218. Why Do Parents Overshare on Social Media? AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast No Stupid Questions

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Episode: 218. Why Do Parents Overshare on Social Media?

Author: Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher
Duration: 00:34:37

Episode Shownotes

How does social media exploit our evolutionary instincts? How dangerous is it to post about your children online? And does Angela regret talking about her daughters on the podcast? SOURCES:Erin Carbone, visiting assistant professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.Jimmy Kimmel, comedian and late-night television host.George Loewenstein,

professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.Taylor Swift, singer-songwriter.Christie Tate, essayist and author. RESOURCES:"Five Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into Child Influencers," by The New York Times (2024)."Online 'Sharenting': The Dangers of Posting Sensitive Information About Children on Social Media," by Pietro Ferrara, Ignazio Cammisa, Massimo Pettoello-Mantovani, et al. (The Journal of Pediatrics, 2023)."Privacy Preferences and the Drive to Disclose," by Erin Carbone and George Loewenstein (Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2023)."My Daughter Asked Me to Stop Writing About Motherhood. Here’s Why I Can’t Do That," by Christie Tate (The Washington Post, 2019)."When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online," by Taylor Lorenz (The Atlantic, 2019)."'Sharenting' Puts Young at Risk of Online Fraud," by Sean Coughlan (BBC News, 2018)."Everything You Need to Know About the 'Right to be forgotten,'" fact sheet by the European Union. EXTRAS:"What Is Your Password?" by Jimmy Kimmel Live! (2015)."The Best Day," by Taylor Swift (2009).

Summary

In this episode of 'No Stupid Questions,' hosts Angela Duckworth and Mike Maughan explore the issue of 'sharenting,' where parents share extensive details about their kids on social media. They discuss the implications of such oversharing, including privacy invasion and the risk of identity theft, particularly for children. Angela reflects on the emotional impact on her own daughter and the realities of children discovering their parents' shared information. The hosts also address the primal 'drive to disclose' that motivates parents, contrasting it with ethical considerations and urging for more thoughtful sharing practices in the digital age.

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Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_05
Anyone who has you on their Christmas card list is so paranoid.

00:00:08 Speaker_07
I'm Angela Duckworth.

00:00:09 Speaker_05
I'm Mike Mahn. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

00:00:14 Speaker_03
Today on the show, what's wrong with proud parents sharing photos and stories of their children online?

00:00:21 Speaker_05
Mom, you have ruined my life. Look at all the stuff that you've put out there about me. Angela, we have a question that hits at the core of so many things we've talked about.

00:00:42 Speaker_05
It says this, I hear a lot about parents oversharing information and photos of their children on social media these days.

00:00:51 Speaker_05
I'm absolutely guilty of doing this and justify it because it's the way we stay in touch with so many friends and family members near and far.

00:00:59 Speaker_05
With the start of a school year, we're warned not to share the kid's school, location, teacher name on a first-day banner, things like that. What is the actual level of threat to a child when a parent overshares?

00:01:11 Speaker_05
And if a parent has overshared and wants to stop, is it even worth it since so much information is out there that you can't get back? Mandy.

00:01:20 Speaker_07
Oh my gosh, I'm now thinking about the times that I have posted photos of Amanda and Lucy on Twitter, or whatever Twitter's called now, X. Is that what Mandy's talking about? Did I just commit oversharing?

00:01:36 Speaker_05
I'm not going to say that you're oversharing, but I think that's sort of what she's talking about, is this idea that parents are posting children, right? The sharenting, the sharing as parents of our children on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook.

00:01:49 Speaker_07
OK, so this term sharenting, is that what you just called it?

00:01:52 Speaker_05
Yeah. So sorry. Fair. That is, I think, the term Mandy's referring to, where parents are sharing so much.

00:02:00 Speaker_07
I just want to say that sharenting is one of Stephen Dubner's favorite things, a portmanteau. Take two words, stick them together. By the way, I haven't done this in a long time because they are now grown women, but I did.

00:02:13 Speaker_07
I'm not even on social media that much anymore. I have lots of opinions about social media and most of them are negative. But anyway, so I feel like maybe I committed this sin like 10 years ago, though.

