Mediatized Families: Digital Parenting on Social Media

Abstract

The digital transformation is a structural change that affects all areas of society and does not leave the individual untouched. It is reflected in new economic sectors and business models, as well as in the way people communicate, learn, work, and live together. These massive transformation processes that are currently taking place in almost all areas of society have also influenced families around the globe.

For reasons of research ethics, no pictorial representations are used in this contribution. However, all references in the text rely on existing images online.

1 Introduction: Digital Platforms, Digital Publics, and the Mediatized Family

The digital transformation is a structural change that affects all areas of society and does not leave the individual untouched. It is reflected in new economic sectors and business models, as well as in the way people communicate, learn, work, and live together. These massive transformation processes that are currently taking place in almost all areas of society have also influenced families around the globe. Particularly, various social media platforms play an important role—ranging from fast diffusion of news on Twitter, social networking on Facebook, photo sharing on Instagram, or self-broadcasting on YouTube or Tiktok—not to mention the various messenger services which have started to dominate interpersonal exchange. But it is not only the perspective of media usage which needs to be taken into account when reflecting on the changes families undergo in a digital society. It is also the decrease of barriers between privacy and publicity, which has categorically changed over the last years. Digital publics, whether they concern millions of followers of international film and pop stars or ‘mini-publics’ dedicated to smaller groups,¹ have created new spaces for communication and interpersonal interaction that have been used by many families for their personal stories.

While at first glance the idea of making family life public to others and sharing precious moments with close family or friends is not new,² the digitalization of the public sphere has impacted these sharing practices categorically. Today, public discourse is undergoing considerable structural change thanks to millions of people having access to digital platforms. While in pre-digital times established gatekeepers, such as the traditional media of television, radio, or print, were crucial for the public sphere or publicly accessible information, new forms of participation have developed through participatory digital media (‘social media’), which in turn are changing the framework conditions of social processes of understanding and establishing new forms of the public sphere. The public sphere needs to be conceptualized as a dynamic: mutually conditioned and reinforcing co-production of individuals, institutions, and the state within converging media-technological networks, the growing relevance of which encompasses almost all areas of society. This development goes hand in hand with changes in the perspective on privacy and private data. As pointed out by Einspänner-Pflock, privacy is ‘user-generated’,³ not only by means of using the respective privacy setting of the social media platform in question, but also by deciding what to publish and what not. With the absence of traditional gatekeeping functions on social media, there are factually no limits on the publication of data, notwithstanding legal constraints, for example, for child pornography or violence. But as is known, the abundance of hate speech, cyber mobbing, and fake and manipulated information⁴ on the internet has proven that the digital public is hardly controllable and open for good use sensu freedom of expression as well as abusive and perturbing practices.

Due to the ‘media logics’,⁵ which characterize the affordances of the various digital platforms, certain digital cultures and digital practices have developed, such as the story function on Instagram. ‘Instastories’ are short narratives which consist of photos and videos that have been taken with the story camera. Additional features are, for example, ‘boomerangs’—short clips that play an animated shot repetitively in a loop. Initially developed by Snapchat and, due to its success, copycatted by Instagram and Facebook, it enables users to tell short stories of their own, with material produced with their private smartphones.

As will be explained below, such publication options for stories and photos have made Instagram one of the most-liked platforms for storytelling. But as more and more data is published online pertaining to children themselves, particularly personal photos, questions about data ownership and data control need to be answered. As Barassi points out, children need to be understood as “datafied citizens”,⁶ and critical questions about the relationship between the datafication of children, algorithmic inaccuracies, and data justice must be made. Benedetto/Ingrassia see the need for child protection, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.⁷ Amidst such changing conditions, families, as groups of people, have to find their way, which is often accompanied by the rather worrisome activities of some users.

In the subsequent contribution, I will briefly outline some of the practices used by families which reflect on media change in reference to families and family life. The digital practices can be regarded from a range of perspectives:

• Societal impacts on the individual due to the digitization of society as a whole and specific services in particular. These impacts affect family members in their various roles, for example, as consumers, citizens, or members of the workforce. Societal impacts can be regarded under the exclusion/inclusion perspective, if, for example, grandparents are disconnected from family life through the digitalization of family interaction or need more support with daily needs due to digitization of certain services.

