Many parents share photos and videos of children on social media: birth announcements, their kid making a mess at the dinner table, their milestones like a first step.

But there are potential dangers to constantly posting about your child online, says Leah Plunkett, a faculty member at Harvard Law School who specializes in children, family law and technology. In Plunkett’s 2019 book Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online, she explains how adults can put children’s privacy and personal data at risk.

This phenomenon is called “sharenting,” says Plunkett. Legal scholars in her field use the term — a portmanteau of “sharing” and “parenting” — to describe “all the ways that parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, coaches and other trusted adults in a kiddo’s life transmit children’s private information digitally.” It can make kids vulnerable to identity theft and harassment. And as they grow older, it may undercut their ability to tell their own story.

Plunkett talks to Life Kit about the different harms of oversharing, how to post information about your kid safely and how to talk to loved ones about your limits. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Parents share a surprising amount of data about their kids online. A birthday photo, for example, can reveal a kid’s name, age and date of birth. What are some of the privacy concerns around that?

There is a thriving black market for personally identifiable information. Kids’ Social Security numbers, when combined with date of birth, name and address, are often good targets for identity theft. Most minors don’t have credit attached to their Social Security numbers, so [someone may be able to use them to] open fraudulent lines of credit.

Creditors don’t verify the age of applicants, so a bad actor could potentially open a credit card without anyone noticing until the kid becomes an adult and wants a card of their own. What are some other security risks?

There are tragic cases of stalking, bullying and harassment. They are rare but they do happen.

So someone could use social media to figure out where your kid lives, goes to school and their patterns and routines. They could also learn about their likes and dislikes and use them in an insidious way.

Other people don’t need to have information about the ins and outs of your child’s emotional and personal life.

You write in your book that children’s data is a form of currency. And there’s the adage that if a product is free, you are the product. What should adults think about when giving a company their child’s data? Or when reading the fine print on a social media platform?

Parents should be aware that they’re not going to know at the moment where a piece of information, photo or video, might go. When we click “I accept,” those agreements give companies and third parties a lot of latitude about what they can do with your data.

After my book came out, The New York Times ran a big investigative piece about the ways in which social media photos of toddlers and young children had been surreptitiously used to train facial recognition software. That’s one of many examples.

Also, at some point down the road, maybe somebody makes a decision about your child based on the stuff you’ve put out about them — how your child is doing at school, how they’re moving through the world. Maybe that is an individual human decision maker. Maybe that is an algorithmically driven data analysis product.

And when you mean decision makers, that could be a university recruiter or a hiring manager. And that may affect your child’s ability to tell their own story.

To themselves or to others in the future. If the world is figuring out significant things about who they are online and making projections about who they’re going to be, it can undercut their ability to figure that out for themselves.

Reading your book, it’s clear you’re not like a Luddite. You have kids, but you haven’t sworn off social media. How do you avoid oversharing the digital realm?

Since I started researching this topic, I adjusted my own personal compass to be very minimalist. I pretty much never post my kids on social media. If I do, you don’t see their faces or anything that would identify them. I don’t use full names. I don’t celebrate their birthday on social media. I don’t show the kids standing in front of where they go to school.

I follow a “holiday card-or-less” rule of thumb when sharing on social media: updates you’d be comfortable with anyone, from your great aunt to your boss, seeing. Information that’s not going to embarrass anybody and isn’t particularly private.

Personally, my wife and I are pretty tight about the pictures we share of our kid. How do we prevent other people, like family and friends, from taking photos of them at, say, a baptism or a birthday party, and posting it online?

For something like a baptism or another rite of passage, it’s probably impossible to get everyone to not celebrate their joy and pride by taking out a phone. But it is OK to make a gentle request. You might say: Thank you so much for being in this moment with us. To really be in the moment, we would request that you refrain from pictures or videos.

Some people will listen, some people won’t. Then make the call about whether or not it matters enough to you to follow up privately with the people who you see taking pictures and videos.

How do you model digital consent with your kids?

The conversation starts with very young kids. Explain what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and where the image or video is going. You might say something like, “Hey, we’re having a really great meal. We’re using a recipe your grandfather sent us. I’m going to take a picture for him. Everybody smile for grandpa.”

You could also ask your kid at a pretty young age, “are you OK with taking a photo? Anyone not feeling up for it?”

What questions should parents ask themselves before they hit post?

