These days, when it comes to kids and social media, people seem to fall into a few groups. Some genuinely want their child to be seen, in a world that treats visibility as proof you exist. Some are quietly, or not so quietly, making a living from it. And a lot of people, maybe most, just want to share a cute moment with family who live far away and miss the small things. I opted out of all three. Some days that makes me feel like the odd one out, maybe a little old fashioned to people who don't see any of this as complicated. But it wasn't really a decision in the way people imagine a decision, something debated and landed on. It was something Ivan and I arrived at together, quietly, before Ian was even born.
Ivan isn't the type to share much of anything, and hasn't been for as long as I've known him. His Facebook profile picture is still the one from university, older and more out of date than anything I've ever posted, and I mean that as a genuine compliment to how consistent he is about it. I went through my own phase of posting, nights out, weekend trips, the ordinary noise of being young. But somewhere along the way, both of us landed in the same quiet, private place, him more naturally than me.
We didn't sit down and debate any of it while I was pregnant. Neither of us announced it online, not because we planned to keep it secret, it just felt obvious not to. Some people who weren't especially close to me found out in person, months along, and were genuinely surprised. The people who actually matter to me already knew, because that's what closeness is for.
I know a lot of parents go back and forth on this exact question, whether to post your kid's face online, whether you're overreacting, whether everyone else seems to be doing it fine, and I don't take that lightly. For us it just wasn't a back and forth. It came together almost on its own, and I'd rather say that plainly than pretend we agonized over something we didn't. This isn't a lecture, and it's not meant to make anyone feel behind for still deciding. It's simply the story of how we got here, and why, for our family, the answer ended up being no.
At the hospital, taking our first pictures of Ian, neither of us reached for a phone to post them anywhere. We hadn't talked about it. We just didn't. It was only once we were home and settled that I said it out loud to Ivan, that I wanted him preserved, kept for us and for the people who truly know him, not shared. Ivan didn't hesitate for a second. He was already there. No face, on anything, not without his own say, once he's old enough to actually give it, that became the shape of it.
After that, we told our families and the friends closest to us. I haven't said it to every single friend directly. I probably should. But most of them have picked it up on their own. Two years of not once posting him tends to make the point without a speech.
The reasoning behind it is simple, even if living it isn't simple every day. What goes online stays there in some form, and once it's out, neither of us gets to choose who finds it, who saves it, or where it travels next. There are good people out there, plenty of them, and there are people who are not, and a baby obviously can't tell the difference or defend himself either way. Protecting his privacy now is our way of leaving the actual decision, whether he ever wants to be visible online, to him, once he's old enough to make it for himself. How we show up in our children's early years leaves a mark, small or enormous, and this felt like one of the enormous ones.
I still think of the internet as the Wild West, no owner, no sheriff, anything goes if you're not careful. There are real laws in plenty of countries trying to protect kids online these days, and governments keep adding more. I'm not saying every single one gets it right, plenty probably don't, but I get why the impulse is there in the first place: protecting people who can't yet make decisions for themselves, or who think they can and are still young enough to get badly hurt finding out otherwise.
I'll say this without turning it into its own chapter: some of that instinct toward privacy came from things I went through long before Ian existed, things I'm not ready to write about here and may not be for a long time.
People sometimes assume this kind of boundary arrives with the baby, as if motherhood installs a switch. For me it was more like something that had already been decided, quietly, long before he existed. Ian's birth was just the moment it became real.
I was posting a fairly normal amount online in my twenties, nights out, weekend trips, the usual. Around thirty, married to Ivan, I noticed I'd already gone quiet on social media without really deciding to. A little family pressure got me to post a few wedding pictures, and that was close to the last time I really put my own life out there.
Somewhere in that stretch I stopped believing the highlight reel had anything to do with real life. I don't think I was ever fooled by it, and it didn't once talk me into a choice I wouldn't have made anyway, it just took up space. I realized the people who actually matter to me already know what's happening in my world. Everyone else is just noise, and sometimes noise with a bit of an edge to it.
None of that has stopped Instagram from trying to sell me a bikini every time I get within ten feet of a beach. The algorithm missed the memo about the pregnancy, and it definitely missed the one about what came after.
The discomfort I feel watching kids get shown off online, especially in vulnerable moments, wasn't new when Ian was born either. I felt it long before I had a child of my own. It wasn't really about how a kid is dressed. It was about handing a stranger a window into a life that isn't theirs to look into.
Here's a number that stopped me cold when I looked it up while writing this: researchers estimate that by the time a child today turns five, an average of nearly 1,000 photos of them have already been posted online, mostly by their own parents. Some studies put the number of children with any kind of online footprint by age two at over 80 percent. None of that is a judgment on any single parent. It's just the water we're all swimming in now, and most of us didn't really choose to swim in it, we just forgot where the tap was. Ian is sitting at zero of that thousand, which either makes him wildly behind on his own digital footprint or exactly on schedule, depending which parent of his you ask.
The reasons people cite for worrying about this aren't paranoid ones. Pediatric groups point to real, documented risks: unwanted contact from strangers, photos being lifted and reused without permission, identity theft using details as small as a birthdate mentioned in a caption. And now there's a newer one that didn't exist when I first started thinking about any of this: AI tools that can take an ordinary childhood photo and generate something that was not real, was not consented to, and was not meant to exist. AI itself isn't the villain here. It's just a tool, and like most tools, it's extraordinary in good hands and genuinely frightening in the wrong ones. That's not a reason to panic. It's a reason to be a little more careful about what leaves your hands in the first place, because once it's out there, you don't get to choose whose hands it ends up in.
While I was researching this, I went looking for other mothers writing about the exact same thing. Some landed right where I did. Others write openly and warmly about sharing their kids, clearly having thought it through with just as much care, they've simply drawn their line somewhere else. I don't think either of us has it more right. Plenty of parents I love and respect post their kids, faces and all, and I don't for a second think that means they love their children less carefully than I love mine. This isn't a competition for who's the more protective mother. It's just where our family drew our own line, and I'd rather explain that line plainly than pretend it makes me better than anyone who drew theirs somewhere else.
There's a small selfish cost to this choice too. Ian talks in a way that's well ahead of other toddlers his age, holds a room, tells you exactly what's on his mind, and any of it would probably do well online. Some days I catch myself thinking about what I'm not sharing. That thought lasts about four seconds before I remember why we made this choice in the first place, and it's gone again.
This isn't the reason Ivan and I made our decision, and it wasn't on my mind when I sat down to write this post. But researching it stopped me cold, and I think it's worth passing along, whatever you decide for your own family. Spain's PolicÃa Nacional found that 72 percent of the material seized from convicted child predators is just ordinary, non-sexual photos of kids, pulled straight from public or semi-public family social media accounts, not stolen, not hacked, just public. Australia's own child safety commissioner said something close to identical years earlier, putting the number at around half. Two countries, a decade apart, landing on the same uncomfortable truth: most of what ends up in the worst corners of the internet started out as someone's proud, completely innocent post.
And that's before AI enters the picture. Right now, in 2026, child safety groups and police in several countries, Spain included, are tracking a rise in predators using ordinary childhood photos to generate harmful fake images, no editing skill required, no need to ever meet the child in real life. None of this needs to make you spiral, and it changes nothing about how much any of us love our kids or how carefully most of us already think about this. It's just the kind of thing I wish someone had put in front of me plainly, once, before I ever posted anything. A public photo is a public photo, no matter how sweet the caption underneath it.