in it. Through practice, self-imposed rules and personal limits, parents navigate the complexities of their digital presence, developing a set of implicit and explicit idioms and guidelines that govern their sharing behavior. This balancing act, as revealed in the findings, aligns with Gershon’s (2010) idioms of practice, where norms are described to continuously be negotiated within communities. This dynamic highlight the ways in which social media practices are both individually tailored and collectively shaped through everyday decision-making on what to share or not to share.
Also, in line with previous work establishing that parents engaging in sharenting often struggle with wanting to practice their own right to express themselves while simultaneously aiming to protect their children (Cino, 2022; Steinberg, 2017), it is clear that parents often have good intentions, want to protect their children, and respect their own desires and opinions while also facing some ethical resistance. However, we did find examples of when their children’s desires are in conflict with their own motives and willingness to share pictures of them. As one informant said: “Of course, if they say that you should remove that picture, you listen … usually, if it’s not a very good picture,” highlighting this very dilemma. In some cases, the informants’ reasoned on how some sharenting activities are perceived as okay, or even encouraged, yet they would never participate in them themselves. For instance, one informant said that “it’s a twofold feeling,” when describing appreciating others posting pictures of their children, yet not wanting to post pictures herself. In another interesting example highlighting the ambiguous feelings toward, and conflicting motives behind, sharenting was described by the informant problematizing wanting to follow “Pinterest moms” for inspirational content, while also admitting to feeling pressured due to following them.
Implications for practice, design, and policy
As shown, the findings underscore that parents in general have good intentions and a clear desire to engage in sharenting responsibly, balancing social sharing with protective practices to safeguard their children’s privacy and digital identity. However, the challenges they face in implementing these intentions also highlight an opportunity for social media platforms to more actively support parents in making ethical and informed sharing decisions. Previous work has noted that digital platforms are often designed for individual identity expression and that there is a need to evolve to better accommodate relational identities and allow fairer representation for both parents and children (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017). Our findings support this idea of a need for social media design that is responsive to the ethical dimensions of digital family life. To promote a healthy and fairer sharenting practice, platform designers could develop features informed even further by community-specific user-centered insights, to simplify the process of setting personalized privacy controls, adjusting visibility settings, and creating even more segmented sharing circles that allow parents to control who sees specific content. For instance, features like customizable “family-only” sharing options or notifications that remind users of privacy settings before posting could help reduce the risk of unintentional exposure. Additionally, offering guidelines within the platform that encourage thoughtful sharing, such as checklists to help users consider potential consequences, could support parents’ internal decision-making processes. By integrating these design features, platforms would not only acknowledge the nuanced considerations parents already navigate but also facilitate a digital environment that aligns with their desire to act responsibly. Future platforms could thus play an active role in shaping healthier sharenting practices, acknowledging and addressing the ethical tensions inherent in sharing family content, while offering tools that empower parents to protect their children’s digital identities. Additionally, policymakers and public institutions could support parents by offering educational guidelines and resources to foster balanced digital practices within families. Our findings suggest that effective policy and design should build upon the intrinsic, user-driven negotiation and regulation by providing resources that enhance parents’ abilities to make balanced choices. In a region where digital engagement is a norm, a supportive framework that strengthens, rather than restricts, users’ practices is key to fostering healthy social media interactions within families.
By addressing these insights, social media platforms and policy initiatives could work toward better supporting digital family engagement by aligning with parents’ current practices and needs. However, while parents typically have positive intentions with their social media use, Janssens et al. (2024) highlight that children may perceive their parents’ mobile use as “technoference,” feeling disrupted when parents engage with phones or social media during family time (Janssens et al., 2024) This dimension, showing discrepancies between parent and child experiences, underscores a potential growing concern about how parental social media use might impact family dynamics, a factor also worth factoring into ongoing discussions and future work on screen time within Nordic family life.
Conclusion
This study examines how Swedish parents engage with contemporary social photography beyond physical albums and the confines of home, analyzing how they negotiate sharing family life on social media while protecting their own personal boundaries and their children’s integrity. Our findings highlight sharenting as a social media practice that extends beyond the act of posting encompassing thoughtful decisions and negotiations before, during, and after sharing. Parents create and navigate boundaries through explicit and implicit norms, reflecting both caution and adaptability. These findings address our research question by illustrating the tensions parents experience as they balance a desire to share meaningful family moments with wanting to safeguard their children from potential risks. By employing a micro-level approach, this study provides detailed insights into the strategies parents adopt, offering a deeper understanding of the complexities of contemporary digital family practices.
This study contributes new insights to the field by unpacking the internal dilemmas parents face when navigating sharenting, extending previous research focusing on intergenerational tensions. By analyzing Swedish parents’ reasonings, negotiations of boundaries and everyday decisions, the study deepens our understanding of how their situated sharenting practices is shaped by Nordic cultural norms, digital infrastructure and media ecologies. Our findings highlight how parents are not passive adopters of social media, but rather active agents shaping practices to align with personal and cultural values. In doing so, our study bridges a gap in the literature, offering detailed empirical insights into the interplay between digital media, cultural values, and parenting practices.
