Parents share thousands of pictures of their children - now comes the criticism of "sharenting"

Gwyneth Paltrow shared a picture of her daughter Apple to her six million followers - and Apple went crazy. The event received a lot of attention, and several observers see the protest as a start to an uprising. How will Generation Z actually respond to the thousands of images on the web that document a whole upbringing?

- Since I am with my children so much, I post pictures of them. If any part of my privacy is to be found on the internet then they must be included. I could have ignored that, but then I had also chosen to live a life outside of society.

Anna Björklund is a program manager, podder and two grandchildren, and has been on the internet since she was ten years old. She is now 28 and has close to 7,000 followers on Instagram, where she posts quite frequently pictures of the children Karl-Gustaf and Filomena, a two-year-old respectively.

- It's not a big difference between the internet and the real world. People are reasonably comfortable with having their children in a public place. I don't usually have my kids naked in a public place, nor naked pictures of them on the internet. These are the same rules that apply.

In addition to nudity, Anna Björklund avoids publishing whining.

- I don't like to discuss that the children are hard on strangers. I don't want to produce them in bad days, ”she says.

Unlike millennials, who have been on the Internet for over twenty years, the younger generation Z will have left digital footprints since before they were born. American researcher Stacey Steinberg is a professor of law and specializes in children's integrity. She writes that sharenting means a cultural paradigm shift for what a childhood is.

A study by security company AVG shows that a quarter of all babies in the US and Europe exist on the Internet before they are born, by having their parents upload ultrasound images of them as embryos. An average British five-year-old is found on 1,500 images online according to the domain company Nominet, and in the United States, 92 percent of all children under the age of two have a unique digital identity.

In Sweden there are no recent statistics, but Kamrat-Posten did a survey about the phenomenon four years ago, and then KP readers testified that more than one in four parents posted pictures of them without permission. Since then, the number of angry submitters on the subject has decreased to the newspaper. Lukas Björkman, editor-in-chief at Kamrat-Posten, believes that one of the reasons for this may be that parents and children are now on different platforms.

- KP readers share exactly what they want with exactly what they want on Snap. The parents post boring pictures on Facebook and Insta. So there are certainly many children who do not know what pictures their parents post, energy scrolling Facebook and Insta ... Especially Facebook has been emptied of people under the last 18 years, Lukas Björkman writes in an e-mail to the Cultural News.

Generation Z seems to have outlived the Internet's long memory, using apps that limit content. Instead, the problems for them tend to arise when they discover what their parents have done. Children's self-googling is described by The Atlantic as a new rite of passage , a new transitional rite .

It's not just Gwyneth Paltrow's daughter who has been fired. Instagram kids have grown up, writes Aftonbladets Johanna Fränden. American essayist Christie Tate hit a social media drive after she wrote an article in The Washington Post that she intended to continue mommy blog - against her daughter's will.

Law professor Stacey Steinberg writes that sharenting involves a conflict between parents' freedom of speech and children's integrity. The conflict has existed even before, but has mainly affected professional autobiographers. Kerstin Thorvall, Anna Wahlgren, Doris Lessing and Per Gunnar Evander are some of the 20th century writers who portrayed their children to the children's dismay. In the 2010s, everyone is a storyteller.

Anna Sahlin is an internet joke with close to 24,000 followers and a few months back mother to baby Viola. When posting photos of her daughter, she often places a small animal face or a funny mustache in front of her face.

- My larger number of followers is almost uncomfortable. Not because they are evil, but you are so damn skinless, she says. But the main reason I do this is because I can't ask my child. She can't understand the consequences of being on the internet.

Anna Sahlin says she is worried that the baby pictures will end up on questionable sleep paths.

- I don't think there is a pedophile ring waiting, but they could be used in bad marketing. By putting an animal face on my child, the picture is impossible to use.

Anna Sahlin and Anna Björklund both say they are better at internet chatter than older generations. A grandmother is more likely to post a nude image than a 90s talisman, says Björklund. They are both members of closed parenting groups and think that the discussions there make parenting less lonely.

- It's an example of how the internet label works better than people say. There you can tell about problems in a closed context, and get help and support if you need it. On Instagram, it's more like standing in a square and screaming "My child is in pain", and you don't, "says Anna Björklund.