00:02:26 Speaker_05
What I think is interesting to at least think through at the beginning is just how frequently it happens.

00:02:32 Speaker_05
I mean, I have a lot of friends who have created Instagram accounts, for example, under their minor children's names, where they post things that their children are doing as a sort of journal of the childhood.

00:02:46 Speaker_07
This is like when people create accounts for their dog.

00:02:49 Speaker_05
Yes, they've created an account on behalf of a child. The friends whose children, I thought, this sounds so weird, but yes, I follow their kids, even though I follow the parents.

00:02:58 Speaker_07
And how old are they?

00:02:59 Speaker_05
Like an eight year old. It's just sort of how a lot of these parents are choosing to document their children's lives.

00:03:06 Speaker_05
There's an interesting article I was reading recently where this woman talked about how she had been writing about her child because she was a blogger, journalist. and sharing things, photos, et cetera, over the course of the life of a child.

00:03:21 Speaker_05
When her child turned, I think it was 13 or 14, they bought her a laptop. Her daughter opens the laptop as a gift and says, this is the greatest present I have ever received. She runs into a room, opens it.

00:03:32 Speaker_05
First thing she does, Google herself, comes running back in and is like, Mom, you have ruined my life. Look at all the stuff that you've put out there about me.

00:03:42 Speaker_07
Which you can't get back.

00:03:43 Speaker_05
I will say this, it wasn't even anyone else. During the pandemic, I turned my hair into this like funny thing and posted a picture. I just stuck it all up kind of funny.

00:03:54 Speaker_05
And literally to this day, it's one of the things that comes up, apparently, if you Google me. And I'm like, geez, Louise.

00:04:01 Speaker_07
What, you mean you put like gel in your hair and you did a kind of like 90s thing?

00:04:05 Speaker_05
I don't even think I put gel in it. I just made it all spiky and poofy because it was really long. It was really hard to get to a barber.

00:04:12 Speaker_05
Anyway, it's a dumb example of where that's not even chariting, but that's where I posted a picture of myself that I certainly didn't mean to become like a picture that's always out there. But whatever. Yeah, I don't know how to get rid of that.

00:04:24 Speaker_07
You can't get it back. It's a good thing you're gainfully employed.

00:04:27 Speaker_05
And just to be fair, it's a picture of my hair looking dumb. It's not like a horrifying.

00:04:32 Speaker_07
Right. It could be worse.

00:04:34 Speaker_05
What's interesting you bring up, though, is there are various laws in various countries that address the situation. So in 2014 in Europe, Europe's highest court ruled that Internet providers must give users the quote right to be forgotten.

00:04:50 Speaker_05
European citizens can petition to have past information removed from the Internet. including crimes committed as a minor, things like that, or at least hidden from Google search results, Bing search results, etc.

00:05:03 Speaker_07
Wait, is that possible? Can you do that?

00:05:06 Speaker_05
It's difficult to do, but in Europe especially, they've been able to really enforce this right to be forgotten and people can kind of petition. France has really strict privacy laws. They've allowed for kids

00:05:18 Speaker_05
to be able to sue their own parents for publishing intimate or private details of their lives without consent. The United States, we don't have, shockingly, any protections like that.

00:05:29 Speaker_07
I will say this, you know, when you brought up sharenting, and I, you know, look this up, of course, as I want to do, there is this Journal of Pediatrics article in 2023 called Online Sharenting.

00:05:41 Speaker_07
The dangers of posting sensitive information about children on social media. It's really a commentary. It's like, more of a opinion piece or a perspective. And apparently, the commentary was prepared by the European Pediatric Association.

00:05:57 Speaker_07
And it says, the purpose is to draw pediatricians' attention to the growing practice of parents and families publicizing sensitive content about their children on internet platforms and the serious risk that potential abusers may intrude on their privacy and exploit data made unwittingly available on the web.

00:06:17 Speaker_07
So maybe Europe is a little ahead of us in many ways.

00:06:20 Speaker_05
But what I think is really interesting about what you're bringing up is there are different risks. Right.

00:06:26 Speaker_05
So there are some who on one end will talk about, well, the real danger of sharenting is that you have untoward actors who are looking at pictures of your family and can lead to negative things. What I think you're bringing up here. Like what?

