Abstract
Modern-day parents increasingly engage in sharing of their children’s information and photos on social media. However, when parents post about their children on social media with high frequency, the phenomenon of “oversharenting” occurs. This research explores the impact of oversharenting on others’ desire to affiliate with parents. While parents post about their children to socialize with others, three experimental studies conducted with U.S. residents recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk demonstrate that parents who oversharent are viewed as less desirable acquaintances than parents who do not. This effect is mediated by observers’ perception that oversharenting constitutes a social norm violation (Study 1; N = 147). Specifically, observers assume that parents who oversharent try to become the center of attention through their children (Study 2; N = 168). The negative effect of oversharenting on affiliation is mitigated in the case of observers who themselves post frequently on social media (Study 3; N = 478). In summary, this research contributes to the understanding of parental sharing in social media environments by demonstrating that, paradoxically, parents’ oversharenting behavior may negatively affect the very goal that parents attempt to fulfill through social media sharing.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
The datasets are available from the corresponding author upon request.
References
Altintas, E., & Sullivan, O. (2017). Trends in fathers’ contribution to housework and childcare under different welfare policy regimes. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 24(1), 81–108. https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxw007.
Balakrishnan, J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2018). An exploratory study of “selfitis” and the development of the selfitis behavior scale. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 16(3), 722–736. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-017-9844-x.
Bartholomew, M. K., Schoppe-Sullivan, S. J., Glassman, M., Kamp Dush, C. M., & Sullivan, J. M. (2012). New parents’ Facebook use at the transition to parenthood. Family Relations, 61(3), 455–469. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012.00708.x.
Baumeister, R., & Leary, M. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497.
Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154.
Blum-Ross, A., & Livingstone, S. (2017). “Sharenting,” parent blogging, and the boundaries of the digital self. Popular Communication, 15(2), 110–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1223300.
Brosch, A. (2016). When the child is born into the Internet: Sharenting as a growing trend among parents on Facebook. The New Educational Review, 43(1), 225–235. https://doi.org/10.15804/tner.2016.43.1.19.
Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Slagt, M., Overbeek, G., de Castro, B. O., & Bushman, B. J. (2013). My child redeems my broken dreams: On parents transferring their unfulfilled ambitions onto their child. PLOS ONE, 8(6), article e65360. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0065360.
Cannon, C., & Rucker, D. D. (2019). The dark side of luxury: Social costs of luxury consumption. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(5), 767–779. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218796790.
Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Glick, P. (2007). Universal dimensions of social cognition: Warmth and competence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(2), 77–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.11.005.
Fox, A. K., & Hoy, M. G. (2019). Smart devices, smart decisions? Implications of parents’ sharenting for children’s online privacy: An investigation of mothers. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 38(4), 414–432. https://doi.org/10.1177/0743915619858290.
Goodman, J. K., Cryder, C. E., & Cheema, A. (2013). Data collection in a flat world: The strengths and weaknesses of Mechanical Turk samples. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 26(3), 213–224. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.1753.
Hayes, A. F. (2013). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. The Guilford Press.
Hayes, A. F., & Matthes, J. (2009). Computational procedures for probing interactions in OLS and logistic regression: SPSS and SAS implementations. Behavior Research Methods, 41(3), 924–936. https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.41.3.924.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X.
Hommel, B. (2018). Representing oneself and others: An event-coding approach. Experimental Psychology, 65(6), 323–331. https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000433.
Johnson, P. O., & Neyman, J. (1936). Tests of certain linear hypotheses and their application to some educational problems. Statistical Research Memoirs, 1, 57–93.
Kapoor, K. K., Tamilmani, K., Rana, N. P., Patil, P., Dwivedi, Y. K., & Nerur, S. (2018). Advances in social media research: Past, present and future. Information Systems Frontiers, 20(3), 531–558. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-017-9810-y.
