Among US parents with children under age five, 39% who share photos or videos weekly on social media report concerns that their posts could embarrass their child in the future or be seen by people they are not close to, according to the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health (2015, n=569). A 2020 Pew Research Center survey of 3,627 US parents corroborates this: 40% of social-media-using parents say they share too much information about their children, and 35% have shared content that could identify their child’s location. On the inaction side, no published survey directly asks non-sharing parents whether they regret their restraint. Based on Pew’s finding that 79% of parents report privacy concern as a dominant motivation for restriction — and that privacy-protective parents overwhelmingly describe their approach as a positive trade-off — an estimate of roughly 8% experiencing isolation or missed-documentation regret is a conservative imputed ceiling, not a measured rate.
The decision differs structurally from most regret pairs because its full consequences unfold over years, not weeks. A child photographed extensively in infancy cannot consent and may, at age 12 or 16, discover years of publicly archived posts depicting their private developmental milestones, childhood embarrassments, or medical experiences. Once content is indexed, screenshot, or held by third-party data brokers, deletion from the original platform does not reliably remove it. The Mott Poll was conducted in 2015, before the normalization of Stories, Reels, and TikTok — current sharenting rates are substantially higher, and the volume of archived content per child has grown accordingly.
Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal asymmetry research predicts that action regrets are more vivid in the short term but that inaction regrets accumulate over time. Sharenting is unusual in that the short-term feedback is consistently positive (social validation, likes, grandparent engagement) while the long-term cost accrues to the child, not the parent. This feedback mismatch — positive reinforcement at time of posting, negative consequence to a third party years later — may cause parents to systematically underestimate action-side regret at the moment of decision and encounter it only retrospectively, when the child is old enough to object.