• Digital media and daily life of families: This perspective ranges from problematic media usage like excessive gaming by teens or long mobile phone screen times. This can result in family tensions, such as conflicting practices of parents and children, e.g. the perception of control needs by the parents (viewing restrictions, accessibility, physical control of the whereabouts of teens, etc.). On the other hand, within family communication, messenger tools like WhatsApp have proven to enhance family cohesion and inner closeness.⁸ Here, we see media usage as a source of conflict and of emotional closeness, better relationships, and more sharing by family members of all generations.

• Public family and the ‘displaying of family’: this perspective regards the publicity created by family members, particularly parents, about their family life. Some specific usages can be characterized as ‘sharenting’.⁹ Due to the media logics of social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Instagram, family life is broadcast to (sometimes) thousands of followers and has, at least for some families, even created business models like ‘mummy blogs’ or ‘insta families’.¹⁰

When reflecting on this development from a media research perspective, four broad fields can be distinguished:

• 1. Media usage within families and by individual family members. This perspective can be related to all media—new or traditional—used within the family home.

• 2. Digital media practices: Platform practices and digital platform cultures which evoke new communication patterns, for example, specific age-related practices of children and parents or grandparents due to digital media.

• 3. ‘Doing family’: Mediated construction of family and family identity based on digital practices by adults about family life.

• 4. Consequences, digital literacy, education: Platform practices rely on media literacy which is under constant pressure by the increasing speed of digital change.

In order to give an overview over some of these perspectives, the approach of ‘doing family’ on selected digital practices will be applied. As to illustrate one of the main practices of doing family, so-called ‘sharenting’ strategies will be highlighted using examples from Instagram.

2 ‘Doing Family’ in the Digital Age

Father, mother, and child(ren)—in Western society this has long been the ideal image of the family. But the family, as a group, is not easily defined. As diversity in family constellations increases evermore, so does uncertainty about where the boundary of the concept of ‘family’ should be drawn. Nowadays, family definitions vary widely, and what people would characterize as family might not be reflected in research. Trost found a large variety of self-definitions: spousal, opposite-sex cohabitational, parent–child, and sibling relationships were most likely to be characterized as familial. However, many other relational forms, including friends or same-sex cohabitants, were considered by various percentages of the respondents as family as well.¹¹ More recently, social change affected the understanding of the family concept profoundly. More and more forms, such as patchwork families, single or separated parents, same-sex partnerships, and same-sex parents, are accepted and lived by society as forms of family. In addition, roles and tasks (for example, the classic image of the man as the breadwinner) within the family are being renegotiated.¹² Family is therefore no longer seen as “a supposedly self-evident group of people, natural or determined by family law”,¹³ but as a network of personal caring relationships between the individual members, which presents itself as a community through practices and interactions. Family, in that sense, focuses on the one hand on the processes in which family as a collective is permanently recreated in everyday and biographical actions (‘doing family’), and on the other hand on the “concrete practices and creative achievements of the family members in order to make family liveable in everyday life”.¹⁴

Parenting has never been easy. But the widespread usage of the internet, the adoption of smartphones by nearly all family members, and the rise of social media has introduced a new side to the challenges of parenthood.¹⁵ According to a study by PWE Internet Research, a majority of parents in the United States (66%) with at least one child under the age of 18 say that parenting is harder today than it was 20 years ago, with many in this group citing technology as a reason why.¹⁶

Digital media have not only changed within family communication, but have also influenced parent–child relationships and intergenerational contact. This has not been a sudden or abrupt development, but rather a continuous process of media adaption, media usage, and the constant flow of new technology. This kind of media driven social change is one of the core concepts of the ‘mediatization approach’, which is the theoretical backing of this paper. Mediatization describes the interconnection of human communication with media and the resulting social and cultural changes, or as Couldry/Hepp summarize:

“Generally speaking, mediatization is a concept used to analyze critically the interrelation between changes in media and communications on the one hand, and changes in culture and society on the other”.¹⁷

The authors see quantitative as well as qualitative aspects in mediatization processes, such as the increasing temporal, spatial, and social spread, or the specificity of certain media within socio-cultural change. Media have become so important because of how they are used in communicative behavior within society and help construct reality.

