A child scrambles over playground equipment or builds a sandcastle. A parent hovers nearby, smartphone in hand, camera angled toward the child. “This is such a good picture!” they say. “Look at me and smile.” The child obliges, but then the parent proceeds to take multiple photos from various angles, and the child’s smile fades.
I have seen this happen more times than I count, and I always feel badly for those kids. While photos can offer a wonderful record of childhood, there is a problem with our smartphone-induced compulsion to take photos of children constantly.
Parents are awash in images of their kids, those they take and those sent to them by other adults. My son’s daycare used to upload daily pictures to an app for me to view privately. This struck me as an odd use of caregivers’ time and skills. Some elementary teachers update private class Instagram accounts, despite the app being technically off-limits to kids under 13. Other parents text me photos of my kids at play dates and sporting events, presumably to show what they’re up to, or – I sometimes wonder – to reassure me subtly that all is well.
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Good parenting has become synonymous with diligent documentation. If you miss an important moment or cannot pull up a photo to illustrate an anecdote, then you have failed in that moment. You missed capturing a memory that might have been meaningful someday.
If it wasn’t photographed, did it even happen?
The compulsion to catalogue comes with a cost. Children take their cues from their parents. If you’re always taking pictures, your kid will grow up thinking that whatever is photographed matters, and whatever isn’t, doesn’t. They might adopt a performative aspect or model parental behaviours, imitating facial expressions, taking selfies, fiddling with filters. If parents frequently post images online, children may start to believe that self-worth is tied to virtual validation.
Camera-happy parents risk missing out on real moments of connection because their attention is mediated by a device. You are not truly seeing something with your own eyes if you look at it through a viewfinder, nor are you imprinting it on your mind.
Psychologist Linda Henkel, a professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut, says that photos are not the same as memories, since photos stay the same while memories are dynamic. In an interview with National Public Radio, she described a “photo-taking impairment effect” that causes people to remember fewer details about a scene if they take a picture, rather than just looking. A reliance on external memory devices, she says, detracts from the “kind of mental cognitive processing that might help us actually remember that stuff on our own.”
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We do ourselves a disservice by forgetting how the presence of a phone can violate the quiet intimacy of a moment shared with a child. Even if an image never gets posted online, the act of creating a photographic record changes it.
We forget (or ignore) children’s right to privacy online and in real life. No one wants their imaginary games interrupted for documentation, unless they’ve been taught to believe it is necessary, and many things that parents perceive as cute or funny could embarrass children in the future. Each of us has the right to determine how we are perceived online, and children deserve a clean slate.
Then there’s the digital clutter. Many parents have thousands of images on their phones – hoarder-level clutter that would cause real distress if it were physical, and maybe does even in digital form.
Don’t stop taking pictures of your kids, but perhaps approach it more judiciously. Take fewer photos. Set them up with care. Treat your smartphone like a real camera, with limited film. Resist the urge to post online.
Spend time in the world without a phone in hand and see how it changes your experience of observing and remembering. Note how not taking pictures affects engagement with your child. I can almost guarantee that your child will respond positively because, as French philosopher Simone Weil once said, attention is “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” When it comes to parenting, it’s better to be a witness than an archivist.
Katherine Johnson Martinko is a Canadian writer and the author of the 2023 book Childhood Unplugged: Practical Advice to Get Kids Off Screens and Find Balance. She writes about digital minimalism, parenting and technology in her e-mail newsletter, The Analog Family.
