Why aren't we talking about this: Sharing photos of kids on social media

We’ve normalised something quite strange.

We take photos of our children constantly. First steps, first days of school, the in-between moments that feel too important to lose. And then we share them. Not always widely, not always publicly, but enough that those images start to exist beyond us.

And on the surface, it all feels harmless. It feels like love, like connection, like a way of holding onto time as it moves.

But underneath that, something else is happening.

We are building digital records of our children before they have any awareness of it. Before they can decide what parts of their lives are public and what parts are private. Before they can say no.

We tell ourselves it’s safe. That it’s just friends, just family, just a small circle. But once something is posted, it doesn’t stay there. It becomes part of a system that can store it, copy it, move it, and use it in ways we don’t fully see.

And then there’s the part that’s harder to sit with. That those same images can be taken, manipulated, repurposed. That they can surface years later, in contexts we would never have chosen. That the idea of “control” online is, at best, partial.

So this episode is really about that discomfort. About what we’re doing when we share our children online, and whether we’ve fully understood the implications of it.

In this episode of Why Aren’t We Talking About This, I’m speaking with Lisa Ventura MBE, a cyber security expert, about children’s images and social media and what happens to them once they’re posted, and what we need to understand about safety in a digital world.

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Why Aren’t We Talking About This? is a series of honest conversations about the stuff we rarely discuss but probably should - big feelings, weird thoughts, life, death, and all the messy, beautiful parts of being human.

Hosted by me, Carly Osman-Holme, on a quest to dodge a full-blown existential crisis. I’ve reached that point in life where I’m asking the big questions: How did I get here? What do I actually want? And why didn’t they teach us any of this in school?