As argued elsewhere the mediatization of daily, ordinary experience as well as of non-daily, exceptional family events, such as the birth of a child, marriage, or death, equally constitute an individual family identity.¹⁸ These experiences play a major role when considering how family life is perceived, what is remembered, and how a family chronicle is developed. Memories are shared both within the closer family circle as well as with friends or colleagues. Oftentimes, media help to document and store these experiences for future recall. Though this interdependence is not a newly emerging phenomenon restricted to digital media and the internet, the process of mediatization significantly changes the communication environments where family identity is negotiated and (re-)produced by introducing the digital public as a new actor in family dynamics. Whereas family interaction traditionally remained largely private, this has changed over the years as more and more family matters are disclosed online. And it is not only the younger generation that uses social media to digitally construct family identity. Parents are sharing baby pictures on Facebook, posting about their kids’ achievements in school, and uploading vacation pictures on Pinterest or Instagram—all of which voluntarily open up family life to a larger audience.

The process of mediatization significantly changes the communication environments in all of society, and it is particularly the exchange with a global public on social media that has reshaped family communication.¹⁹ Schlör underlines the role of mediatization and states that “families increasingly resort to media activities such as communication, information, entertainment and presentation practices as a form of doing family”.²⁰ And particularly social media are regarded as “platforms which offer a broad variety of services to socialize, they support families in (re-)constructing both their self-concept and their public image through practices of inclusion and integration”.²¹

But the new digital activities worry many parents. In the 2020 study about parenting in the digital age, PEW research revealed that parents with young children clearly express they are anxious about the effects of screen time: 71% of parents with a child under the age of 12 say they are at least somewhat concerned their child might spend too much time in front of screens, including 31% who are very worried about this. Until recently, Facebook had dominated the social media landscape among youth—but it is no longer the most popular online platform among teens, according to a PEW Research Center survey.²² Most notably, smartphone ownership has become a nearly ubiquitous element of teen life: 95% of teens now report that they have a smartphone or access to one. These mobile connections are in turn fueling more-persistent online activities: 45% of teens now say they are online on a near-constant basis. Studies for Germany confirm similar usage cultures, with 93% of teens owning a smartphone.²³

Mobile media are increasingly used in the family environment and are part of the social interactions between individual family members. More than a third of those surveyed in the German “Youth Media Study” claim that they feel the smartphone is very important for organizing everyday family life.²⁴ The advanced media skills of children and young people, who have grown up with daily media use and the resulting routine use of the smartphone, promotes—and in some cases makes possible—intergenerational communication. Technical communication media have become constitutive for many social contexts in the sense that they would not be possible in their present form without media.

The mobile phone transformed the relationship between those who are physically co-located and the ‘absent presence’, referring to relationships we hold with partners, children, and family who are not physically present in one space. Various studies have shown that increasing mobility and multilocality of families in everyday life is supported by certain apps and actually strengthens the family system. Especially in terms of family organization and expressions of belonging, shared digital spaces can do good for all generations. Schlör summarizes that discursive, presentational, and audio-visual communication practices facilitate participation in the everyday life of other family members.²⁵ Examples of such practices include requests to go to bed via WhatsApp and posting family photographs on SNS (social network services).