00:06:40 Speaker_05
Like pedophilia, do people start, you know, looking.

00:06:43 Speaker_07
They could like target your kid.

00:06:45 Speaker_05
Right. You're not posting anything inappropriate about your child, but still people go down a path of fantasizing or whatever. Right. That's an extreme. But I think more common is this idea of fraud.

00:06:57 Speaker_05
Now, think with me for a second about when you create an Internet password and then you have these safety or security questions. Do you know I'm talking about in case you forget?

00:07:08 Speaker_07
Yes. First pet. Where'd you go to elementary school? What's your husband's mother's maiden name? Those kind of questions.

00:07:15 Speaker_05
Exactly. And then you think about the things we share online. Names, ages, dates of birth. Happy birthday. Today is my daughter's birthday.

00:07:26 Speaker_05
your home address, your place of birth, your mother's maiden name, what school they go to, the name of their pets, the sports team. These are all the questions that are often in our security questions. And they're things that we've shared online.

00:07:40 Speaker_05
And so the worry is that there will be massive fraud. In fact, Barclays is estimating that by 2030, They'll have 7.4 million incidents per year of identity fraud. Oh my gosh.

00:07:54 Speaker_05
Based on sort of this oversharing and their forecasting that sharenting will account for two-thirds of identity fraud facing young people by the end of the next decade, specifically because we've shared all of these things that lead to the questions one needs to answer to perpetuate fraud.

00:08:16 Speaker_07
Okay, so there is this idea in science, it's the following, when you do a study and it's anonymous, somebody fills out a survey, you don't know who they are, that would be called like minimal risk, right, or even no risk.

00:08:27 Speaker_07
But then, the more you know about the person, and there is this concept of personally identifiable information, PII. Well, that elevates the risk. And then, you know, you need to make sure the person has full information.

00:08:39 Speaker_07
They may need to sign a consent form and so forth. What's interesting is that typically personally identifiable information, it's usually just the really obvious things like I know their full name. I know their cell phone number.

00:08:52 Speaker_07
I know exactly where they live.

00:08:54 Speaker_07
But what you're raising is that, yeah, all of these kind of more like triangulating questions, like, how do I know you're really you when you log into the Barclays website to change your credit card number or to get a new card?

00:09:05 Speaker_07
And it's like, well, it's also personally identifiable information to know the name of your dog and to know your favorite food and to know these things that

00:09:15 Speaker_07
You know, for scientific research, it doesn't occur to us that like, yeah, if you collectively know those things and those are the security questions, that's also personally identifiable.

00:09:25 Speaker_05
Yeah. In fact, there are these skits that are meant to be funny and maybe not where I think it's Jimmy Kimmel will go out and interview people on the street and then literally just ask, so what's your dog's name? What school did you go to?

00:09:40 Speaker_05
And people just share it all. And then it's like, well, now I can get into anything. But you bring up a good point that we have different protections.

00:09:48 Speaker_05
Like HIPAA protects us, you know, this personally identifiable information, but HIPAA is a law regarding health. Can't reveal health information.

00:09:57 Speaker_07
All those forms we have to sign, which I'm sure we read in detail before we sign and we like check into the doctor.

00:10:03 Speaker_05
Also, FERPA, the law that governs sort of what information you can share in an educational setting. We don't have an equivalent in terms of parents, social media or online posting.

00:10:14 Speaker_07
So I have a friend of a friend. They have a kid. I remember when this kid was born. And usually, like, you're so excited to share baby pictures and, you know, I don't know, like all the stuff that parents do, like, you know, hey, this is what

00:10:30 Speaker_07
they did this Tuesday, it sounds like the friends that you have that have like a whole social media account. This couple forbade anybody in their social sphere from ever posting any likeness of this kid on anything, basically.

00:10:49 Speaker_07
In fact, even not wanting them to email pictures to each other. And at the time, this is now several years ago, I thought these people were crazy.

00:10:57 Speaker_07
I was like, what paranoid person would be so anxious about what would happen with a kid picture that they posted to Facebook or texted each other? And now, like, we haven't brought up the fact that, you know, with artificial intelligence, like,

00:11:15 Speaker_07
You can say, like, who is this person? The facial recognition capacity of artificial intelligence. Like, I cannot believe what my phone can tell me.

