Halle Bailey resonated with concerned parents everywhere when she sounded the alarm about her infant son being posted on social media by his father without her permission. But according to family lawyers, protecting your child’s privacy from the rest of the world – especially when you share custody with your ex-partner – isn’t always black and white.
On Wednesday (November 6), the Little Mermaid actor called out her YouTuber ex-boyfriend DDG, whose real name is Darryl Dwayne Granberry Jr, for featuring their 11-month-old son Halo in YouTuber Kai Cenat’s livestream.
“Hi everyone. Just so you know I am out of town and I don’t approve of my baby being on a stream tonight,” Halle wrote in a since-deleted post. “I wasn’t told or notified and I am extremely upset to have my baby in front of millions of people.”
“I am his mother and protector and saddened that I wasn’t notified especially when I am out of town,” she said.
The 24-year-old singer, who gave birth to her first child last year, cited her “severe” postpartum depression as something that furthered her concerns about her child’s safety. “As a woman experiencing severe postpartum, there are boundaries that I wish to be respected. No one knows what someone is going through until they snap,” Halle wrote.
The Color Purple star’s openness about her mental health struggles show how common postpartum anxiety can be, particularly for a first-time mother. But when it comes to co-parenting, the law states that not everything can be controlled by the primary caregiver.
Holly J Moore is a certified family law specialist who’s been practicing in California for 18 years. Speaking to The Independent, she explained that there’s no general written-in-stone regulation that prohibits one parent from exposing a child on social media without the other parent’s knowledge or consent.
Halle and DDG, who were first romantically linked in 2022, announced their split in October 2024. The terms of the former couple’s custody agreement have never been made public, but Moore emphasized that a family court judge isn’t likely to grant restrictions when it comes to social media.
“When a child is in your custody and care, you are allowed to make parenting decisions even if they might be different than the decisions the other parent might make,” Moore said. “The court tries to allow parents the autonomy to make parenting decisions for their kids when the child is in that parent’s custody. They don’t really want to get into the nitty-gritty of every single decision. They really just want to say, ‘We’ve decided that this parent is able to have custody for however much time.’”
Of course, things get a bit more challenging when the child just so happens to have famous parents. On social media, some people were quick to criticize the Grown-ish star by pointing out that Halle frequently posts her son on her own Instagram page. Others rushed to Halle’s defense, claiming that a YouTube livestream – which was broadcast to Cenat’s millions of subscribers – wasn’t the most appropriate environment for a child to be featured online.
“Halle not wanting her child on a livestream full of naive teenagers and young adults is completely understandable,” one fan wrote on X/Twitter. “You guys genuinely hate women because the Halle Bailey hate train right now is insane.”
“I might be the only person on Halle Bailey’s side. I don’t think how she feels is wrong,” another user said. “She said he didn’t tell her about the baby doing the livestream and he definitely could’ve simply told her that. Parenting is an equal thing.”
In high-profile custody battles, Moore explained that a judge may be more likely to sign off on privacy restrictions or other security-related concerns than they would for an average case. With the rise of influencers and adolescents being increasingly featured on social media, these parental controls in custody cases may soon become more common.
More famous figures have made the decision to avoid posting their child on social media too. Actors Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard were early pioneers of covering their children’s faces on Instagram with an emoji, while Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik, and Chris Pratt and Katherine Schwarzenegger, have followed suit.
Despite Halle’s valid concerns about her son being featured on a YouTube livestream, Moore recommended such private disagreements between co-parents should occur far away from public platforms. Otherwise, anyone is allowed to form an opinion.
Instead, the family lawyer suggested that co-parents should come to a mutual agreement on their child’s social media privacy. “Recognize the parameters of what you have the right to control and what you don’t have the right to control,” she said. “Unless there’s some specific order saying the child cannot be exposed in that way, that’s totally fair game.”
Halle later deactivated her X/Twitter account after Cenat’s livestream, only to return one day later to issue an apology for her public reaction.
“Yesterday maybe I did overreact and shouldn’t have brought it here. I know that Halo is always safe with his dad. I just don’t like finding out with the rest of the world what my baby is doing,” she wrote.
It appears that Halle and DDG did exactly what family lawyers recommend healthy co-parents do: talk it through offline.
