Legal and child safety expert Stacey Steinberg defines "sharenting" as any instance where parents share information, photos, or videos of their children outside the immediate family circle. This includes common habits like posting pictures on social networks, sharing family updates on personal blogs, or forwarding videos via messaging apps like WhatsApp.

While often done to celebrate milestones or seek community, oversharing creates significant vulnerabilities for children and often violates their right to dignity and privacy. A recent example TikTok post that went viral, involving a mother who openly discussed a very sensitive family matter that related to parental maintenance. On the same TikTok account, the mother's child subsequently posted a video of herself visibly distressed, echoing the same family-related grievances. Although social media platforms are useful for expressing and voicing one's opinion, there is a concern around parents and caregivers who are increasingly using public posts to vent frustrations about maintenance and family support, as that knowingly or unknowingly draws children into these public disputes, using their visible distress to amplify reach and garner sympathy, with little consideration of how quickly such content can spread beyond their control. Moxii Africa (formerly Media Monitoring Africa) encourages families and caregivers to engage the appropriate departments and support systems to resolve these matters, in order to protect their children's privacy and long-term wellbeing in the process.

Below are some of the core risks of sharenting to consider before you post:

• Permanent Digital Footprints: Parents dictate a child’s online identity long before the child is mature enough to log on, creating a permanent internet record that follows them into adulthood.
• Psychological Harm and Bullying: Publicly airing private, vulnerable family moments (such as divorce or emotional distress) exposes minors to peer victimization, relentless cyberbullying, and public humiliation.
• Privacy and Security Vulnerabilities: Oversharing inadvertently leaks highly sensitive data.
• Distraction from Core Family Issues: Using public platforms to broadcast structural family crises shifts the focus toward internet engagement, leaving underlying domestic challenges unaddressed while compounding the child's trauma.
• Target for Bad Actors: Images and videos posted online are easily intercepted, copied, or manipulated by cybercriminals, identity thieves, and online predators.

Moxii Africa strongly advocates for proactive parental guardianship, urging parents to take full control of device usage to protect children from escalating online harms. Through initiatives like the Web Rangers Programme, Moxii Africa emphasizes that safeguarding a child's digital rights requires active, structured supervision rather than passive monitoring. Because online violence, cyberbullying, and algorithmic exploitation frequently spill into children's physical lives, parents must act as the primary firewall.

To access online safety materials for both parents and children, Follow Web Rangers on the various platforms:

• Website: webrangers.co.za
• Twitter: @MediaMatters
• Instagram: @webrangersza
• Facebook: webrangersSA

Moxii Africa also has a Social Media Agony Aunt for parents and children who need someone to talk to or just to share their online frustrations, please visit https://hashplay.co.za/social-media-agony-aunt/

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