00:11:25 Speaker_07
So, I now no longer think that person was paranoid, but maybe they could see the future in a way that I certainly was completely... I mean, honestly, even in this conversation, I'm like, what?

00:11:37 Speaker_07
Barclays is saying that, what did you say, two-thirds of identity theft for that generation is going to be from their parents sharing on the Internet?

00:11:45 Speaker_05
from sharenting. Yeah.

00:11:47 Speaker_07
Like I'm blown away.

00:11:48 Speaker_05
And look, I I don't know. I think that there's a balance, too, because I'll admit there's a lot of joy in sharing with people that you love.

00:11:57 Speaker_05
The challenge is where does it end and everything on the Internet minus a few right to privacy things, I guess, are there forever. Right. So Angela and I would love to hear your thoughts on posting information about children online.

00:12:09 Speaker_05
Record a voice memo in a quiet place with your mouth close to the phone and email it to NSQ at Freakonomics.com and maybe we'll play it on a future episode of the show. Also, while sharenting may be morally ambiguous, sharing the podcast is not.

00:12:23 Speaker_05
If you like the show and want to support it, the best thing you can do is tell a friend about it. You can also spread the word on social media or leave a review in your podcast app.

00:12:33 Speaker_03
Still to come on No Stupid Questions, does Angela regret sharing stories about her children on this podcast?

00:12:41 Speaker_07
I have on occasion felt a sort of, is it regret? I don't know, but it's like a twinge of anxiety.

00:12:55 Speaker_03
Now, back to Mike and Angela's conversation about sharenting.

00:13:02 Speaker_07
So if there are all these downsides of sharenting, maybe some of them more obvious than others, you do have to ask the question why we do this.

00:13:11 Speaker_07
I know of some research on, you know, how parents behave with respect to sharing about their kids, whether it's, you know, on social media or not. And I think the researchers who study this will say that there are a mix of motives.

00:13:25 Speaker_07
One is kind of showing off your own parenting. I think that sometimes at holiday time, sometimes people just send cards that are like a photo of the family and happy holidays. And sometimes you turn it over and there's like a CV.

00:13:39 Speaker_07
It's just like, here are all the accomplishments of my children in chronological order. And I like to read those cards out loud to Jason when we get them, because they just, you know, make us laugh.

00:13:50 Speaker_05
I think that- Now anyone who has you on their Christmas card list is so paranoid.

00:13:54 Speaker_07
Maybe I overshared there, but it's so true. And I think there is this motive to, I don't know, to show that your family's doing well, that like you're an awesome mom or you're an awesome dad. You know, my dad was just egregious in this respect.

00:14:10 Speaker_07
I mean, he would tell people our SAT scores, you know, where we had gotten into college. really cringy stuff.

00:14:19 Speaker_07
Thank God there wasn't social media at the time because I can't imagine those things going out into the world and not being able to like be rounded up and like put back into Pandora's box.

00:14:29 Speaker_05
On the plus side, how nice that your dad actually knew your SAT score. I bet most parents are like, I don't know.

00:14:36 Speaker_07
You think that's a plus?

00:14:37 Speaker_05
I don't know. I'm saying at least he cared.

00:14:40 Speaker_07
I guess. He did also ask me what grade I was in. So I'm not sure that my dad was like prioritizing the right information to know about his kids. But it really was. I mean, look, the positive word for this would be pride.

00:14:52 Speaker_07
There's pride in your own parenting. There's pride in your children. But the Negative word for this is showing off. And by the way, everything, if you think about how it could be good, it's one thing. If you think about how it could be bad, it's another.

00:15:08 Speaker_07
You know, grit, well, stubbornness, like pride, you know, showing off. But I do think there is a parental motive to show your friends and family and perhaps a wider circle that your kids are great.

00:15:23 Speaker_05
Yes. In a healthy environment, I think it's good to have some level of, hey, I want to share this.

00:15:29 Speaker_07
Do you post things about yourself that are some form of pride sharing? You know, just sort of like, hey, I'm proud of this. Look.

00:15:40 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, I don't think I think of it that way. But for example, I work for Smith Entertainment Group, who's the parent company of Utah Jazz, a couple of soccer teams, and recently purchased a new NHL team called the Utah Hockey Club.

