Sharenting and parents’ digital literacy: an agenda for future research

Abstract

The responsibility for protecting children in the digital environment is perceived to be that of parents who are provided with multiple guidelines for monitoring children’s screen time and online use. The societal understanding that parents are responsible for supervising– and controlling– their children’s online behaviour is clear. As a result, studies have tended to focus on parents’ digital literacy in relation to these policing and managing responsibilities. A growing body of research, however, has examined parents’ behaviour creating their own digital narratives using personal information and photographs of their children through ‘sharenting’. This paper contrasts parents’ digital literacy as publishers of personal information and narratives with their designated role in policing and managing their children’s media use. Parental power in this context inevitably extends to the control of their children’s privacy, however our study indicates breaches of children’s privacy by ‘sharenting’ practices is frequently not recognised or fully understood by parents.