Children's Content in Social Media: Practices and Effects of Sharenting

The new phenomenon of sharenting, the new type of parents’ online activities concerning their children, has increased children’s digital representations on social media, especially Instagram and Facebook. The main goal of this exploratory study is to theorize a concept of sharenting, especially the problems related to this phenomenon, such as negative attitude of other users to this type of content. Moreover, an important scope of this paper was to explore various types of visual digital representation of children in different social media. The main research methods are the typology method, online observation of Instagram and Facebook parents' accounts, visual analysis of images presented in profiles, including semiotic analysis, interpretative description (qualitative content analysis), and a survey. The findings have shown that the phenomenon of sharenting is common practice among parents, (especially, mothers) despite of many social risks that can be provoked by it. First of all, the security of the children is in danger. In addition, results of this research have shown to sustain gender and racial stereotypes that can be also found in traditional media.