Parents in Japan – Can we talk about your kid’s pictures on SNS

I feel like the old man who is out of touch and doesn’t “get it”, help me understand this.

I’m at a lunch with a bunch of moms who have since the birth of their kids have been posting to public instagram. Especially mixed families. Hashtag halfu or whatever. I think this is absolutely bonkers, in the land of phones that have forced flash sounds and private trains for women. How does a society with so many checks for pervs have a social norm to post your kid’s photos online? I’m literally the only parent in my group that thinks private accounts are a must. I can’t be alone in this. My concerns were met with giggles. Seriously?

My kids are younger and don’t have an opinion on it yet, but I would imagine that — again, in a land of a unique kind of bullying, having thousands of their photos online is the last thing they will want a snotty kid in class to find and use against them. But they probably won’t need any help with that because they all want to be Tik Tok celebrities anyway and will do it themselves. That was the “winning” rebuttal and conclusion of my wacky foreigner gets offended lunch date.

If you have a partner that’s also doing this, would love your perspective. I hate it and I know this is more of a global issue than a Japan issue, but attitudes here about SNS seem… I don’t have a nice word for it. Please lend me your brains.

39 comments
  1. I have family all across the world, I’m not going to send them pictures individually.

    Use privacy controls to limit who can see the pictures and it’s ok for me.

    I don’t understand “Japanese unique way of bullying🄬™”, and how that affects my 3 year old who isn’t on any sort of SNS, but apparently it’s too 和 for me to get?

  2. This hasn’t really been my experience, but I don’t know that many mixed families in person, so maybe we have very different circles. I see lots of smiley face stickers over kids faces.

    That said, you can’t really stop someone taking photos of kids out on public. If what you are worried about is some creep doing upsetting things with photos of kids, you not putting your kids photos up doesn’t stop that person from taking their own photo to use. I am not entirely sure there is really one single sensible privacy line, but rather it’s really much more up to what each persons level of comfort is. A lot of what we do thinking it keeps us safe is more about feeling safe than actually being safe. Etiquette where I am though would suggest you check with people before putting their photos up on social media, which seems pretty reasonable.

  3. I have family all over the world, and we built a private WhatsApp chat group to send photos. Also got them digital frames to upload new photos to while we are in another country.

    While I can’t speak to having a Japanese spouse (we are both American), I was able to agree with my wife on the fact that their social media lives are theirs, not ours. As professional ITs we both know how accurate facial recognition is over time. Our kids are not on social media unless you can’t see their faces.

    I wish you luck. Speak honestly and without hostility with your spouse about it.

  4. I’m Japanese, but born and raised in the US. I think the two factors here are 平和ボケ and computer/internet illiteracy.
    平和ボケ heiwa-boke is when they’re so used to living in a very safe environment that they don’t think about potential dangers of different political, international, and non political situations.
    It’s a nice problem to have, until they go abroad and get pick pocketed.

    This combined with their lack of internet literacy means they’re exposing themselves to the world without understanding the dangers.

    I met my wife over SNS but I remember asking her how old her daughter was and she was shocked I knew about her kid when she literally had a picture of her uploaded on the SNS app we were talking over. It’s pretty ridiculous.

  5. We don’t post any pictures of our kids on social media, but I’m only on Reddit, wife is on insta? I think? We do a yearly book that we send to my olds and then they can share that in person with people but aren’t allowed to post it online. Otherwise we do video calls with people so they can see and chat with them.

  6. Lots of my friends back home post their kids pictures on FB/IG. The things that’s weird in your case is the ‘#half’ part. I’ve never seen that. If my wife did that, I’d tell her to stop it immediately.

  7. My wife made me agree to not post any photos of our daughter on social media. I agreed and we never do it. I just send photos on LINE to my family back home directly.

  8. I’m at an age where most of my friends have kids, in Japan and elsewhere around the world.

    The ones with brains cover their children’s faces in any public posts. The.. less intelligent ones, shall we say, post their kids willy-nilly. Never post your kids online, check out the story of that American kid who ended up getting made into a Chinese sex doll. The mum has spent years trying to get it removed from online shops with no success.

