At 7am on a Wednesday I drop my child off for a two-night school camp. The first big school camp. Children carry their pillows under their arms and drag behind them suitcases whose wheels and weight they can barely manage. They’re nervous. Excited. Some cry. By 7.45am they have loaded their bags. Through the coach’s tinted windows I can see that my daughter has settled in next to her friend so I wave goodbye and head to work.
Before 10am my phone pings. Parents had been asked to download an app so the school can communicate during the days away. There are 10 pictures of the class packed on a ferry and arriving at camp in a post on the app. I feel relief. I had been anxious about the bus arriving safely – even though I knew it to be irrational – and it is comforting to see my child buffeted by friends, smiling at the camera.
Soon the phone pings again. And again. And then again. By the end of the day I’ve received 20 posts, each consisting of up to 10 photographs, which I come to assume is the maximum.
By midday the next day there are 12 more posts.
As my day is punctuated by post after post – not just from camp, but from after-school care, from my other child’s school day – I keep unlocking my phone. I swipe through carousels of pictures of children at play, scanning for mine, confirming they are safe and happy. It’s a continuous chronicle of the childhood happening away from my physical oversight.
Does anyone really want this?
***
By the time a child is 13, estimates suggest, around 72m pieces of data will have been collected about them. Eighty per cent of children in the developed world have a digital footprint by the age of two. Much of the blame for this has been laid at the feet of premature access to social media (the subject of new federal government plans to restrict access for younger teens) and “sharenting” – the oversharing of pictures of one’s own children online.
It’s not hard to conjure up an image of a tween scrolling TikTok or a smug parent posting to Instagram a photo of their sleeping infant next to a laser-cut wood sign declaring their age in months.
But it is not the whole picture.
We have a much broader, far more intimate culture of recording our children. Of photographing our children. Receiving and requiring data on our children. It is in their cots, their daycares, their schools. It is chewing up the memory on our phones. And it is almost inescapable.
The Australian community attitudes to privacy survey, released last year, spoke to almost 700 parents. Half said they felt they had control over their child’s data privacy. Three in five said they had no choice but to sign their child up to a particular service. Nearly all said their children have the right to grow up without being profiled and targeted.
But, from their first days, we record them. It is an act of love, of narcissism, of habit, an insurance against forgetting; these creatures we have made, whom we rear and adore – why not capture each unrepeatable, beautiful, funny, tender expression, moment, footstep? These photographs feel private, if unmanageable in their volume and almost involuntary in their taking. Even an ordinary Saturday in my family might result in up to 32 photographs; an old-school roll of film.
There is something else, too. From the earliest days we are sold the idea that surveillance is safety. That, without data, parents cannot be assured of a child’s wellbeing. Baby monitors – promising “total peace of mind” – livestream not only video of babies sleeping to your phone a room – or half a city – away, but data about oxygen levels, heart rate and sleep behaviour.
It speaks to the most basic of parental instincts: protect the baby.
But, as the Edith Cowan University researcher Dr Donell Holloway writes, the “datafication” of childhood expands as a child engages in education. Contemporary childhood is “undergoing a profound transformation”.
As children enter daycare, some parents seek, welcome – and others simply receive – a deluge of photographs on apps they are required to download. These pictures act as a kind of continuous proof of life and a demonstration of the safety and good practice of early education providers. Most post pictures of the children throughout the day, alongside updates about what they were offered for morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea, how much they ate, when they slept and what early learning curriculum touchstones they hit. It can be a comfort, a source of joy. Having established this expectation, a day without receiving pictures can be concerning.
In 2019 the early education consultant Karen Hope wrote on an industry blog, the Spoke, that “photography in early learning centres has, in some ways, become a runaway train … How are we going to communicate with families that a photograph of their child in front of a puzzle does not always evidence learning, development or engagement?”
It does not end with daycare.
“Schools play a large part in how children experience privacy on a day-to-day basis,” the then UN special rapporteur on privacy wrote in a report published in 2021. The mass transition to online learning when the pandemic began led to a boom in technology in classrooms which “amplified existing power imbalances between education technology companies and children, and between Governments and children and parents”.
On one day during the school camp I receive more than 100 photographs of children.
The posts evoke contradictory reflexes in me: the first, I’m so comforted she’s OK. The second, just leave her alone.
***
In the final tranche of 10 photographs, of the class travelling back on a boat from the island, I can’t see my daughter. For a moment I fret: has she been left behind, alone? Is she OK? This is an anxiety I would not otherwise have had. I would have been on my own, working. She’s somewhere else, in the care of people I trust. But instead I worry. Until I spot her in the back of photograph nine. She’s fine. Duh.
Information expectation disrupts a healthy distance, a healthy unknowing, between children and parents. It can burden parents with anxiety. We’re all burned out and the continual need to assess and observe our children does not help.
And it is an affront to the privacy of children.
Children now expect their intimate moments to be recorded. It is, as a friend of mine noted, no longer, “Mum, look at me!” but “Mum, take my picture!”
They know to review their own photographs. My youngest daughter would come home from daycare eager to look over hers . It was tiresome. They were shit photos.
Privacy is essential to children’s development. Safety too, absolutely. But their privacy is overlooked and compromised.
“Adults’ interpretations of children’s privacy needs can impede the healthy development of autonomy and independence, and restrict children’s privacy in the name of protection,” the UN special rapporteur wrote. “Adult reliance on surveillance to protect children … constraints children’s rights to privacy and autonomy.”
Privacy is critical to children’s ability to develop a sense of self, self-esteem and independence.
Parents can opt out – in theory. Usually there’s a box you can untick at the beginning of the year. Many parents who do that tire of seeing their kid in photos with a star-eyed emoji slapped over their face or being removed from photographed scenes. Others forget or don’t read it at all. Ultimately, it is just easier to consent. Easier to float in the current with everyone else than swim against the flow to an island all on your own.
When I meet my daughter at the school gates, carrying her bag of dirty clothes and on the verge of exhaustion, she barely pauses to say hello and hug. She wants to tell me everything she did. Archery. Damper making. An obstacle course. Beach swimming. She is the proud narrator of her own independent life. I look at her, smiling, as she tells me about the world she experienced without me, forged on her own, by herself. And I pretend that I haven’t already seen it all.
