Before You Post: The Child Online Safety Checklist Every Parent Should Have

Before You Post: The Child Online Safety Checklist Every Parent Should Have

It is Monday morning and she looks so smart you could cry. The uniform is crisp. The bag is nearly as big as she is. She is doing that shy little smile she does when she knows she is being photographed, and you have already taken eleven pictures because none of the first ten were quite right.

You pick the best one. You are still standing at the school gate. You type something like my baby, Primary Three already, God is good, and you post it.

And it is a lovely photo. Nothing about wanting to share it is wrong.

But look at that same picture again, and look past your daughter this time. There is the school crest on her breast pocket. There is the school name on the sign behind her. There is a board in her hands with her full name and her class written on it in your best handwriting. There is the number plate of the car parked to the left. There is a location tag at the top of the post. And it went up at 7.42 in the morning, while she was standing there.

None of that is about being careless. It is about the fact that when we look at a photo of our child, we see our child. We do not see the background. Here is what to look for before you post.

Why this matters more than it used to

For years the advice about posting children online was mostly about embarrassing them at eighteen. That is still true, but it is no longer the main thing.

Two things have changed. The first is that photos are now searchable in a way they were not before. Image recognition has got very good, very quickly, and a face in a public post is no longer just a face. The second is AI. In 2024 and 2025, investigations by journalists working with the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network documented ordinary photographs of children being lifted from public social media accounts and fed into AI tools to generate abuse material. The Internet Watch Foundation and the UK's National Crime Agency have since issued joint guidance urging families to understand the risks of sharing children's photos online.

That is not written to frighten you and you do not need to read any further into it than this. The practical takeaway is simple. Most of the information that gets gathered about children online is not stolen. It is collected from what was posted publicly, by people who love them, with the very best intentions.

The other thing worth sitting with is permanence. A photo you post this morning may still be findable when your daughter is applying for a job, or a visa, or trying to keep her home address private from someone. She will have opinions about it one day. She does not get a vote today.

Most of what strangers know about our children was not hacked. It was posted.

The full before you post checklist

The school name, logo or crest

A crest on a breast pocket or a bag is enough for anyone local to name the school in seconds, and the uniform alone often does it even when the badge is hidden. Combine that with a face and you have told a stranger exactly where your child can be found on a weekday morning.

What to do instead: take the photo before the uniform goes on, or crop from the shoulders up, or turn the badge away from the camera. If the photo is already taken, cover the crest with a solid shape rather than a blur.

Your child's full name

It appears in more places than you would think. Name tags sewn into collars. Labels on water bottles and lunch boxes. The name written on a first day board. A painting brought home with her full name across the top. A caption that uses her surname.

What to do instead: photograph bottles and bags from the unlabelled side, and use only her first name in captions if you use a name at all.

House numbers and street signs

Photos taken at your front door or gate very often include the house number, the gate colour, the neighbour's shop sign or a street name plate. Any one of those turns a general area into an address.

What to do instead: move a few steps so the doorway is not in frame, or shoot against a plain wall. Check the reflection in car windows and glass doors too, because number plates and buildings show up there.

Car number plates

A plate is a unique identifier that can be traced, and it also tells anyone reading it which state you are registered in. It appears in school run photos constantly, usually in the background rather than the subject.

What to do instead: block it out with a solid rectangle before posting. Do this for other people's cars as well, not only your own.

Location tags on the post

This is the easiest one to fix and the one most often forgotten. A tagged location on a school gate photo publishes exactly where your child spends the day, and a tagged home location does something worse.

What to do instead: leave the location field empty. There is a section further down on removing tags from posts that are already live.

Places you go every single week

One photo at church tells nobody very much. Fifty photos over two years, all at the same church, the same dance class, the same Saturday park, tell somebody your family's routine. Patterns are more revealing than any single post.

What to do instead: you do not have to stop posting these. Just vary what you show and avoid captioning the regular time and day.

Age, class, year group or teacher's name

First day boards are designed to be shareable and they are wonderful keepsakes. They also often carry the year group, the class number, the teacher's name and the date, which is a lot of specific detail about a small person in one frame.

