Research Article
Early Childhood Caregiver Practices and Perceptions Regarding Sharenting and its Impact
Posting and socializing have become very common in the modern era of social media and technology. This practice is also found to be very common in caregiving. Parents frequently document and share their children’s moments on social media, a practice is known as ‘sharenting’. This study aimed to assess early childhood caregiver of young children (aged 0-8 years old) practices and perception regarding sharenting with its impacts using a quantitative, descriptive cross-sectional study design that recruited 64 participants who registered for the Parenting Club online webinar conducted by the ECD PREP (Early Childhood Development Parenting Readiness Education Program) team at a tertiary care academic medical center in Karachi Pakistan to address the research problem. Convenience sampling is a type of non-probability sampling technique in which participants are chosen due to their accessibility to gather insight for the research problem using a validated self-assessment tool, the Sharenting Scale developed by Mustafa Maruf Cansızlar was used to examine the concept of sharenting and its impact on Early childhood caregiver practices and perceptions that were employed through an online Google form. The study employed descriptive statistics to analyze sharenting behavior among caregivers of young children (aged 0-8 years old) using SPSS software version 25. Results showed that 54.7% of parents are not even aware of the term sharenting. 42.2% of parents never share content related to their child on social media while 4.7% of parents always post on social media, out of which 64.1% of parents use Facebook, 67.2% use Instagram, 79.7% use WhatsApp, 92.2% use TikTok, 95.3% uses YouTube, followed by 98.4% parents who use Snapchat to share content related to their children. The result of this study highlights a need to further explore parental awareness regarding sharenting, children’s digital rights, and protection in Pakistan.
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