00:15:53 Speaker_05
So when we did that and had our first game, I did post on Instagram. And why did you post? Because again, for me, Instagram is mostly like my own journal.

00:16:04 Speaker_05
I wanted to have the pictures and the memories and the beauty of the moment I did share with my coworkers. And it was sort of like a way to amalgamate all that stuff into a place that I could revisit it again.

00:16:17 Speaker_07
But can I ask you, you've said this before, that your Instagram account is your journal, right? It's like a photo journal.

00:16:22 Speaker_05
Why don't I just keep a private journal?

00:16:24 Speaker_07
Well, yeah, I did want to ask you, like, you could, like, just save them to Google Photos. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, by the way. Most things that people do, I think, have multiple motives.

00:16:35 Speaker_07
I mean, even drinking coffee in the morning or something, it's like, oh, kind of wakes me up. I kind of like the taste. It's sort of like a nice ritual. It's warm.

00:16:43 Speaker_07
You know, most things that human beings do reliably are for multiple reasons, not one reason.

00:16:49 Speaker_07
So I'm not saying that it's good or bad, but I'm wondering what reasons, plural, there might be for you choosing to document your life in your Instagram account.

00:17:01 Speaker_05
I mean, I think there's one documentation for myself to share it with the people that I love. We as humans want to share things, right? I mean, that's also how we connect.

00:17:12 Speaker_07
Well, my point was, is there multiple reasons, right? And I think wanting to share things is one reason, but pride is another. Those are, I think, different. I mean, they're related, but they're different.

00:17:23 Speaker_07
You mentioned social connection, and I think that's got to be a motive for these parenting parents. But let's talk about one of those motives, this drive to disclose.

00:17:34 Speaker_07
That is the exact phrase, the drive to disclose, that is used by two scientists at Carnegie Mellon, Aaron Carbone and George Loewenstein. Aaron, I don't know very well, but George, I do know very well.

00:17:47 Speaker_07
He's a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon.

00:17:51 Speaker_07
One of the things that he's well known for is saying that when economists think about human beings, they tend to think like, oh, human beings do things when they weigh that the benefits outweigh the costs, you know, considering the probabilities.

00:18:05 Speaker_07
That's like how an economist classically thinks that anybody decides anything, to drink coffee, to buy that coffee, to move to Salt Lake City.

00:18:14 Speaker_07
But George has long argued that for so many things, that has to be incomplete, that we're not doing these like cold, cognitive calculations.

00:18:26 Speaker_07
But in this article that I'm looking at, Privacy Preferences and the Drive to Disclose, that George and Erin co-authored, they explore the drive to disclose as a kind of primal instinct, not a cold, calculated, instrumental, like, if I disclose information about my eight-year-old,

00:18:46 Speaker_07
then my neighbors will think this, and then, and then, and then. But more just this visceral need, like hunger, or thirst, or they also say like sex, or whatever.

00:18:59 Speaker_07
They're basically saying that we can have this almost nonverbal or intuitive drive that if you don't meet that need, like hunger and thirst, there's kind of this negative feeling, like this kind of charge.

00:19:15 Speaker_07
And then when you do meet that need, the drive to disclose, you get rewarded, right? And again, like the same way it feels like to be really thirsty and to drink a glass of water.

00:19:27 Speaker_07
The ancient instincts are there because if you are an organism that doesn't have that drive, you're not going to survive. But when something has become

00:19:36 Speaker_07
an instinctive drive, it is enacted in you without the kind of calculation of the costs and benefits. We have drives to, for example, see calories.

00:19:47 Speaker_07
And then you put together things that are like really high calorie, like ridiculously high calorie, like the concentration of calories doesn't even exist in nature, and combinations that don't exist, like, oh, I'm gonna make something super high calorie,

00:20:01 Speaker_07
I'm gonna put a lot of fat in it. I'm gonna make it sweet with refined sugar and salty. Like you cannot forage for those things. They don't exist. So they become like hyper palatable or hyper rewarding.

00:20:12 Speaker_07
And I think what makes instincts so interesting, like if the drive to disclose is an ancient instinct, what that means is that you will get an immediate reward signal from your brain, from satisfying that need, even if actually in this particular situation, it is not for your long-term benefit.