Whereas some may postulate that media influences are pulling individuals and families apart,²⁶ others contend that media has become an integral part of mainstream family life that can have positive as well as negative effects on family functioning. Procentese, Gatti, and Di Napoli point out that, regardless of effects, media do not always have to be in competition with family members for time or attention in the lives of adolescents.²⁷ Rodríguez-de-Dios/van Oosten/Igartua likewise underline that parents and adolescents are often engaging in media platforms together and use them to stay connected and structure family routines.²⁸

3 Digital Parenting

The challenges described above have influenced parent–child relations as well as intergenerational relations in the family as a whole. Generational differences play a major role when considering digital practices applied in the family context. The widely discussed concept of ‘digital parenting’²⁹ reflects parenting from two perspectives. For one, it refers to the regulation and control of children’s media use, which many studies have shown to be of concern for parents of younger children. Secondly, it looks at the ways parents themselves incorporate digital media into their daily activities and parenting practices. Hence, digital parenting includes the incorporation of digital media into daily educational practices and the shift of childcare and care to the digital space.

3.1 Digital Parenting on Messenger Services

Messenger services like WhatsApp have become the most important among family communication means. The popularity of this messenger app is related to the increased spread of the smartphone. As a result, communication via WhatsApp is the most frequently used function on the smartphone, along with the exchange of text, image, video, and voice messages. As O’Hara, Harper, and Morris point out, WhatsApp is a relationship-oriented tool, on which togetherness and intimacy are enacted through small, continuous traces of narratives, of tellings and tidbits, noticings and thoughts as well as shared images.³⁰ The German Youth and Media Study found that 85% of girls and 78% of boys between 12 and 19 years regarded WhatsApp as their most important mobile app, followed by Instagram, with 53% of girls and 40% of boys listing it. 82% of the respondents also stated that they send messages on the messenger service daily.³¹ With an average of 36 messages received per day, WhatsApp is an important platform for staying in touch with people, keeping up to date with news and current issues, and coordinating daily life. With one in two children now owning a smartphone in most Western countries, WhatsApp is also important for six to 13-year-olds. For half of the respondents in this user group, communication via WhatsApp was the most important smartphone application.³² 47% of those surveyed in the 2018 KIM Study stated that they send WhatsApp messages daily. As children grow older, a growing subjective relevance of message exchange via smartphone can be observed. In addition, it is clear that messenger services are already used in early to middle childhood—the age group of six to seven-year-olds—to exchange messages with friends and family members. While 59% of those surveyed use WhatsApp to communicate with people in the household, only 39% of those surveyed use the messenger service to communicate with relatives outside the household. As Nouwens, Griggio, and Mackay confirm, WhatsApp is the most popular messenger system for families.³³ Their research title “WhatsApp is for family; Messenger is for friends” sums up the digital practices with many families. The smartphone is thus “seminal to keeping the family together”.³⁴ Digital parenting therefore encompasses the inclusion of digital media in daily educational practices and the shift of childcare to the digital space, including WhatsApp.

Different types of messages are important for communication between family members. For example, text, picture, voice, and video messages are all sent on WhatsApp, particularly to routinely stay in touch with distant family members. But communication via WhatsApp is susceptible to misunderstandings and misinterpretations due to the lack of para- and non-verbal signals. Compared to face-to-face communication, family WhatsApp chats are also a more polite form of communication. The request to lock the front door when leaving the house is a politely formulated appeal to the other family members—but it is not necessary due to the daily routine of locking the door.

3.2 Sharenting

One of the more problematic and highly contested activities of digital parenting is the fact that parents share their parental experiences, joy, and challenges in the digital public. This practice has been labeled ‘sharenting’ and has received wide attention in research of various disciplines. Sharenting is defined as a parent’s use of social media to discuss their children’s lives by sharing text posts, photographs, and videos that convey personal information about their children.³⁵ Studies have shown that more than 50% of parents, especially mothers, who use social media, also post details about their children.³⁶ For Germany, the miniKIM study from 2014 revealed that 41% of parents who use social media share information—mostly in the form of pictures—about their children.³⁷ Although sharenting refers to social media platforms, parents have sought advice, information, and exchange with other parents well before the introduction of these participatory media. The transition from being a couple to their new role as parents confronts adults with major changes on an emotional, social, and life-practical level. The increased social isolation that parents sometimes experience after the birth of their child can be eased by SNS,³⁸ and some of them are socially and digitally (re)constructed.

