A mother who shared snippets of family life online took care not to disclose her children’s names or real-time locations. Yet strangers still sent screenshots of her posts and claimed to know who her children were.

She may have done it with the best intentions – parental pride, sharing with other family members and recording milestone events. The trend is known as “sharenting”, where parents share information and images of their children online, often without their consent.

But such actions can leave a lasting digital footprint that exposes personal information to risks that parents never intended. For instance, children’s photos can be manipulated using generative AI tools, and these images can end up on pornographic sites and social media channels.

According to the Internet Watch Foundation in Britain, more than 8,000 realistic artificial intelligence-generated images and videos of child sexual abuse were found online in 2025, a 14% increase from the previous year. Britain’s National Crime Agency has warned parents about posting images of their children publicly online.

Despite these stark warnings, how parents actually perceive and respond to these risks in daily life remains a complex question.

In a study we conducted involving 152 parents of children aged 12 and under across nine Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern locations, we examined parents’ motivations for protecting their children’s information online and what this could mean for educating parents about the risks and the actions they can take.

Our study found that most parents already recognise the risk of strangers misusing their children’s data and believe that the consequences could be serious. Yet concern alone did not appear to be the strongest basis for protective action.

Parents’ intentions were more strongly associated with whether they believed a measure would work and whether they felt capable of carrying it out. As such, what they need is better, more practical guidance on what to do beyond withholding obvious details. That includes managing audiences, limiting redistribution and understanding the limits of available privacy measures.

Even for parents who are comfortable online, these steps do not always come naturally.

Sharenting has become a natural part of family life. At the same time, parents are increasingly having to consider difficult questions. Who may eventually see a post, and what will they do with the image? What information might an image unintentionally reveal? How might a child feel about the post in the future?

Public discussion has often addressed these questions by emphasising risks such as digital profiling, identity theft, unwanted redistribution and the accumulation of a child’s digital footprint before the child can consent to it. These concerns are important. But greater awareness of risk, by itself, may not be enough to strengthen parents’ intentions to take protective action.

In our study, we examined parents’ online protection of children through two sets of questions. First, how serious is the potential harm, and how likely is it to affect my child? Second, is there an effective response, and do I feel capable of carrying it out without excessive difficulty?

This distinction allows us to look beyond whether parents are concerned. It helps us understand whether parents believe that practical, effective and manageable actions are available to them.

We examined 16 actions, including limiting audiences, managing resharing permissions, disabling location tags and metadata, withholding identifying information, avoiding potentially embarrassing content and seeking a child’s permission before posting.

The central finding was that parents’ assessment of their ability to protect their children online was significantly associated with their intention to take action. The strongest predictor was whether parents believed that a protective measure would work. The next strongest was whether they felt capable of carrying it out themselves.

For instance, parents who believed turning off location tags and metadata would protect their child reported a stronger intention to do so. Parents who were confident about keeping identifying details such as birth dates and schools out of photos and captions also reported a stronger intention to do so.

Perceived threat still had a role, but for a narrower range of intentions involving children’s identity, visibility, reputation and consent. These included withholding real names, avoiding potentially embarrassing images, not showing a child’s face, removing sharing permissions and asking permission before posting.

Such protective measures may sound familiar. Familiarity, however, does not seem to have led to common practice. In our study, parents who posted about their children more often tended to report weaker intentions to protect them, as did parents with public accounts.

Ultimately, awareness only leads to protection when paired with measures parents feel capable of carrying out.

Three actions can make sharenting safer. First, parents must judge the content, not just the settings. A uniform, street sign, house number or birthday cake may seem harmless, but details accumulated across posts can reveal a child’s identity, age, location and routine. 

In one reported incident in Malaysia, a well-dressed stranger called a child by name on school grounds in an alleged attempt to lead her away before the teacher noticed and intervened. The child’s father believed the stranger had obtained the information from social media.

Consider a run of ordinary posts: a first-day-of-school photo showing the school crest, a birthday cake with a candle shaped like the number seven and a weekend shot at the playground below the block. None reveals much on its own. Together, they can tell a stranger a child’s school, age and neighbourhood.

Second, parents should consider matching the audience to the purpose. Family updates may be better shared in a small private group than on a public account. Privacy settings help, but they cannot prevent someone from capturing or forwarding a post.

Third, parents should decide what happens after a post. Sharenting decisions rest with parents, but a photo sent to a family chat can travel further than intended. Letting relatives know what can be reshared, and where, keeps that decision with the parent.

To safeguard children in a complex and dangerous digital environment, parents need more than warnings. Equipping them with practical, manageable tools ensures that the digital trail they leave behind does not put the young ones at greater risk.

The findings suggest that public education could usefully complement risk warnings with guidance that builds parents’ confidence in protective measures.

Campaigns could show what these measures can achieve, how to apply them and where their limits lie. Brief lessons at family touchpoints, such as antenatal classes and pre-school or school parent sessions, are possibilities worth exploring.

As calls for platforms to do more to protect children online grow stronger, they too can build on the controls they already offer by making protective features easier to find, easier to understand and clearer on their limits.

Safe sharing needs to become the default rather than the exception.