'Sharenting': how to keep your children safe online

Now, she asks her eight-year-old son for his permission to post his photos.

Ms Connors is an Aboriginal artist based in Melbourne. She uses her Instagram account, yarli_creative, to showcase her art, share her culture and have authentic conversations about motherhood.

"At the forefront of my business and my content creation is being an Aboriginal artist," Ms Connors said.

"And second to that is the content creation that I've built around it about my life."

In the four years since Ms Connors started Yarli, she has gained almost 40,000 followers.

The name is a portmanteau of her children's names: Marley and Yindi.

Occasionally, they feature in her content.

"They're my everything, you know?" she said.

"They're beautiful, I want to share them with the world."

As Ms Connors' following grows, however, she has become more concerned about the impact it could have on her children.

"Social media is part of our lives. It's part of everyone's lives."

"I guess it's just about putting the right precautions in place."

Calls for more regulation of childrens' social media footprint have been growing as have concerns for their online safety.

Some overseas jurisdictions have considered introducing child labour laws similar to those that apply to child actors.

In May, a proposed social media ban for children under the age of 16 received widespread support.

The ban would stop children from creating a social media profile but wouldn't prevent parents from publishing their children on their own accounts.

Ms Connors is careful not to share anything that could be used to find her children.

She never posts them in their school uniform and has asked their schools not to post them to their own social media pages.

When creating content in public places, she waits until they have left, before posting.

She regularly monitors her followers and blocks fake accounts or those who don't align with her values.

"It's hard as a parent because you want to try and make the right decision and you want to try and protect your children as much as you humanly can," she said.

"But there's people out there that just take advantage of that and it's just really challenging and tricky to navigate."

As her children grow, Ms Connors said she will likely start posting their images less.

"I think I'll start to reduce a lot more once they become a bit more independent in the world and move around."

Early Start Discovery Space director Professor Lisa Kervin teaches families safe ways to share information about their children online.

Ms Kervin does not discourage parents from taking photos of their children or sharing them online but warns them to be cautious about who was able to access them.

"If I reflect on my own childhood, my family had a photograph album of me at key stages that was shared amongst our network," she said.

"When we're thinking about the online environment, our network is perhaps a little broader, perhaps contains more people than would have seen those traditional photograph albums."

There are also security concerns to consider, she said.

"At a time when we can use our face to open our phones and to access personal details about ourselves, we need to be really mindful about where our face is and how that might be used in the future."

Ms Kervin encouraged parents to consider not just how a child feels in the moment but how they might feel in the future.

"A child throwing a tantrum for example - how might that child feel about that image in five years' time, in ten years' times, as a teenager when their friends see that photo come up in memories?"