00:20:30 Speaker_07
We have an ancient instinct for calories, for salt, but now we have this like modern environment that's a mismatch.

00:20:38 Speaker_07
And maybe social media is a mismatch for the ancient instinct to disclose information about ourselves and our, you know, and for many parents, I think they feel like their kids are just like an extension of them, you know, it's their family.

00:20:52 Speaker_07
So the modern inventions have gotten us into trouble because those ancient instincts don't change.

00:20:59 Speaker_05
Right. Or they take a really, really long time to evolve.

00:21:02 Speaker_07
Not going to change in our lifetime. They are hardwired into your DNA.

00:21:06 Speaker_05
Well, here's what's maybe a little bit scary about that then, if you think of the implications of it, right?

00:21:12 Speaker_05
Because not only are parents sharing about their children because of this drive in a way that has been bastardized, but it's also impacting the rising generation who suddenly want to become influencers. So in a recent survey, one in three pre-teens

00:21:32 Speaker_05
said that being an influencer was one of their career goals. Eleven percent of Gen Z, that's people born between 1997 and 2012, already describe themselves as influencers. And over half of Gen Z say they want to be influencers.

00:21:48 Speaker_07
OK, so one in three preteens wants to be an influencer and one in two Gen Z adults wants to be an influencer. Is that right?

00:21:55 Speaker_05
Yes.

00:21:55 Speaker_07
What the heck is an influencer?

00:21:57 Speaker_05
Well, It's a great question. It's generally described as someone who's influencing others online via their online persona. So using TikTok or Instagram or one of these other platforms to quote influence people.

00:22:13 Speaker_07
To like shape opinions.

00:22:15 Speaker_05
Or like you do your makeup tutorial or you just do a dance and then other people do it. It's interesting. There are some child influencers who are earning six figure incomes from monthly subscriptions.

00:22:26 Speaker_05
They can make thousands of dollars by promoting various brands who pay them to promote on their social channels. So with Instagram, for example, I believe that you cannot have an account until you're at least 13 years old.

00:22:40 Speaker_07
That's federal law, you know?

00:22:41 Speaker_05
Yeah. Well, some states like Utah are trying to raise that even further.

00:22:45 Speaker_07
I think it's somewhat arbitrary, by the way. I don't know how they chose 13.

00:22:49 Speaker_05
Well, the way around it is that parents can manage an account for their children.

00:22:54 Speaker_07
Look, I think this just reveals a lot about our human motives. I personally think it's not like to blame or shame people do it. It's just to acknowledge that, like, oh, those are human motives. No wonder you're doing that. Right.

00:23:06 Speaker_07
Maybe you shouldn't do it. Like the pediatricians in Europe. have a point.

00:23:10 Speaker_05
And maybe we shouldn't eat Doritos every day. Exactly. We've got to learn to curb these evolutionary instincts in a way that is beneficial to us instead of harmful.

00:23:18 Speaker_07
Right. I mean, in the article that I was telling you about by Aaron and George at Carnegie Mellon, they point out that, like, hey, acknowledging that there is a maybe primal drive to disclose doesn't mean that you should just indulge in it.

00:23:31 Speaker_07
And they very explicitly say that, you know, look, what we have to do with alcohol or eating or whatever, like you do have to use self-control to make a more calculated, deliberate decision.

00:23:42 Speaker_07
But what I'm thinking about as we close out this conversation is Taylor Swift.

00:23:48 Speaker_05
Because all things come back to Taylor Swift. All roads lead to Taylor Swift. She is the current version of Rome.

00:23:54 Speaker_07
You know, when you describe these parents of, like, eight-year-old influencers, and I have to say, I'm feeling a little judgy, right? Like, does the eight-year-old really want to be doing this? I mean, maybe they do, but maybe they don't.

00:24:07 Speaker_07
And I have to believe that there have got to be, you know, some parents out there who they want to be famous, they want to be influencers, and they're not thinking

00:24:16 Speaker_07
about whether this is in the best interest of their kids or whether their kids deeply share that motivation. So I want to contrast that with Taylor Swift. I love the song that she wrote when she was just a teenager called The Best Day.

