Billet
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By revealing too much about our children’s lives on Facebook or Instagram, we risk having to give some explanations to the teenagers they end up becoming.
“Dear friends, I have the immense joy of announcing to you that Manon (1) has been clean since… this morning, the day before he goes back to school!” Post publication date: September 2, 2013 on Facebook. Forty likes, fifteen comments, including, among “the most relevant”, that of Antonin who writes, mockingly: “Will we also have the right to our first periods?” Manon’s mother, with humor but still without shame, herself brought the post back up a few days ago by writing to keep her friend informed: “That’s it,” embellished with a laughing emoji.
Eleven years after her mother’s first publication, Manon is still clean, she wears crop tops and baggy pants and, at 14, would be old enough to ask her mother: “Why so much shamelessness?” This Facebook post, dating from 2013, the equivalent of a parchment written by Pliny the Elder on the timeline of the digital age, and which resurfaced from the past thanks to yet another comment, highlights an obvious fact that happy parents tend to quickly forget when they share photos on social networks: these posts age like the children who appear majestically in them.
A law promulgated in February
Nearly 300 million photos are distributed every day on various digital platforms. The Vie publique website, published by the government, indicates that according to an English study, a child appears in 1,300 photographs published online before his or her 1
