Combatting Sharenting: Interventions to Alter Parents' Attitudes Towards Posting About Their Children Online

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Topic - Technology, Media & Child Development

Abstract

As parents have become active on social media, concerns have arisen regarding “sharenting”: a phenomenon in which parents disclose detailed information about their children online. While posting information about one’s child has many benefits (Moser et al., 2017; Ouvrein & Verswijvel, 2019), there are also risks associated with oversharing online. Predatory individuals may use children’s information to sell to data brokers, forge fraudulent identities, or carry out physical abductions (Minkus et al., 2015; Coughlan, 2018). Additionally, sharing sensitive or embarrassing information about children may violate their boundaries and deprive them of engaging in impression management, potentially damaging parent-child relationships (Ouvrein & Verswijvel, 2019). There is generally a lack of education for adults who are trying to navigate social media; therefore, it is important to develop strategies to mitigate sharenting. In the present study, we aim to measure the efficacy of different interventions for sharenting.
We designed two interventions to dissuade parents from electing to post inappropriate content about children online. In one intervention (N=82), parents watched a video about the dangers of sharenting. In the other (N=79), parents watched the same video but also wrote a summary of its content. A control group received a video unrelated to sharenting (N=85). 246 parents with at least one child under age 18 were asked identical questions about their opinions of child-centered media before and after the intervention.
We categorized photos and posts about children as appropriate or inappropriate to post online based on previous literature. We measured how parents’ inclination toward posting these items changed based on the intervention. Additionally, we measured how appropriate participants believed it was to post different categories of child-centered media online and their perceived importance of seeking permission from their child before posting.
Parents were more reluctant to post both inappropriate (F(2, 240) = 3.596, p = .029) and appropriate content (F(2, 240) = 8.608, p < .001) after the video and summarization task. Parents also rated both types of content as less appropriate after this intervention (inappropriate content, F(2, 243) = 5.75, p = .004; appropriate content, F(2, 243) = 3.717, p = .026). In contrast, the video intervention without the summarization task did not produce significantly different results than the control condition on these measures. Furthermore, none of the interventions changed parents’ perceived importance of seeking their children’s permission before posting. Additionally, we found participants’ attitudes about how important it was to ask their children’s permission before sharing information about them online did not strongly predict how often they actually asked their children for permission (r(242) = 0.58, p < .001).
These findings suggest that a video with a summarization task that portrays sharenting negatively can influence parents’ short-term attitudes toward sharenting. Given the effects on both appropriate and inappropriate posts, policymakers and educators should consider whether changing parents’ attitudes toward posting appropriate child-centered content is worth making them more reluctant to post inappropriate content. Broadly speaking, these results suggest that videos combined with summarization tasks can be effective interventions for changing short-term attitudes.

Authors

• Sterling Williams-Ceci, Cornell University
  Presenting Author

• Gillian Grose, University of Maryland - College Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Annika Pinch, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rene F. Kizilcec, Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Neil A. Lewis, Jr., Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Author