Kenrick, D. T., Griskevicius, V., Neuberg, S. L., & Schaller, M. (2010). Renovating the pyramid of needs: Contemporary extensions built upon ancient foundations. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(3), 292–314. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691610369469.
Kirmani, A. (2015). Neatly tied with a bow. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25(2), 185–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2015.02.002.
Kumar, P., & Schoenebeck, S. (2015). The modern day baby book: Enacting good mothering and stewarding privacy on Facebook. Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 1302–1312. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675149.
LaFrance, A. (2016). The perils of ‘sharenting.’ The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/babies-everywhere/502757/
Lee, K., Vasileiou, K., & Barnett, J. (2019). ‘Lonely within the mother’: An exploratory study of first-time mothers’ experiences of loneliness. Journal of Health Psychology, 24(10), 1334–1344. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359105317723451.
Magen, Z. (1994). Good parents: Comparative studies of adolescents’ perceptions. Current Psychology, 13(2), 172–184. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686800.
Marasli, M., Suhendan, E., Yilmazturk, N. H., & Cok, F. (2016). Parents’ shares on social networking sites about their children: Sharenting. The Anthropologist, 24(2), 399–406. https://doi.org/10.1080/09720073.2016.11892031.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346.
Neighbors, C., Walker, D. D., Mbilinyi, L. F., O’Rourke, A., Edleson, J. L., Zegree, J., & Roffman, R. A. (2010). Normative misperceptions of abuse among perpetrators of intimate partner violence. Violence Against Women, 16(4), 370–386. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801210363608.
Nominet. (2015). Today’s children will feature in almost 1,000 online photos by the time they reach age five. https://www.nominet.uk/todays-children-will-feature-in-almost-1000-online-photos-by-the-time-they-reach-age-five/
Ouvrein, G., & Verswijvel, K. (2019). Sharenting: Parental adoration or public humiliation? A focus group study on adolescents’ experiences with sharenting against the background of their own impression management. Children and Youth Services Review, 99, 319–327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.02.011.
Pynn, S. R., Neely, K. C., Ingstrup, M. S., Spence, J. C., Carson, V., Robinson, Z., & Holt, N. L. (2019). An intergenerational qualitative study of the good parenting ideal and active free play during middle childhood. Children’s Geographies, 17(3), 266–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1492702.
Scott, M. L., Mende, M., & Bolton, L. E. (2013). Judging the book by its cover? How consumers decode conspicuous consumption cues in buyer-seller relationships. Journal of Marketing Research, 50(3), 334–347. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.11.0478.
Sherif, M. (1936). The psychology of social norms. Harper.
Siibak, A., & Traks, K. (2019). The dark sides of sharenting. Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies, 11(1), 115–121. https://doi.org/10.1386/cjcs.11.1.115_1.
Sorensen, S. (2016). Protecting children’s right to privacy in the digital age: Parents as trustees of children’s rights. Children’s Legal Rights Journal, 36(3), 156–176.
Spencer, S. J., Zanna, M. P., & Fong, G. T. (2005). Establishing a causal chain: Why experiments are often more effective than mediational analyses in examining psychological processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(6), 845–851. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.89.6.845.
Sung, Y., Lee, J.-A., Kim, E., & Choi, S. M. (2016). Why we post selfies: Understanding motivations for posting pictures of oneself. Personality and Individual Differences, 97, 260–265. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.03.032.
Zelizer, V. A. (1985). Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value of children. Basic Books.
Code Availability
Not applicable.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Ethics Approval
This project was reviewed and approved by the Montpellier Business School Scientific Integrity Committee. The Institutional Review Board at the University of Tennessee determined this project to be human participant research that is exempt from regulation.
Informed Consent
Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants who took part in the three experimental studies.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Appendix
Appendix
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Klucarova, S., Hasford, J. The oversharenting paradox: when frequent parental sharing negatively affects observers’ desire to affiliate with parents. Curr Psychol 42, 6419–6428 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01986-z
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01986-z