What to do instead: keep the board for your own album and post a version without it, or make the board say something general like First day back rather than Primary 3 Blue, Mrs Adekunle.

Posting while you are still there

Of everything on this list, this is the one I would ask you to change first. A photo posted at 7.42 in the morning from the school gate is a live update on your child's location. The same photo posted at eight in the evening is a memory.

What to do instead: take the picture, put your phone away, enjoy the morning, and post it later. Nothing at all is lost.

You do not have to post in real time. Enjoy the moment now, post it tonight.

Bath time, potty training and partly dressed photos

These are shared with complete innocence and they are the ones most likely to end up somewhere you would never want them. It does not matter how sweet or how ordinary the picture is, and it does not matter that your account feels small and familiar.

What to do instead: keep them off social media entirely. Send them to one person on a private message if you must share them at all.

Your child's exact date of birth

Birthday posts are lovely and nobody is asking you to stop. But a full date of birth combined with a full name is the beginning of an identity file, and both are often sitting in the same caption.

What to do instead: say happy 6th birthday rather than giving the date, or post a day or two later so the date is not exact.

Instagram settings worth twenty minutes of your evening

These are the app settings as they stand at the moment. Instagram moves things around fairly often, so if a menu name has changed, look for the closest wording.

Switch your account to private

Only people you have approved will see your posts and stories from that point. Your profile picture and bio stay visible, so choose a profile picture that is not a clear photo of your child's face.

Remove the location from a post you already shared

Open the post, tap the three dots in the corner, tap Edit, tap the location line at the top, and clear it. Save. It is worth going back through the last year of posts and doing this, particularly for anything taken at home or at school.

Control who can tag you

In Settings and privacy, look for the section covering how others can interact with you, then tags and mentions. Set tags to people you follow only, and turn on manual approval so nothing appears on your profile without you seeing it first.

Hide your story from particular people

In Settings and privacy, find the story controls and choose hide story from. You can select individual accounts and they are never told. This is useful when you do not want to unfollow somebody but you would rather they did not see your children daily.

Use Close Friends properly

The green circle list is the most underused tool on Instagram. Put your school photos there. Twenty people who know your child seeing the picture is the same feeling as two thousand strangers seeing it, and it costs you nothing.

Go through your followers

Open your followers list and scroll slowly. Accounts with no profile picture, no posts, a handful of followers or a name that means nothing to you can be removed by tapping the three dots beside them. You are not being rude. They will not be notified.

How to stop your phone recording where photos were taken

Every photo your phone takes can store the exact coordinates of where you stood. Instagram usually strips this data when you upload, but WhatsApp file sharing, email and cloud links often do not, so a photo forwarded around a family group can carry your address inside it.

On iPhone

Go to Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Location Services, then scroll to Camera and set it to Never. To share one photo without its location, open the photo, tap the share icon, tap Options at the top, and turn off Location before you send.

On Android

Open your camera app, tap the settings icon, and turn off location tags or save location, depending on your phone. Then go to your phone Settings, then Location, then app permissions, and set Camera to not allowed.

Inside Instagram

Separately from your phone, simply do not add a location when you post. The field is optional and empty is a perfectly good answer.

The short no list

Everything above has some room for judgement. These few do not.

Safer ways to share the school photo

None of this requires you to give up the tradition. It just moves it a few degrees.

Take the picture at home before you leave, against your own wall, with the bag on and the badge turned away. Shoot from behind as she walks towards the gate, holding her father's hand. Photograph the small things instead of the face, the new shoes lined up by the door, the sharpened pencils, the plaited hair from the back. Post the memory a week into term rather than on the morning itself. Or put the whole thing on Close Friends and let the people who actually know her see it.

Some of these end up being better photographs than the posed one at the gate, which is a nice accident.

The uniform question

Uniform deserves its own note because it does more work than any other detail in the picture. It identifies the school, and the school identifies the area, the daily route and the hours your child is there. In many cases the house colour or tie tells someone the year group too. Blurring the crest helps, but a distinctive uniform is often recognisable to a local person without the badge at all.