  9. Definitely not a Japan exclusive thing, I know plenty of people back home who made facebook accounts for their kids and post everything on it.

    I personally am against it and even tell the schools to not use our kids for promotion or any website/SNS activity. Google, Amazon, or any kind of shared photo library is good for family members and nothing else, I want to raise them to spend less time on SNS sites and also it’s for their own privacy. Perhaps it’s my age talking but I would be somewhat weirded out if I were to discover my parents were showing me off to the entire world.

    I do know a few mixed couples where the wife loves ‘showing off’ their kid all over Instagram. I know she loves the kid but the way she posts you’d think the kid is only just an accessory.
    Constantly trying to meet up with other mixed parents and getting photos together, traveling to different places (where the kid is miserable) just to get good photo shots, doing every possible hashtag for being half. I do wonder how those kids are going to be when they get older.

  10. My wife (Japanese) is a little different. She won’t post like blatant face pictures on her own SNS but she has a SNS account for the kid only. It is not linked at all to any of us and she does it for fun, it is public though. Same with our cat (although the cat is linked to us lol)

    For sharing pics with each other and family we use mitene and just give relatives a web/app invite.

    In mitene you can share with only the admins as well. My wife likes to take pictures of our baby’s poop when it is special and puts it on mitene with only admin access lol.
    Then people at work ask to see some of the pictures of my kid and I have to screen my phone to make sure a picture of my baby’s ass with poop doesn’t show up.

  11. >thousands of their photos online is the last thing they will want a snotty kid in class to find and use against them.

    You can periodically archive or delete the picture for example when your child is old enough to be bullied, etc.

  12. SNS? In English we call it social media. I think it’s a judgment thing and not a hard line thing.

  13. I think the Japan in general is just less tech literate / let’s be honest has less spare time. (The extension of this is that bullies/other sketchy people themselves are less tech literate on average). When you consider the average junior high kid has at least class + clubs every day and tons of them go to juku too, a lot of them don’t have a ton of free time. Even though most kids have smartphones, PC ownership isn’t nearly as normal in Japan as it is in other developed countries. I’ve seen a lot of stuff that suggests that in general Japan’s online hours are on the low side considering how wealthy/developed it is.

  14. I haven’t put my child onto public social media. I’m actively trying to dissuade them from using social media. They use communication apps but social networks are I think poison for the most part.

    You’re absolutely right to keep your kid off public social media. You can share photos of the kid with family with a private photo sharing platform like Smugmug or the like.

  15. I personally think it’s a consent issue: just as we don’t allow minors to sign contracts we shouldn’t post people’s (including children’s) faces without their age-of-majority-consent.

    TV’s in Japan are getting better at this: for non-real time video, they blur out everyone but the ones who gave consent.

    And since minors cannot give consent, by default they should be blurred.

    Child models and actors (and on street interviewee’s) might be given an exception but that should be phased out as deep fake gets better and no child should have to be actually filmed and shown publicly.

    Logical final step is, to protect minors and their rights, it should be banned and prosecuted just like child porn.

  16. Wife watched one episode of Mr. Robot and bless her, deleted all her social media. Mines been gone for a while now.
    However, we do have to keep proxy accounts to contact friends/family as you can’t access the messenger apps without them, but I’ve not seen a timeline/newsfeed for a while now (unless you count reddit).

    When our child is born we’ll share pictures with the family, but I’m not about to plaster them over the internet.

  17. I see a lot a Japanese parents posting pictures of their kids with some kind of digital stamp on their faces. Actually I don’t think I have seen the face of a kid on sns in some times.

  18. Zero SNS here. I guess reddit if that counts. My wife made a private Instagram account for my family back home because they were going nuts when we had kids and I had no way to share except email.

    And yes, we’re old. My concern is privacy which everyone seems either fine to give up or just knows it’s a losing battle.