00:24:31 Speaker_07
Have you ever heard it? Have you listened to all the Taylor Swift songs that there are? No, you have not.

00:24:37 Speaker_05
This is where you're putting me in a very vulnerable situation.

00:24:40 Speaker_07
No, now you're going to get hated.

00:24:42 Speaker_05
I have not listened to much of Taylor Swift.

00:24:45 Speaker_07
Oh, really? Okay. I'm so sorry. I forgive you. But anyway, when she was just a teenager, she wrote this song and it was really an ode to her own mother. And it's called The Best Day.

00:24:58 Speaker_07
And when she decided to kind of reveal the song to her mom, she made this compilation of home videos of herself and her little brother and the two of them with their mom, mostly, you know, there are a few shots with dad.

00:25:12 Speaker_07
So here's the thing I want to contrast. Taylor Swift, with her own capacities, decided to put together this montage. She decided to then share it more publicly. I think it was first a YouTube video. Then, of course, Taylor Swift became Taylor Swift.

00:25:28 Speaker_07
She decided to post the pictures of her when she was five years old. And so, though I understand that there's a drive to disclose, I understand that all people have a sort of pride motive, a need to connect socially. But when it comes to like

00:25:43 Speaker_07
your kids, maybe we could let our kids make that decision. I will say that I probably should have done this more myself. I wrote a lot about my own daughters in Grit before they were old enough to really give me permission to do that.

00:26:01 Speaker_07
So maybe I should have taken a page out of the Taylor Swift parenting playbook myself

00:26:07 Speaker_05
And you talk about Lucy and Amanda here on this podcast even a lot. Have you had negative backlash from them? What's been their reaction to the book or this?

00:26:17 Speaker_07
I will be completely honest. I have on occasion just said something like it wasn't a thought. And I think I'm pretty high in the drive to disclose. Right.

00:26:26 Speaker_07
Because look at me just like spilling the beans on Jason, on me, on the last time I talked to Lucy and Amanda about sambas and what's cool. But also, you know, more personal stories than that. And I have on occasion felt a sort of, is it regret?

00:26:41 Speaker_07
I don't know, but it's like a twinge of anxiety. I think what this conversation is making me think about is, I mean, we kind of live in a very sharing moment in history, like vulnerability, sharing your story. I get it. I want to do it.

00:26:55 Speaker_07
I think there's huge upside for everyone. But This conversation's making me think about whether in our drive to disclose and my drive to disclose, whether there could be some downsides that, frankly, I've been a little bit blind to.

00:27:11 Speaker_05
Yeah. So to Mandy's question, though, when we share our First Day banner, when we share about our children online, I think it's really interesting to always recognize, as you've brought up, that we have some primal evolutionary instincts

00:27:26 Speaker_05
that need to be checked in a modern world.

00:27:29 Speaker_05
I think there's also a lot of things we have to think about, like fraud, like consent, like what this will mean to the child when they wake up like this one girl who opened up the laptop and said, Mom, what have you been posting about me all the years?

00:27:45 Speaker_07
You ruined my life.

00:27:46 Speaker_05
And so maybe the lesson is next time before we hit share, we do pause and give ourselves a second thought to say, why am I doing this? Where is it going? And what might be the impact?

00:27:59 Speaker_07
And what would Taylor's mom do?

00:28:04 Speaker_03
Coming up after the break, a fact check of today's episode and stories from our NSQ listeners. And now here's a fact check of today's conversation.

00:28:21 Speaker_03
Mike references a 2019 Washington Post piece by lawyer and writer Christy Tate entitled, My Daughter Asked Me to Stop Writing About Motherhood, Here's Why I Can't Do That. He gets some of the details slightly wrong.

00:28:35 Speaker_03
Tate gave her fourth grade daughter a laptop for Christmas. Her daughter looked up Christy Tate's name, not her own. And that search brought up the author's many articles on parenting, with accompanying family photos.

00:28:49 Speaker_03
The Jimmy Kimmel segment that Mike mentioned is a compilation of man-on-the-street interviews from 2015. The production team asked pedestrians along Hollywood Boulevard to share their thoughts on cybersecurity.

