Parenting Blogs and Children's Online Privacy: On the Privacy Management of Parent Blogs in Turkey

Abstract

This study aims to determine how the digital privacy of the child is addressed based on the content shared by parents on the parent blogs in Turkey. Today, parents share content about their daily parenting practices and the development of their children on digital communication media. The fact that the majority of the content shared is about the child makes it a necessity to think about the digital privacy of the child. In this context, parenting blogs are important in that they are digital texts through which mothers and fathers convey their relationship with their children and their parenting roles to the readers in the form of an autobiography. Within this study the Turkish parent bloggers' opinion on their privacy management of the content that they share was analyzed using a qualitative research design. The data collection phase was constructed based on face-to-face semi-structured interviews with 15 purposively selected parent bloggers and qualitative content analysis was used as the data analysis method. Regarding the privacy management of the blogger parents, four basic determinants have been detected: (1) ethical principles and auto-control, (2) the child's intervention and demands, (3) interactions with their followers and (4) the legal context.