    100% on board with you!

    And yes, we’re old. My concern is privacy which everyone seems either fine to give up or just know it’s a losing battle.

  19. I agree with you. I stumbled upon accounts that shocked me when I was pregnant/shortly after birth and following a bunch of Japanese pregnancy/mom accounts on Instagram. There were all these accounts with high quality professional looking pics of their young girls posed in questionable positions EVERY single day, it was so creepy. THOUSANDS of photos of pouting 4 year olds licking lollipops or sitting on the beach in baby bikinis with their legs splayed. What was even more disturbing was if you checked the comments there were comments by random men (the main account wasn’t following them back, often they were non Japanese men living outside of japan) with a bunch of heart eye emojis and saying weird shit like “I love you” “LOVE” I even saw comments saying “sexy” or the eggplant emoji. And the parent/owner of the account didn’t even care to AT LEAST delete these comments and/or block those creeps. If you check the “following” it’s often full of creeps like that, not other parents or moms or whatever.

    Feels like they’re literally pimping out their kids to pedos.

    Personally I have a Facebook where I ONLY have a few people I know irl/family and it’s set to private where I post the occasional pic, and I also have the close friends list on Instagram where I sometimes post pics to my “story” only to close friends. Any public Instagram pics (which I rarely do, don’t think I’ve posted one in almost a year) I completely censor her face and I don’t post any embarrassing pics or naked bath pics or whatever.

  20. Guess I’m with you. I’d never put my child’s photos on the internet via SNS (they exist in the cloud somewhere though since that’s where our photos are saved). I wouldn’t think that was typical behavior nowadays either, but I might just be old like you. I don’t use any SNS apps besides LINE because that’s how I communicate with friends, but they did add something called VOOM recently which I’ve checked out because I’m OCD when it comes to clearing “notification badges”. I’ve since stopped tapping that tab, but I did see in the mess of teenage girls dancing, some children around ages 5~9 with makeup on doing the same things the teens were doing. Reported that shit immediately and never went back.

  21. I don’t post pictures of my kid publicly and neither do any of my friends. I wonder if the people who post pics of their kids with those cringe hafu tags think their kids will be scouted by a modeling agency or something.

  22. This isn’t necessarily a Japan issue. I’ve seen many of my friends (non-Japanese) who post their photos of their kid all the time.

    I just think it’s something many don’t think about. Back then we took photos of kids a lot time, but those were on cameras where you had to get the film developed. I don’t think people think that much of the kids consenting to be online, or the risk of security. Sure you can make your FB/IG private, but anyone can download your photos and re-upload them somewhere else.

    And it may not be the fault of the parents necessarily. Maybe they sent photos to relatives or friends in a chat group or it got leaked.

    I do think it’s ironic though because I think I’ve seen many Youtubers based in Japan censor out faces of people in their videos for privacy, but I know many Japanese guys who use their kids as profile photos on FB, or instead of posting themselves post photos of their kids. (And yes, while FB can be configured for privacy, profile photos are usually public on FB)

  23. My FB and insta account are private and non-searchable, but if my kid has a really nice photo, you bet your ass I’ll post it. But I make sure that none of the other kids'(if there is any) faces can be seen in them. For usual photo dump, our family has our own group chat for that.

  24. Maybe it’s just a personal decision that different people make differently and you should perhaps maybe refrain from judging people with different views or from pushing your decision on others? People don’t need saving, and aren’t going to change just because you teach them all of your excellent knowledge.

    Also, if your circle are all doing this consistently, and of those hashtags are real and not exaggerated, then perhaps you need to rethink your circle of friends.

  25. What really bothers me is that schools use your kid’s photos without permission for their advertising.

  26. I connect and stay in touch with close friends, old coworkers and family through Facebook. I do not have an Instagram account nor do I use any other social media platforms. My friends list is quite small and I have strict privacy settings on my account. I am okay to update about my family life on FB about once a month. I have done this for almost close to a decade and I haven’t felt uncomfortable about it so far.

