Among US parents of children age four and under, 52% are concerned their child might be embarrassed when older by what is shared about them on social media, and roughly two-thirds are concerned about private information (68%) or photos (67%) being found, according to the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health (fielded 2014, n=569). These are concerns about a hypothetical future, not retrospective regret, and they coexist with continued sharing: a 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that 82% of social-media-using parents have posted photos, videos, or information about their children, yet only 16% say they worry sometimes or often that their child will later be upset about it. On the inaction side, no published survey directly asks non-sharing parents whether they regret their restraint. The ~8% shown for that side is an imputed placeholder, not a measured rate; the entry is flagged as a proxy comparison.
The decision differs structurally from most regret pairs because its full consequences unfold over years, not weeks. A child photographed extensively in infancy cannot consent and may, at age 12 or 16, discover years of publicly archived posts depicting their private developmental milestones, childhood embarrassments, or medical experiences. Once content is indexed, screenshot, or held by third-party data brokers, deletion from the original platform does not reliably remove it. The Mott Poll was fielded in late 2014, before the normalization of Stories, Reels, and TikTok — current sharenting rates are substantially higher, and the volume of archived content per child has grown accordingly.
Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal asymmetry research predicts that action regrets are more vivid in the short term but that inaction regrets accumulate over time. Sharenting is unusual in that the short-term feedback is consistently positive (social validation, likes, grandparent engagement) while the long-term cost accrues to the child, not the parent. This feedback mismatch — positive reinforcement at time of posting, negative consequence to a third party years later — may cause parents to systematically underestimate action-side regret at the moment of decision and encounter it only retrospectively, when the child is old enough to object.