This book explores sharenting--the widespread practice of parents or caregivers sharing information about their children online--and explores how this pervasive digital practice is reshaping childhood, parenting, and family life in a networked society.
Offering a transdisciplinary framework that integrates legal, sociological, psychological, and communication-based perspectives, the book examines sharenting from the micro-level of family life to the societal macro-level. It conceptualizes sharenting simultaneously as a communicative practice, a mode of identity construction, an evolving set of family rituals, a source of intergenerational conflict, and a regulatory challenge, among other dimensions. It also addresses emerging dynamics such as influencer parenting, datafication, children's vulnerability as data subjects, and the growing risks associated with technologies that enable synthetic media, including deepfakes.
With contributors from Central-Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, T�rkiye, and the Global South alongside Western scholars, the volume provides a rare comparative view of the interaction between global platforms and locally situated forms of parenting and governance. The book will appeal to scholars and students interested in parenting in the digital world from a range of disciplines: sociology, media studies, psychology, law, socio-legal studies, communication studies, childhood and youth studies, and family studies.
Gergely Ferenc Lendvai is a researcher and chief reference officer at the Science Strategy Office at LUPS Budapest and a research fellow at DARL Budapest (ELTE). His research interests include media law, human rights, internet law, and computational social sciences (empirical sociological studies and scientometrics). He is also the editor of the Legal and Ethical Issues of Chilling Effect, co-edited with Gergely Gosztonyi (2026), and Digital Parenting/Digitális szülőség, co-edited with András Koltay (2025).
Arantxa Vizcaíno-Verdú is Associate Professor at Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Spain. Her work explores media and information literacy and the dynamics of digital culture, focusing on how children and young people engage with user-generated content, influencers, and participatory storytelling across social media platforms.
Anca Velicu is a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Romanian Academy, Romania, with over 20 years of experience in studying children's and adolescents' use of digital technologies. Her research interests include children's online risks and opportunities, cyber violence, parental mediation, gender-based misuse of personal data, digital literacy, and media education. Her latest book is Children and Digital Technologies during the COVID-19 Period (2023).
András Koltay is Research Professor at the University of Public Service and Professor of Law at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, Hungary. His principal research concerns freedom of speech and the press, media regulation, and platform law. He is the author of New Media and Freedom of Expression (2019) and Media Freedom and the Law (2024).