If you want the milestone photograph without the exposure, take it in her home clothes on the Sunday before, or crop tightly to her face and shoulders, or shoot the details rather than the whole outfit. The moment you are trying to keep is her face on that morning. The uniform is not the point of it.

Talking to your older children about all this

Somewhere around eight or nine, children start to have opinions about being posted. That is the right time to start asking.

Ask before you post. Out loud, every time. If she says no, do not post it. It will feel strange the first few times and it is the single most useful thing you can teach her, because she is learning that her image is hers to give and that a person who cares about her will accept a no.

Explain permanence in plain terms. Something like: once a picture is online, you can delete it from your phone but you cannot be sure everybody else has deleted it. Children understand this immediately, usually faster than adults do.

If she asks you to take down something old, take it down. Do not negotiate and do not explain why you loved it. Just remove it and tell her it is gone.

And let her see you making these decisions about yourself as well, because how you handle your own posting is the lesson she will actually carry into her own phone.

Ask her first. She is learning what consent sounds like from you.

When family and friends post your child

You can be careful with every single photo you post and still find your child's face, school and full name on somebody else's page by Tuesday afternoon. Usually it is grandma. Sometimes it is the aunty who took twelve pictures at the naming ceremony and posted all of them.

This is a delicate one, because in our families it is very easy for a request like this to be heard as an accusation, or as you saying they cannot be trusted with your child.

The way through it is to make it about a rule you follow, not about something they did wrong. Say it once, warmly, and to everybody rather than to the one person who upset you.

Something like: Mummy, please can I ask a favour. We have made a rule in our house not to put the children's school or their faces in uniform online, because of all the things happening now. It is nothing you did. Would you mind taking that one down for me, and I will send you the ones you can post.

That last part matters. Do not just ask people to stop. Send them two or three photographs you are happy for them to share, so they still get to be proud in public. Most grandmothers are not attached to the specific picture. They are attached to showing off the child.

If you want a family rule that is easy to remember, make it this one: no school, no uniform, no full names, and ask the parents before you post.

Tools that actually help

You need less than you think. Most of this is a habit rather than an app.

For blurring and blocking out: your phone already does it. On iPhone, open the photo, tap Edit, then the markup pen, and draw a solid shape over the crest or plate. On Android, Google Photos has the same markup tool. Snapseed is free, works on both, and is available in Nigeria and the UK. One important point: use a solid block rather than a soft blur or a swirl, because those can sometimes be reversed by software.

For managing older children's devices: Google Family Link is free and works on Android and iPhone in both Nigeria and the UK. Apple's Screen Time and Family Sharing are already built into every iPhone at no cost. Start with these before you pay for anything.

A note on Bark, which is widely recommended in American parenting content. It is only available in the United States, Australia and South Africa, so it will not work for you in Nigeria or the UK. Qustodio is the closest equivalent that does work internationally, if you decide you want paid monitoring for a teenager.

The bigger picture

You are allowed to be proud of your children in public.

Motherhood in this country asks a great deal of you and gives back very little in the way of recognition, and posting your child on her first day is one of the few moments where you get to stand up and say look what I have raised. That is not vanity and it is not carelessness. It is joy, and joy is meant to be shared.

So this was never about stopping. It is about the fact that nearly all of the risk sits in details you do not even want in the photograph. You do not want the number plate. You do not want the street sign. You do not want the school crest. Losing them costs you nothing at all and takes about forty seconds.

If you read this and thought about photos you have already posted, please do not sit in that feeling. Every mother reading this has posted something she would crop differently now, including the one who wrote it. You did not know. Now you do. Go back when you have a quiet evening, remove a few location tags, take down two or three, and move on.

Blurring a badge is a small thing. So is waiting until the evening. So is asking your mother-in-law to take one down. None of it looks like much on its own. All of it is love doing its actual work in the background, where nobody claps for you.

The memory can be public. The details do not have to be.

The checklist, ready to screenshot

Save this to your camera roll and run through it before you post.

And the one that matters most: you do not have to post in real time. Enjoy the moment first. Post it tonight.

Before you upload anything, ask yourself one question. What could a stranger learn about my child from this photo? If the answer is more than you are comfortable with, edit it first. That is all this is.