Expanding on Cino’s concept of “social media dilemmas” (SMDs), we have delved into the explicit and implicit rules parents follow, and how these intersect with societal expectations in the Nordic context. This analysis enriches the understanding of SMDs by showing how Nordic parents navigate both global and local cultural norms and media ideologies, demonstrating how sharenting is shaped by both collective and individual negotiations. Our findings both affirm and extend earlier research on sharenting by offering a more granular understanding of how Swedish parents manage the practice, showing that the dilemmas they navigate are not only social or ethical but also deeply embedded in evolving platform norms and local media ideologies (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017; Cino, 2022; Holiday et al., 2022). The findings have implications for research, platform design, and policymaking. Social media platforms could support responsible sharenting through incorporating user-friendly and intuitive privacy settings, segmented sharing options, and notifications for mindful sharing. For policy and education, the results suggest that providing parents with resources and guidelines that enhance, rather than restrict, their self-regulatory practices could be more effective in promoting ethical digital engagement within Nordic families.
In this study, Swedish parents demonstrate a self-regulated approach to managing sharenting practices. They carefully balance social media engagement with their commitment to protecting their children’s privacy, emphasizing the importance of policies and design solutions that empower informed and responsible decision-making.
Limitations and future work
This study’s micro-level analysis provides a nuanced understanding of sharenting by delving into the details of Swedish parents’ reasonings around creating and sharing visual content related to family life on social media. This study provides a unique lens into the often-overlooked intricacies of digital family practices where parents maintain between social engagement and privacy concerns by closely examining the detailed decision-making processes and nuanced strategies parents employ before, during, and after posting. This methodological approach allows for a deeper understanding of sharenting as a social practice that go beyond the immediate act of sharing photos and confirms the idea of sharenting being a socially complex and negotiated practice, shaped by subtle, often unspoken norms. Through empirical detail provided through this micro-level perspective, we capture the layers of reasoning, ethical concerns, and ambivalent feelings that characterize sharenting, offering insights that other studies may overlook. However, every study comes with limitations. The reliance on qualitative methods, while valuable for capturing depth, may not fully represent the breadth of perspectives within diverse parenting communities. Also, the study is limited to a small group of Swedish parents, which may affect the generalizability of findings across different cultural and national contexts. While the notion of limitations in terms of validity, generalizability and transferability is a known concerns when conducting qualitative research (Blandford et al., 2016), the work behind this paper has been conducted with an aim of ensuring quality by engaging in personal and epistemological reflexivity, emphasizing transparency, and iterating between empirical detail and “the bigger picture” (Blandford et al., 2016). While some challenges are manageable, others are more difficult to meet. For instance, we cannot ensure that the informants’ descriptions capture their actual use, experiences, and opinions. Also, parenthood is sensitive to many and often characterized by strong believes and expectations of how to be a “good” parent, why there is a risk that the informants adjust their answers accordingly, even if not intending to. Despite limitations, what our findings suggest are valuable in the light of aiming to create in-depth understanding of user needs and practices to inform design of future social media platforms and ICTs. Still, further work is necessary. Future research could expand upon this work by including parents who choose not to engage in sharenting, offering insights into contrasting views on social media sharing within family life. Comparative studies across different cultural or regional settings would also deepen our understanding of how sharenting practices are shaped by varying cultural contexts, social norms and digital landscapes. Future research could also explore age-related differences in parental reasoning around sharenting through larger-scale quantitative studies. Additionally, quantitative methods could help investigate how peer interactions and social media communication shape parents’ perceptions of what is appropriate or expected to share, offering further insight into how idioms of practice are reinforced or challenged in digital communities. As social media and digital technologies continue to evolve, further research will be crucial in tracking how these developments impact family dynamics and parental practices, to inform future design, policy, and educational and supportive efforts around digital parenting.
Footnotes
Author note
For transparency, we declare that a shorter version of this paper, entitled “
Ethical considerations
No ethics approval needed. However, the data collection adhered to the latest Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) ethical guidelines (franzke et al., 2020) including obtaining informed consent, allowing informants to opt out at any time, and anonymizing names and handles in all excerpts (please note that this information is also included in the Methods section of our manuscript).
Consent to participate
At the start of each interview, informants received brief information about the study and reviewed an informed consent form, which they approved verbally before proceeding.
Consent for publication
Informed consent for publication was provided by the participants as described above.
Author contributions
The data for this paper were initially collected for a bachelor’s thesis by Author 2 and Author 3 under the supervision of Author 1. While parts of the data have been previously reported within that thesis, the current paper represents a significantly extended analysis. For this study, the data were re-analyzed using the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software NVivo, applying a new theoretical framework to explore sharenting as a social media practice, which was beyond the scope of the original thesis.
Author 1 contributed to the conceptualization of the study, supervision, and manuscript writing. Author 2 and Author 3 collected the data and contributed to its analysis and drafting of the manuscript. All authors reviewed and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement
Data will be available on request.