Sharenting is linked to a diverse set of digital practices. Widely known are photo sharing on social media, particularly Facebook and Instagram, and blogs. On the other hand, SNS is a well-liked way to compare yourself with other parents and to present yourself as a good parent. Through sharing, they prove to family, friends, and/or the public that they are up to their task as parents.³⁹ Sharenting also creates recognition and confirmation for parents. By sharing images of babies and children on SNS, parents hope for, and often receive, positive feedback in the form of likes and comments from friends and subscribers. This also leads to contributions with children generating greater attention (likes and comments), thus further encouraging parents.⁴⁰

Much of the parental activities has been attributed to their desire to be seen as a good parent in the eyes of the society.⁴¹ For example, it has become relatively common for the parents-to-be to create ‘digital shadows’⁴² for their children even before they are born.

One specific digital practice are so-called ‘mummy blogs’. These are mostly concerned with sharing experiences and giving advice, as well as marketing children’s products. Blogging mothers of young children are not only sharing their experiences, but they are also negotiating their identities as mothers and thereby creating a sense of belonging. And as not to forget the financial side of these bloggers: More and more mummy bloggers are making money by becoming ‘mummy influencers’.⁴³ While most mummy influencers feed into the ‘good mother’ images, there are also some ‘confession blogs’ which talk about the “bad” or “slummy” mummy, blogs that share stories of boredom, frustration, and maternal deficiency while relishing the subversive status of the “bad” mother.⁴⁴

Sharenting needs to be analyzed as a complex digital practice. While many parents seek support or advice, some research points to the trend of ‘oversharing’.⁴⁵ Sharenting has become increasingly controversial as parents have to balance their right to share and children’s privacy interest. For one, parents’ main aim can be to involve their family members and close friends in their child’s upbringing. For example, research by Blum-Ross and Livingston suggests that 56% of mothers and 34% of fathers of infants and toddlers (up to four years) use social media to share information about parenting topics.⁴⁶ All of the above indicates that present-day parents are increasingly seeing social media and sharenting ‘as a ubiquitous part of their parenting experience’. At the same time, however, sharenting has also gained quite a negative public image, and much of the public discussion related to sharenting emphasizes a variety of potential problems that such a practice might induce.

3.3 Visualization and Privacy

Family pictures have always been shared and shown to others in order to create favorable memories,⁴⁷ whether it concerned snapshots from home or the presentation of slides from vacations. Especially the common viewing of photo albums invites one to remember, but also to communicate about the pictures themselves.⁴⁸ Photos are not taken to capture them for posterity, but rather to use them to exchange information with others for the moment and to communicate with them on the basis of images.⁴⁹ With the ephemeral use of images, photo sharing is “the prerequisite for visual communication by means of photographic representations or for the subsequent communication with them”.⁵⁰

There are various possibilities of visual sharing, which are influenced by different factors.⁵¹ Typical photographic practices and motifs for families are manyfold. These include celebrations, such as birthdays or Christmas; life-cycle milestones like weddings, births, baptisms, graduations, and the documentation of achievements and status symbols like buying a new car or house. As further highlights in family life, and as a break with everyday life, there are also pictures of vacations and journeys in family photo albums.⁵² Particularly in the first year after birth, a large number of pictures are taken. In addition to milestones (first steps, first smile, first tooth, etc.), many everyday moments with the child are also documented. Taking pictures of family members, especially of (small) children, is an important part of family life for most families.⁵³ Interestingly, these pictorial practices are not (yet) changed by the process of mediatization, as pointed out by Le Moignan et al.⁵⁴ They emphasize the positive sides of family snapshots, such as the capacity for social media to elicit responses from close family members which can confirm that ‘good parenting’ is taking place. The sharing of digital snapshots can also be used to gain support from weaker-tie networks, in addition to immediate friends and family. Research indicates that such online sharing can be a positive source of support, as well as a way to gather information, especially for new parents. It seems, however, that with visualization, and the resulting increase in the number of images, more trivial moments (casual snapshots of everyday life) are captured by the families. But family photos are not only used for private pleasure and shared memories within the family; they are also shared with friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. The exchange of images enables a feeling of mutual participation in the lives of the others.⁵⁵ Pictures, as material objects, can be used as personalized gifts (such as portraits in a picture frame) to strengthen the social relationship among each other. However, pictures are not only artifacts or objects, but also serve as a means of communication. They are a form of social action.⁵⁶

