Parental Decisions on Sharing Their Children's Private Information on Social Media among Families in Jakarta Area

The practice of publishing photos and videos containing children’s private information on social media—also known as sharenting—is popular among parents in Jakarta. Embarking from the debate about privacy paradox in which it is believed that privacy concern does not predict someone’s behaviors in managing his/her private information online, this research aims to reveal the considerations underlying parental decisions when sharing their children’s private information through social media and their perceived risk toward their children’s online safety. Using a qualitative approach, the researcher conducted interviews with 20 parents in Jakarta with at least one child younger the 13 years. The result suggests that the perceived benefit of sharenting exceeds its perceived risks. The study also found four reasons why parents exercise sharenting: to document their children’s development, to gain social support from their followers on social media, and to overcome loneliness as new parents and the low self-efficacy of parents in protecting children’s privacy on the internet. Unsurprisingly sharenting through social media has become a growing trend among parents. This finding thus will be useful as a groundwork to develop an intervention program regarding relevant sharenting in the context of Jakarta, Indonesia.

Corrupting the Youth: Should Parents Feed their Children Meat?

This article is concerned with choices that parents or guardians make about the food they give to their children. Those with primary responsibility for the care of young children determine the set of foods that their children eat and have a significant impact on children’s subsequent dietary choices, both in later childhood and in adulthood. I argue that parents have a morally significant reason not to feed meat to their children, which stems from their fiduciary responsibility for the child’s moral development. This should, at a minimum, be factored into parental decisions about their children’s diet. In the absence of compelling countervailing reasons, it will mean that parents should not, in an all-things-considered sense, feed meat to their children. This claim does not rely upon the obviously contentious claim that it is morally wrong to eat meat. Instead, the fact that children, when adults, may reasonably themselves come to believe that consuming meat is wrong gives parents morally compelling reasons to avoid acting in ways which may have the predictable consequence of corrupting the moral character of those for whom they are responsible.

Should Children Have a Veto over Parental Decisions to Relocate?

Many people move house at some point during their childhood and not rarely more than once. While relocations are not always harmful for under-aged children, they can, and frequently do, cause great disruption to their lives by severing their social ties as well as any attachments that they might have to their neighbourhood, town, or wider geographical region, with long-lasting psychological effects in some cases. Since it is increasingly recognised within normative philosophy as well as within Western societies that older minors should have the final say over certain issues that significantly affect their lives (think, for instance, of custody disputes, decisions about whether to get specific vaccinations or use contraceptives), this raises the question: Can it be morally incumbent upon parents to give their minor children a veto over family relocation? This article argues that the answer is affirmative. Specifically, it suggests that such duties exist if and only if (i) parents are not morally required to either relocate their families or stay put, (ii) the stakes of the decision about a family relocation are fairly low, and (iii) the children have the competence to make these decisions, as many older minors do.