Who owns your child’s image?

On Monday, a bill was passed by the National Assembly in France that will give courts the power to prevent parents posting pictures or videos of their kids online. The courts will decide, based on the child’s age and maturity, if the consent of both parents is needed, or whether the child’s approval is sufficient. In certain circumstances, if posting the image ‘seriously affects the child’s dignity or moral integrity’, not even the consent of both parents will be enough. The proposer of the bill, Bruno Studer, says the new law is intended to show young people that their parents don’t have an ‘absolute right’ over their image.

I feel ambivalent about this. On the one hand, it’s an example of the state appropriating responsibilities that should properly belong to parents and, in that way, undermining the authority that parents should enjoy over their children. It’s not quite as bad as the SNP’s ‘named person’ scheme, which would have seen the Scottish government make a teacher or health visitor responsible for the welfare of every child – it was abandoned in 2016 after the Supreme Court ruled it would have breached human rights law – but not a million miles away. I accept that children have some rights which no parent should be able to abrogate, but copyright in their own image doesn’t feel like one of them. Surely parents are the best judges of what’s in their children’s best interests, particularly when it comes to social media?

On the other hand, I’m not sure that’s true of me. When my son Ludo was ten years old, I posted a picture of him on Twitter at 8 a.m. wearing a dress and a blond wig. It was World Book Day, when children are supposed to go to school as their favourite fictional character, and the day before a girl in his class had bet him £1 he wouldn’t dare to go as a female. I included this caption with the image: ‘My son Ludo is going to school as Goldilocks #WorldBookDay.’

I thought it was obvious, given the hashtag, that he wasn’t actually trans and I wasn’t virtue-signalling about what a woke parent I am. It was just a bit of fun. But I got deluged with abuse by some of my more irascible followers. ‘You belong in front of a firing squad, sicko,’ tweeted one. ‘Kill yourself immediately #ChildAbuse #MunchausenByTyranny #AttentionWhoreParents.’ Another said: ‘This twat needs castrating.’

I didn’t mind it rebounding on me – it made for a good dinner party story – and Ludo was fine with it at the time. But now he’s 18, he’s a bit less sanguine. The trouble is, it attract- ed a bit of press attention and if you google his name the picture pops up, which is a source of much merriment among his friends. I’ve thought about asking various newspapers to remove it, but I don’t suppose I’d get very far. I fear he may need to invoke his ‘right to be forgotten’.

Another example: when my now 19-year-old daughter was a toddler she became a dab hand with a hula-hoop. Indeed, she became so adept – she could walk, run, trampoline, all without letting the hoop slip – that I decided to make a short film of her exhibiting her skills. When it was finished, I added Elvis Presley singing ‘Rock-a-hula’ to the soundtrack, uploaded it to YouTube, then forgot about it. That, too, came back to haunt me when her teenage friends discovered it. I tried to take it down but couldn’t remember my old YouTube password. I occasionally joke about playing it at her wedding, but she doesn’t see the funny side.

Not only would this French law have saved me from these ‘sharenting’ mistakes, but I’d go further and apply it to journalists writing about their children as well. Until we went on holiday with Rachel Johnson and her family in Turks and Caicos in 2013, my kids forbade me to write about them. But to my eternal regret, she told them about the arrangement she has with her children: if she puts them in one of her columns, she has to pay them £75. Since then, mine have demanded payment every time I mention them, which has led to a good deal of agonising on my part: is the story about Ludo getting stuck in the downstairs loo funny enough to justify the outlay? Usually not. In some ways, it would be simpler if it was just illegal to write about your children.

In the interests of symmetry, the law should be amended so the courts are also the ultimate arbiter of whether your children can post pictures of you on social media when you’re in your dotage. I worry that mine will get their revenge by putting up ‘hilarious’ videos of me aged 85 trying to open a can of soup with an electric tin opener or answer a telephone call on an iPhone 50. It will be poetic justice, but I’m not looking forward to it.