I’m giving up the ‘sharenting’ – for the sake of my children | Charlotte Philby

It started off modestly, but soon I was posting dozens of photos of my kids on social media. Now I’m quitting to reclaim real life, and their privacy

• Charlotte Philby is the former editor of the website Motherland

When I made the decision, a month ago, to take myself off social media for a year, I did so for various reasons. Not least because my two-year-old had taken to running up to me with a worried expression, shouting “mummy, your phone!” whenever he found it not in my hand for more than five minutes.

Having amassed some 10,000 Instagram followers as editor of Motherland, the online parenting magazine I ran for two years, I had watched myself mutate from the sort of person who purposely only ever uploaded photos of my kids in an “ironic” way, and only ever occasionally (“See my child being a total monster as we queue for soft-play on Mother’s Day!” sort of thing) to the kind who seemed to be obsessively spamming my various online profiles across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, with fragments of my life.

Related: The 'sharenting' divide: Half UK parents do not post children's pictures

I wonder how many special moments with my kids I missed because I was busy trying to capture them for social media

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from Children | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2v2TsYi