Parent-Run Instagram Accounts of Child Models: A Content Analysis

The act of parents posting content such as photos and videos or disclosing information about their children online and on social network sites (SNSs) is referred to as sharenting. Recently, with the increased accessibility to the internet and social media platforms, parents in this digital age are widely sharing content of their children without fully understanding the long-term implications this will have on their child(ren). Existing within this field of study are several qualitative research conducted on the perspectives of the parents as well as the children, this study however, aims to investigate how audiences are reacting to the content of children, particularly, child models on the social media platform Instagram whose accounts are public and are claimed to be managed and run by their parents. Through examining this phenomenon, the study aims to contribute to the field of knowledge by highlighting the multiple aspects parents must consider before posting content about their child(ren) online. The data corpus considered within this research contained a total of 1,191 comments, these comments were coded and assigned a theme. The themes identified within the data set are Emojis, inappropriate Emojis, inappropriate comments, explicit sexual comments, compliments, and conversational comments.