00:29:01 Speaker_03
When prompted, many people who were interviewed not only shared personally identifiable information, they also readily revealed their actual passwords on camera. Also, federal law does not ban children under 13 from creating social media accounts.

00:29:17 Speaker_03
But most social media platforms have chosen to restrict account creation for kids under 13, due to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule's limitations on gathering data about children's online activities.

00:29:32 Speaker_03
However, Metta and other companies have recently developed services for kids under 13, such as Messenger Kids and YouTube Kids.

00:29:41 Speaker_03
As Mike noted, Utah Governor Spencer Cox did sign legislation requiring parental permissions for anyone under 18 to use platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. But a federal judge blocked the law from taking effect.

00:29:56 Speaker_03
That's it for the fact check. Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some thoughts about last week's episode on how disguises affect our behavior.

00:30:06 Speaker_06
Hi Mike and Angela, just following up on your interesting talk on disguises and masking, I think it's interesting to also point out that people who wear masks all the time, these are masks that we make up ourselves, can have a significant long-term effect on their mental health.

00:30:26 Speaker_06
I was diagnosed as autistic later in life and looking back, the fact that I felt the need to wear

00:30:32 Speaker_06
a mask and pretend and blend in was not great and is the case for many people who have undiagnosed autism or feel that they need to perform in front of others rather than being true to themselves.

00:30:47 Speaker_04
As a child therapist, what you call costume, and I call dress up, is an important tool in my work. I've had more than one child show up to a session dressed up head to toe as a police officer.

00:31:00 Speaker_04
You don't need a PhD in psychology to figure out these children were expressing a wish to have power after someone took it from them. Angela refers to a disguise as allowing a person to be deceitful.

00:31:13 Speaker_04
I would rephrase a disguise as freeing someone to pretend they are who they wish they could be. In other words, to show their true self.

00:31:23 Speaker_01
Hi, Mike, Angela, and Rebecca. This is Aiden Adele from Ursinus College. I wear the Zack the Bear costume for my college. I want to be a professional mascot. And so when I saw the title to this episode, it really made me smile, made me think about what

00:31:42 Speaker_01
The mascot costume does for me in allowing me to be my true, energetic, unabashed self. I have a very high-energy personality, and sometimes I can be too much for people. But it's somehow acceptable when it's under fur.

00:32:01 Speaker_00
Hey Angela and Mike, my name is Ishwaq, I'm from the Sultanate of Oman. I have been a content creator for the past 10 years and never once did I ever show my face in front of the camera or even in any public event that I was part of or presented in.

00:32:15 Speaker_00
I always find a creative way to hide my face whether using a mask or anything else just to keep my identity secret even though people know who I was in public.

00:32:26 Speaker_00
I think this gave me the opportunity to share my thoughts and opinions and ideas more freely knowing that I wouldn't be recognized in public very easily unless somebody really notices my voice and recognize me from my voice.

00:32:40 Speaker_00
Thanks again for the great episode.

00:32:43 Speaker_03
That was, respectively, Ofra Obejas, Paul McAuliffe, Aidan Nadel, and Ishwaq al-Maskari. Thanks to them and to everyone who shared their stories with us. And remember, we'd love to hear your thoughts on sharenting.

00:32:59 Speaker_03
Send a voice memo to nsq at Freakonomics.com and you might hear your voice on the show. Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, what does it mean to be a narcissist, really?

00:33:13 Speaker_05
I want to be president because I'm dang good at what I do and I'm the best person for the job.

00:33:18 Speaker_03
That's coming up on No Stupid Questions. No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things.

00:33:32 Speaker_03
All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Lierke Bowditch is our production associate. This episode was mixed by Greg Rippin.

00:33:44 Speaker_03
We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz Rabson. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra.

00:33:51 Speaker_03
You can follow us on Twitter at NSQ underscore show, and you can watch video clips of Mike and Angela at the Freakonomics Radio Network's YouTube Shorts channel, or on Freakonomics Radio's TikTok page.

00:34:04 Speaker_03
To learn more or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com slash NSQ. Thanks for listening.

00:34:14 Speaker_07
You know, I guess there probably are some Taylor Swift haters, but I don't want to meet them and I don't know any of them.

00:34:24 Speaker_02
The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.