A New Phenomenon in the Digital Age: Sharenting

The development of digital technologies has paved the way for life practices existing in physical life to exist in the digital world in similar or different forms. One of these life practices is parenting behaviors. Especially in recent years, individuals who share their parenting behaviors through social media accounts have started to come to the fore. The Turkish equivalent of “sharenting”, which is a combination of the words “share” meaning “sharing” and “parenting” meaning “parenting” in English, is “sharing parenting” or “sharing-parenthood”.

Sharenting is when parents share their children's content on social media. Parents make their children the subject of social media shares. In social media environments, mothers and fathers not only remember their personal and friends' memories; They also share photos and videos of their children. This situation corresponds to the concept of sharing.

Sharenting behaviors have positive and negative effects. It can help other parents or new parents to share experiences and thus help raise children. However, on the other hand, it can also be described as an act that directly violates privacy. It can be thought of as a process that reveals the child's privacy before he is born and continues until his youth.

What brings the sharenting action, which is becoming more and more widespread around the world day by day, to a dangerous level is that there is a large target audience in social networks and that foreigners within this large target group also see the posts in question. There is a possibility that the shares may fall into the hands of malicious people—location information, plans, etc. The transfer of the details in the relevant posts may endanger children as well as social media users in general. For this reason, parents need to be very careful, especially when sharing their children.

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