Children's privacy, autonomy, and digital identity in sharenting research: a scoping review with bibliometric mapping

Research on digital parenting and sharenting has expanded rapidly, yet the literature remains distributed across media studies, child development, communication, law, and health-related domains. This dispersal has limited integrative understanding of how parental online disclosure is linked to children's privacy, autonomy, digital identity, and digitally mediated visibility.

This study synthesized publications indexed in Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus at the intersection of digital parenting and sharenting. Guided by a structured review question, the study was conducted as a scoping review with bibliometric mapping and reported in line with PRISMA-ScR principles. The review aimed to map conceptual, thematic, and evidentiary patterns across an interdisciplinary corpus rather than to perform quality-weighted effect synthesis. Records were screened against four explicit eligibility criteria concerning children's privacy, online visibility, digital identity, consent, and parent-child boundary regulation. The final corpus comprised 252 English-language articles and reviews published between 1992 and 2025. Narrative synthesis was combined with bibliometric mapping using bibliometrix in R and VOSviewer to identify thematic concentrations, intellectual linkages, and temporal trends.

The field showed limited early output, followed by sustained growth after 2016 and marked acceleration from 2019 onward. The literature has consolidated around a conceptual core defined by sharenting, social media, children, privacy, and digital parenting. Communication Privacy Management, privacy calculus, mindful sharenting, and psychological ownership emerged as recurrent interpretive frameworks. Across the corpus, children's privacy, consent, boundary negotiation, and digital identity increasingly functioned as organizing concerns, while more recent studies showed stronger engagement with platformized visibility, influencer culture, and rights-based governance. Intellectual mapping indicated a coherent citation base anchored in foundational work on sharenting, adolescents' perceptions, and children's privacy.

The review indicates that sharenting is no longer examined solely as an everyday parental sharing practice. It is increasingly treated as a psychologically and ethically consequential process through which children's online identities are constructed, negotiated, and exposed in platformed environments. The study clarifies the conceptual and intellectual structure of the field and highlights the need for more child-centered, cross-cultural, and psychologically explicit research.