When families consciously decide to present themselves on social media platforms, parents and children alike are displayed. Although most SNS have an age rating of 13 years or older, children can also use the platforms if their legal representatives maintain the account. Parents are “the gatekeeper of personal information of their children, they are the ones to decide whether and how many pictures they contribute to SNS”.⁵⁷ As guardians, parents are responsible for protecting their children’s privacy on the web. However, families—young parents in particular—are often criticized for sharing too much private information online (oversharing) and especially for exploiting their children. For example, ultrasound images of their unborn child are already being shared online, and every milestone in the baby’s life is publicly documented.⁵⁸ Children thus have an online identity and biography before they can decide to take this step themselves. In her study on sharenting on Facebook, Damkjaer found different approaches to sharenting.⁵⁹ In the family-oriented use, information is shared on Facebook “to create and perform a family narrative and identity, to mark and celebrate intergenerational ties and to confirm family values such as tradition, the cyclic nature of everyday life and being part of a lineage”.⁶⁰ In this sense, the SNS is used like a public photo album, presenting biographical highlights such as the announcement of birth and milestones to friends and acquaintances. At the same time, the presentation of the family also reinforces family identity and is as such a form of doing family. In her interview-based study on the motivations behind Instagram storytelling about family pastimes, Shannon came to the conclusion that posted family leisure images and narratives were intended to communicate “non-normative definitions of family, clarify family identity, help individuals feel a sense of belonging within their social network and community and resist the typical idealization of family life and offer authentic representations of family leisure”.⁶¹

It is noticeable, however, that some families rarely react to the comments of friends, while others engage in lively exchanges. Here, sharenting is more a one-way presentation of the family, while in contrast other parents rely on dialogue and exchange with like-minded people to form a support network: “This approach is generally marked by continuous projection, reporting, self-monitoring, information retrieval and, not least, self-identity production through sharenting, often in close interaction with peers”.⁶²

Although parents are not ignorant to problems which come along with such display practices of their children, many warnings have been issued. Just to name one of the most prominent institutions, UNICEF points to various risks in its report on “The State of The World’s Children: Children in a Digital World” and stresses:

“[Sharenting] can create potentially serious results in an economy where individuals’ online histories may increasingly outweigh their credit histories in the eyes of retailers, insurers and service providers. Parents’ lack of awareness can cause damage to a child’s well-being when these digital assets depict a child without clothing, as they can be misused by child sex offenders. It can also harm child well-being in the longer term by interfering with children’s ability to self-actualize, create their own identity and find employment.”⁶³

Especially inappropriate photos, such as nude or shaming photos, which expose children as a means of education in situations that are embarrassing for them, can have negative effects on the children’s psyche. Besides bullying (both online and offline), there is an additional risk that the publicly provided images may be downloaded, partially edited, and distributed on pornographic or pedophilic sites.⁶⁴ In their interview-based study, Kutscher and Bouillon found that children and parents have different ideas about which photos should be shared.⁶⁵ In general, however, children would reveal fewer pictures than their parents. For this reason, attention is repeatedly drawn to this problem in the media and on parents’ advice pages (see, for example, the German initiative #deinkindauchnicht, https://deinkindauchnicht.org). As Ouvrein and Verswijvel noted, young people do not reject parental sharing in principle, but they do demand that certain limits be set on what types of images are shared, how often, and with whom.⁶⁶