  27. My brother’s facebook is pretty much exclusively photos of his kids (and I think it’s cringey as fuck but they are his kids not mine so..).. yeah it’s not just a Japan thing.

    That said I agree in Japan it seems extremely polarized between:

    1) People who seem to have zero social media presence or if they do, post no photos whatsoever. So many people here seem to be sort of “off the grid” outside of having a LINE account.

    and

    2) People who post a gazillion photos of their kids.

    The weird thing is that they are happy to post umpteen kid photos but you almost never see photos of their spouse. It’s either because said spouse said “no thanks” or (more sinister) because your kids are your kids forever but your spouse could change…?

  28. The sad reality is that a lot of moms here treat their kids as accessories, toys, pets and status symbols. They give them a lot less humanity than they deserve, and posting them to SNS is no different to showing off their shopping for all to be jealous over. Sadder yet is that the kids are used as an object in their constant competition to be the most admired mom in their group or community.

  29. I have a number of friends on social media in both the US and Japan. Many of the former post a lot of pictures of their kids. Some of the latter don’t post any or blur their faces or whatever. I am not sold on the idea that this is uniquely Japanese behavior. Frankly I don’t see that it’s such a big deal if you’re not posting stuff that’s distasteful.

  30. My wife and I both have public IG accounts and post family pics/pics with our kids often. I don’t really see it as an issue.

    I think because our kids are both under 3 probably makes it less worrisome. If they were teens/pre-teens I might hesitate a little more. We also don’t use hashtags.

    The simple fact of the matter is that there is an enormous amount of very suspect material on IG that people with those perversions can easily access before they’d even think about my family photos.

    I’m one of those weird people who likes my kids to dress to the nines even though they grow out of the clothes so quickly. I had a search around IG for fashion ideas and was shocked and disgusted at some of the photos Japanese kids’ clothing brands and child-model parents post of the kids.

    Incredibly oversexualized, very revealing clothing, full makeup even on toddlers, kids in very weird poses or locations.

    Had a quick look through the followers of the child models and they were all 20-50-year-old men from the Baltics, middle-east and India.

    Reported a lot of it but none got taken down.

    So not really worried about pervs stumbling upon pics of me and my toddler at the Lego museum tbh.

  31. In the same way that I would not want another human uploading pictures of me to Facebook without asking, I don’t want be the one to do that to my own kids. They shouldn’t have to inherit – or clean up – a social media presence that someone else made for them. To that end, we use Notabli.com for private sharing to family (in Japan and in my home country), and a Synology NAS in the closet for photo backups.

    We are also insistent with schools, clubs, and friends of the family that we don’t want them putting our kids’ pictures on social media. And folks have all been pretty respectful and understanding.

  32. I dunno if this was mentioned already but – there’s a good chance that some of those moms *want* their biracial children to be scouted for modeling jobs or something.

  33. I don’t get it either. I post pics of my kids on a private account with only people who I know allowed to follow. I refuse to post their faces publicly.

  34. I only very rarely post pics of my child in IG as a story and only targeted to “close friends”, because it’s otherwise impossible to keep my large family up-to-date with my life in Japan. My only concern is that I’m sure IG is somewhere on their servers storing a copy of the picture even if it’s a story that disappears after 24 hours.

  35. After a word with my wife several years ago I brought her round to my way of thinking on this and she no longer shares photos of our kids on SNS.

    Also, the schools our kids go to are (so far) pretty good at getting permission from parents on how much they are allowed to share.

  36. I rarely post my kids’ photos to SNS. We use a private account with Mitene among family members. I have a few friends also in Japan who do not post any pics online.

  37. When I was first getting into Reddit, I posted a picture of my 1.5 year old son in r/daddit. A couple of hours later, a guy private messaged me to ask if my son was circumcised. I immediately took it down. Never again.

    My wife and I have an app called Back Then to where we can personally select who can see pics of our kids.

    I stopped using hashtags on anything ages ago.

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