Are you posting a picture of your child in any state of undress? If you are, please don’t post it.

Are you sharing your child’s location, full name or date of birth? If you are, think about whether that level of detail is necessary for your post.

If your parents shared a similar post about you at this age, how would you have felt about it? If the answer is that it would have really bothered you, take another minute to think about what you need from this post.

What advice do you have for parents who often share photos and videos of their children and their lives on social media? Is it too late for them?

I had the same reaction when I started researching all of this, and I’m here to tell you, take a deep breath. Don’t panic. If you want to change, go back over your social media posts and take down what you’re not so sure about. Then make your settings private.

Please don’t be hard on yourselves. Since the dawn of time, parents have been making the best choices they can at any given moment, and then later being like, maybe I’ll do that differently going forward.

The digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.

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On a Saturday evening in late April, the door of the Libros Lincoln Heights is propped open. Inside, 18 local poets pack the narrow single-room bookstore, waiting for a chance to read a poem or two at this month’s open mic in front of an enthusiastic audience.

Donato Martinez, an English professor at Santa Ana College, is the third poet to take the podium. He reads from a stack of loose papers, his hands moving in time with the stanzas he spits like rap bars.

“All street vendors are allowed. / taco stands that never get shut down / Free zone any time / Patrolled by our own. That means Elotes. Churros. Bacon wrapped hot dogs / Fruit cocktails anytime,” Martinez recites from his new poem, titled “If I Was God I Would Visit the Hood.”

The audience snaps and hums, layering their own harmony over the soft whir of the ceiling fan and the cars rushing down North Broadway.

Martinez’s poetry collection “Touch the Sky” can be found on the surrounding shelves, along with collections from three other of the night’s readers. Their presence speaks to the driving ethos behind the Libros: 80% to 90% of the merchandise on the bookstore’s mismatched shelves are written by residents of Lincoln Heights and nearby neighborhoods.

“I don’t just have one little shelf for local authors. The whole place is local authors,” Jesse Marez, the owner of the Libros, said. “It blends in with the neighborhood.”

Marez, an electrical engineer by trade and lifelong book lover, opened the Libros last November, in an effort to consolidate the bookshelves he’d been curating at cafes across the Eastside since late 2021. He estimates that it is the first bookstore in Lincoln Heights in upwards of 70 years.

A sticker for the Libros on the doorway of the shop.

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Beverages at the open mic poetry reading.

Growing up in Lincoln Heights and neighboring El Sereno, where his family settled after immigrating from Mexico in 1969, Marez experienced this paucity firsthand. Now he’s determined to be at least one place where local authors can share their stories and readers can find a book across a variety of languages and genres.

“We didn’t grow up going to a bookstore or having books, so for me I think it’s valuable for a child,” Marez paused, ducking his head to wipe away tears. “I think it’s important for them to know they can have a book of their own, and it not to be a used book because we’re all used to hand-me-downs. I think in a neighborhood like this, people need to know that they can get a new book, especially at an early age.”

In the months since opening, the Libros has become a neighborhood hub, spotlighting books and authors that can’t always be found on the shelves of other bookstores. Collections of self-published poetry and family histories of Lincoln Heights sit alongside multi-award-winning books by Viet Thanh Nguyen and Kelly Lytle Hernández (also L.A. residents). On a table in the center of the room are copies of “Violet’s First Big Goodbye,” a picture book written by the bookstore’s youngest author, 8-year-old Luna Yanez-Cuestas.

Yanez-Cuestas, who lives in Burbank, wrote and self-published the book with her mother, Adriana Cuestas, to share the grief she felt after saying goodbye to her old neighborhood.

“It’s about saying goodbye to what you really love,” Yanez-Cuestas said.

A signed copy of “Violet’s First Big Goodbye” by Luna Yanez-Cuestas lies on a table at the Libros bookshop.

Customers come to the store for this wide selection of books, many of which have been signed by their authors. Marez said most of the books sell quickly because they are local.

Readers aren’t the only ones who frequent the store. Authors regularly stop by with books tucked under their arms, shyly asking whether Marez will sell their memoir or poetry collection. His answer is always an enthusiastic yes, even as shelf space becomes increasingly limited.

Marez has a knack for finding local writers, too. He met Lluvia Arras, L.A.-based author of “A Kids Book About Blended Families,” when their sons were playing soccer together. A few months later, he connected with Joseph Robledo at an exhibit on the Olympic Auditorium at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes.