Despite all criticism of sharenting by parents, it should be noted that they themselves are sometimes overwhelmed by the media logics and the challenges of media use. They are also often under pressure from outside. “Parents’ approaches to communication technologies do not spring from rational, intentional decision making, but rather from the competing demands of social, work and family life, self-realization and the desire to be good parents”.⁶⁷ The conflict between presenting and communicating the “good parenting” of parents and protecting one’s own child from the abuse of their images leads to new strategies and an adaptation of image practices. Families and parents are well aware of the risks of children’s images on SNS, and react to them differently. One strategy is generally to share fewer images, or only do so on special occasions such as birth announcements. Another approach is to limit the audience and addressees for the pictures, as well as to accept fewer friends/subscribers on SNS in general. Above all, inappropriate photos, such as nude or shaming pictures, should be deleted, which is advised by many scholars. For example, parents set their Facebook or Instagram profiles to ‘private’ from the outset to limit the public visibility of posts. Others refrain completely from presenting pictures on certain SNS and share family and children’s pictures with friends and relatives via other more secure channels. However, parents still wish to show their children while maintaining their anonymity. In order to protect the children’s identity, a new pictorial practice has arisen: no longer showing their faces. This can be done either through strategic pictorial compositions (the child from behind, far away, or only detail shots of the body) or by masking of the face (disguise or subsequent digital processing). These ‘anti-sharenting’ photos on SNS also lead to new pictorial aesthetics and new visualization practices. Sharenting is hence a digital practice that stages the family on social media as its core subject.

Image-centered platforms such as Instagram are therefore particularly well suited for not only practicing ‘doing family’, but also displaying it. “Opportunities to share digital images (i.e., family photos) on SNSs have magnified the ability of photography, as a modern tool of choice, to inscribe meanings about family and construct one’s identity, and convey it to others”.⁶⁸ Doing family, so it seems, is primarily represented in the form of displaying family. But displaying needs to be reflected critically, as elaborated above.

4 Family Narratives and Child Protection on Instagram

One of the most frequented platforms for family communication is Instagram. A simple search for the German hashtag #familie yielded more than 7.5 million posts; the English equivalent #family totals more than 380 million posts—not even taking into account the many composita, ad-hoc creations, or related hashtags like #baby, #photooftheday, #instagram, #familytime, #kids, #cute, #smile, #beautiful, and many more. With successive posts about the daily routines and highlights, many Instagram profiles of families follow quite similar patterns. Even if the narration sometimes takes place mainly via the photo or mainly via the caption, the photo and the caption still form a unit, and the post on Instagram is the result of the combination of these two elements.

Most images, which can be found under the many family related hashtags, report about the daily life of the families; show the furnishing of the houses/flats; and depict (house) animals, meals, and especially family members. Vacations, family celebrations, holidays, pregnancies, and even just landscapes and surroundings are often photographed and shared. In general, the photos show the beautiful moments and highlights in life and special snapshots from everyday life.⁶⁹ However, Le Moignan et al. also found that, unlike analog photo albums, Instagram shows more trivial images that report on everyday life.⁷⁰ Due to the limitlessness of the digital space, many families present their children for years in a row. At the same time, the photos display perfect and happy families presented ‘on stage’. Finch explains this need as founded well before the ages of SNS, with a desire for recognition by others and a positive reaction to their doing family practices.⁷¹ With the combination of images and text in the contributions, Instagram provides the perfect tools for displaying family: they show their unity and community as a family on a visual level and also tell about their activities in the caption. Through likes, shares, and comments, they receive direct feedback from others and thus confirm their family identity.

Many photos “tell” a lot about the values and lives of the family, but particularly in combination with the caption, it becomes clear that these photos talk about a family-oriented topic. As split images, the textual elaborations, often just a list of hashtags, have the function of contextualizing the visual narration on the family’s everyday life or the thoughts on a topic. The operators of Instagram—hashtags, links and emojis—are specifically used to make digital storytelling more interactive.

