Why We Stopped Posting Our Baby Online

This is not a scolding piece. If it reads as one, it has failed, and you should stop reading.

Nearly everyone posts. We posted. There is a photograph of our son at four days old that about six hundred people have seen, and I do not regret the moment or the feeling behind it. Not posting your baby online is a choice some families make, and there are good reasons for it, but the parents who do post are not careless or vain. Mostly they are doing the only easy thing available, and I want to get to that before anything else.

What a digital footprint means for someone who is now fifteen

The first generation of children documented from birth on social media are teenagers now. That has produced something we did not have before: their opinion.

It is not uniformly negative. Plenty of teenagers find their baby photos funny and are entirely relaxed about them. But a consistent complaint has emerged in the reporting and the research on this, and it is more specific than “I am embarrassed”. It is about consent and control. A child who is fifteen has, in many cases, a public record going back to the ultrasound: the nappy photos, the potty-training update, the post about the meltdown at the supermarket, the school report someone was proud of, the illness someone asked for advice about. They did not agree to any of it. They cannot take it down, because it is not on their account. And they will meet people who have read it before meeting them.

The specific thing that seems to sting is not the photographs. It is the narrating — the posts where a parent described a difficulty the child was having. Written with love, read years later as a permanent public record of a bad week they do not remember. Adults get to decide which of their difficult periods are public. That is a fairly basic dignity, and a child born in 2020 has had it decided for them.

None of this is an argument that photographs of children are dangerous. It is a narrower argument: the child is the subject, and eventually they become the owner of that subject, and they arrive to find the decisions already made.

The bit about data, factually

There is a version of this conversation that gets lurid, and it puts people off, so let me stay with what is actually established.

When you post a photograph publicly, you do not know where it goes. That is not a conspiracy claim, it is a description of how the open web works: public images are scraped, at scale, by parties with no relationship to you. Some of that scraping has fed facial-recognition and machine-learning datasets, which has been documented repeatedly and litigated in several countries. A face is durable biometric data. A child’s face at three is linkable to that same person at thirty-three.

Beyond images, the ordinary metadata is worth naming plainly. A steady stream of posts reveals a name, an approximate birth date, a school, a neighbourhood, a routine, and the names of relatives. Individually harmless. Assembled — and assembling is exactly what data brokers and identity-fraud operations do — it is a fairly complete profile of a person who does not yet have a bank account to protect.

I am deliberately not quoting a percentage at you. There are some frightening numbers in circulation on this subject and a lot of them trace back to a single press release, so I would rather give you the mechanism than a statistic I cannot stand behind. The mechanism is enough: public means public, permanently, to parties you will never see.

The real reason people post

Here is the part I think the privacy conversation usually gets wrong, and it is the reason the advice so often fails.

People do not post their children because they want an audience. They post because their mother lives two hundred miles away and has not met the baby yet. Because the grandparents are in another country. Because a cousin they love is going through something and this is the only cheerful thing to send. Because after a birth your world contracts to two rooms and posting is the one action that makes the outside world respond.

Instagram solved a genuine problem, and it solved it better than anything else available: one action, everyone who cares sees it, no admin. Telling a new parent to stop posting without replacing that is telling them to be more isolated, at the point in life when isolation is most dangerous. That advice deserves to fail and usually does.

So the question is not “how do I stop posting”. It is “what does the job that posting was doing”.

What to do instead

The requirement, stated properly: one action from you, seen by the twelve people who genuinely want it, with no strangers, no algorithm, and no permanent public record.

A few arrangements that meet it, in ascending order of effort:

A group chat that is actually just family. Free, immediate, everyone already has it. Its weakness is that it is a river, not a place — photos scroll away within a week, there is no order, and in five years the chat is unsearchable and possibly gone with the phone. Fine for the daily bits. Not where the archive should live.

A private shared album. Both Apple and Google offer these, and they are much better than most people realise: invite-only, no public URL, chronological, and grandparents can comment. If you want a free answer today, this is the free answer. The catch is that it is a photo album, so it holds photos, and the things you will most want later — what she said, how much he weighed, the letter you wrote at 3am — have nowhere to go.

A private vault built for it. A single place holding photos, video, voice, milestones and writing, with the people you invite and nobody else. More deliberate to set up. Better in year five, when the value is not in this week’s photo but in the accumulated record being findable and complete. This is what we use, and it is what DearBaby is: invited family, no feed, no followers, no recommendations, no strangers.

Whichever you choose, it puts the storage question back in your hands, which is worth thinking about properly — how to back up baby photos so you still have them in twenty years covers what that actually takes.

Whichever you choose, two habits do most of the work. Move the audience over before you stop posting, so nobody feels dropped. And when you do post publicly — because you will, occasionally, and that is allowed — ask the small question: would they mind this at fifteen. Faces at the beach, generally fine. The difficult week, probably not.

The actual point

We did not stop posting because we became convinced something terrible would happen. We stopped because of a smaller and more persuasive thought.

Our son will be a teenager in a world where a search on his name returns something. I would like the something to be his — chosen by him, published when he decided he wanted to be visible, and take-down-able by him when he changes his mind, which he will, repeatedly, as everyone does.

He can post every one of these photographs himself one day if he wants to. That would be a completely different act, because he would be the one doing it. All we have really done is hold the decision for him until he is old enough to have an opinion about it.

The people who love him still see everything. They just see it in a room with a door.