Robledo is the author of “Blood on the Canvas,” a book commemorating his father, local boxing legend Canto ‘TNT’ Robledo. The son of Mexican immigrants, the elder Robledo became an amateur boxer at 15, turned pro at 16 and won the Pacific Coast Bantamweight Championship at 19. He was on his way to the world championship when a series of injuries left him permanently blind.

“Blood on the Canvas,” guides readers through backyard gyms in South Pasadena to the World Boxing Hall of Fame to tell the story of his father’s transformation from would-be champion to inspirational trainer who touched the lives of hundreds.

Attendees write poems during a poetry reading and open mic night at the Libros bookshop.

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Attendees place their poems on plants outside the Libros bookshop.

Meeting authors like Robledo and Arras has drawn Marez into L.A.’s literary world and taught him tricks of a trade that is often opaque to outsiders.

Behind each book on the store’s shelves is a journey scattered with roadblocks. It’s challenging to break into the mainstream publishing world and, according to a new survey, the industry remains overwhelmingly white.

“I was obsessed with self-publishing because I thought based on how I hear things go for authors in our society, it just didn’t seem fair to give such a big part of your work to another person,” said Cuestas.

For these reasons, authors like Cuestas turn to independent or self-publishing to get their books out into the world. The latter, which has recently become increasingly popular, gives authors creative control and the potential to earn a greater share of the profits, said Brenda Vaca, an author based in Whittier who created her own publishing house to publish her poetry collection titled “Riot of Roses.”

But that creative control comes at the cost of donning all the hats: writer, publisher, distributor and marketer. Stewart J. Zully, who self-published a memoir about the 40 years he spent vending in Yankee Stadium, says he’s spent a large part of his writing career hustling alone and hoping for a break.

“The creativity and the work [to get] it done is one side of the brain and then the business side is completely different,” Zully said.

At the Libros, Marez is trying to lift a few of these hats off the authors’ heads by launching his own publishing company, Legacy Publications.

A paper bag with a sign that reads “We publish authors, talk to us” sits atop a shelf at the Libros bookshop.

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“What we’re trying to do is help these authors with the distribution and the printing and the publishing,” he said. “Because they’re more worried about how to make a dollar or how to do the distribution, where they should be worried about their second book.”

Like the bookstore, Legacy Publications is deeply rooted in Marez’s pride for the Eastside neighborhoods he grew up in.

“I want to feature people that have actually made our community,” Marez said. “We want to talk about people who have left a legacy in our neighborhoods.’”

In launching this new branch of the business, Marez aims to highlight local voices, help authors make a profit and ensure the books themselves are made with high-quality materials. He prioritizes working with local printers such as Litho Press and Paperleaf Press and plans to release at least three books by the new year.

In his dual roles, Marez is filling Lincoln Heights with books that take readers to distant countries and eras, opening up new worlds. Alongside them, are stories that bring readers home with untold histories of the neighborhoods that have raised them and their families. The authors themselves find solace in knowing that, at least at the Libros, their books will be read and shared.

“Our books, they don’t appear at Barnes & Noble,” Martinez said, referencing how stories by authors of color have largely been kept out of mainstream publishing, and thus bookstores, for generations. “I wish they did and I think our stories belong there. If they’re not at Barnes & Noble, we need these independent bookstores to house our books. We support Libros and then Libros provides a safe space for the writers and poets. I think that right there is a relationship.”

From left: Harrison Butker, a slug, JoJo Siwa

Jason Hanna/Getty Images; Vicky Barlow/@thehidephotography; Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

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Jason Hanna/Getty Images; Vicky Barlow/@thehidephotography; Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

From left: Harrison Butker, a slug, JoJo Siwa

Jason Hanna/Getty Images; Vicky Barlow/@thehidephotography; Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

Sunday, May 19, marks the one-year anniversary of the NPR news quiz, which opened with Victor Wembanyama and ended with a rainbow slug. Since then, the news has gifted us such fodder as ChatGPT, George Santos, British royals and Barbie. We learned that Jack Smith had a mullet; that one of the Barbies, unlike J. Robert Oppenheimer, has a Nobel Prize in Physics; and that a spotless baby giraffe is kind of creepy.

So, were you paying attention — all year? We hope so.