Sharenting: A psychosocial exploration of the performance of motherhood on Instagram

Abstract

Mothers’ motivation(s) to ‘sharent’ (share content online that includes text, photographs, and videos of their children) on the social media platform Instagram has received little research scrutiny to date. This study explored the aforementioned from a psychosocial perspective, which foregrounded three South African mothers’ subjective positions in relation to their maternal identities and sharenting practices. It included the examination of their desires, anxieties and defences as understood within a psychoanalytic framework. The qualitative research-aligned Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) method was employed to collect and analyse data that produced five themes. These were building a memory chest, an online village of mothers, working through the transition of becoming and grappling with the identity struggle of a mother, the scrutiny of motherhood and the sharing/oversharing dilemma. These themes were used to answer four research questions about the relationships between maternal identities and the performance of motherhood on social media, and sharenting. The implications of these findings and recommendations for future research were discussed in an attempt to contribute and expand upon psychosocial research on the intersection of motherhood and social media, especially within the South African context.