But posting on Instagram is not meant to be just a declaration or display—it is intended to evoke reactions from the digital public or specific communities. Consequently, the public display of the photographs needs to be regarded in relation to the accompanying text passages. Just depicting the family is usually not sufficient for the parents; in order to feel like a successful ‘Instafamily’, feedback from others external to the family unit, who observe the activities, can reinforce or validate the practices that they observe. To evoke such reactions, accompanying text passages often address the public directly. Others use a whole list of hashtags as part of ‘hashtag storytelling’⁷² in order to attract attention.

With regard to sharenting practices, families differ greatly in their awareness of the problems connected with the use of the children’s photographs. Some families generally do not show the children’s faces, e.g. by taking photos from behind or from the side. Other families openly show their children and sometimes publish photos of them in which they are only sparsely clothed. In a few years, one might assume, these pictures could possibly make the children themselves uncomfortable. More and more parents have started to use stickers, a tool supplied by Instagram that was developed to decorate and highlight elements of the uploaded content. But in this case, the parents do not use the stickers to highlight objects, but to cover parts of the children’s bodies. If, for example, the children look straight into the camera, their faces, especially eyes and nose, are covered by such stickers. If the parents post nude pictures, they cover the respective body parts. In this way, they grant their children a certain degree of privacy. But the audience has started to be critical of these depictions. Some families adopted the practice of so-called “anti-sharing”, as described by Autenrieth.⁷³ As Instagram has a ‘no nudity’ policy, nude pictures are often deleted. But in many cases, photos of nude children tagged with family issues stayed undetected, and it is more than ever the responsibility of parents to be aware of the risks they are taking.

5 Summary: Digital Families, Mediatization, and Legal Challenges

Families are always in a process of community building through common practices and activities. Digital doing family practices increasingly takes place in and with the media, and are influenced and changed by mediatization processes. At the same time, through the use of the media, families influence and change digital cultures. An example of doing family practices influenced by mediatization is the production and display of family photographs. In the course of the technical development, such as integrating cameras into smartphones, it is becoming increasingly easy to take, edit, and share photos. With the exponential growth of images in everyday life, they are therefore not only used as a medium of memory, but as a means of communication,⁷⁴ resulting in an increasing visualization of family lives.

Media usage by and about families is characterized by a variety of motives, goals, and practices. From the perspective of media and communication research, two main lines of thought can be distinguished: media usage within the family, and the family as a mediated object. For both perspectives, the definition of ‘family’ is up for personal expansions and configurations—some see close friends as ‘family’, while others regard only the nucleus as ‘family’.

Media usage studies often focus on the conflicts arising from the generational gap in media usage and media cultures, but more and more studies are dedicated to the productive side of media usage, which is designed to organize, help, interact, and connect family members.

The second perspective concerns the family as an object and topic in the mediated public. Concepts such as ‘digital parenting’ refer to the perspective of media usage by parents in order to connect with other family members, of which sharenting is a specific strategy. Through the representation of family ties and family cohesion, family images contribute to the construction of the reality of the family. Sharing the images with others therefore serves on the one hand to reassure the family about itself, and on the other hand to demonstrate social recognition and family affiliation to others. While some follower responses have highlighted concerns over the children’s well-being, a vast majority overtly signal their love, support, and even envy toward such parenting. Photos cannot only be shown to selected friends and acquaintances, but can also be made available to a broad, sometimes anonymous public. As a consequence, families have to deal with balancing the need for social recognition, exchange, and identity formation with the limitations of privacy and data protection. As Steinberg explains from a legal perspective, parents who show pictures of their children on social networks are in conflict with the desire to both protect children’s rights and present family practices and activities to others.⁷⁵

With the increasing digitalization of society, mediatization takes over many more contexts and daily practices. Every new platform that is adopted by parents for doing family practices enhances the responsibility of exposing their children. And as Steinberg points out: “Parents should consider the objects of their disclosure, their children, as autonomous persons entitled to protection not only from physical harm (such as the harm posed by pedophiles and identity thieves), but also from more intangible harms such as those that may come from inviting the world into their children’s lives without first obtaining informed consent”.⁷⁶ It seems that this principle has not yet reached many parents sufficiently. It looks as if media research, legal studies, and family psychology need to put more emphasis on this issue.