There is a video making the rounds. A toddler, maybe two years old, is crying — properly crying, the kind that makes the face go red and the breath come in gasps. The person holding the camera is laughing softly. The caption says something like he does this every time, and the comments are full of heart emojis and the word adorable in three languages. The video has been watched four hundred thousand times.

Nobody asked the toddler.

This is where family content culture sits in 2026. Childhood has become, for a growing number of families, raw material. The child laughs, stumbles, mispronounces a word, throws a tantrum — and within minutes the moment has left the living room and entered the permanent, searchable, commentable archive of the internet. The parents usually mean no harm. That is part of what makes it hard to talk about.

In Oman, psychologists and social workers have been raising the alarm quietly for a few years now. The problem is not social media as such. The problem is a specific practice that has normalised faster than anyone had time to think carefully about: children becoming the subject of daily content, their emotional states — distress included — captured and published for engagement.

What a child cannot yet carry

A child’s sense of self builds slowly. It develops through private experience — making mistakes without an audience, recovering from embarrassment without a comment section. That process needs protected space. When daily life is documented and shared at scale, the space collapses.

The child begins to understand, before they have the vocabulary to name it, that their worth is being measured. In views. In likes. In the verdict of strangers who have decided, on the basis of a thirty-second clip, whether this particular child is charming or irritating.

Dr. Kaltham Al-Maqbali, a psychologist and educational specialist based in Oman, has observed a consistent pattern in children exposed to sustained public attention from an early age: their self-assessment swings between overconfidence and total insecurity, rarely settling in the middle. Al-Maqbali has cited UNICEF findings indicating this group is more vulnerable to depression than peers who grow up with greater privacy.

There is another problem parents rarely consider. The footage does not disappear. A moment of a six-year-old’s distress, filmed because a parent found it funny, will still be retrievable when that child is sixteen. The internet does not respect a child’s right to grow up.

Soft exploitation

Samia Ambu Ali, a social worker with fifteen years of direct experience with Omani families and children, uses a specific term for what she observes: soft exploitation. It is different from the forms of child exploitation that laws are designed to address. There is no violence, no coercion that a camera can capture.

But the child is being used. Their image is currency. Their tears, their fear, their confusion — these are content. Their privacy, which they are too young to understand, is being spent on their behalf by the people whose job is to protect it.

The parents, Ambu Ali says, almost always love their children genuinely. They are not running a scheme. What happens is more mundane: a practice becomes normal before anyone has decided whether it should be. What starts as sharing a beautiful child with grandparents becomes, step by step, a content schedule, a follower count, a child who has learned to perform on command.

The child filmed mid-tantrum is not a willing participant. The exchange happens anyway, the comments roll in, and the child learns something no parent consciously intends to teach: that their most vulnerable moments are public property.

What the culture already knows

The Islamic ethical tradition that shapes family life in Oman places karama — human dignity — and the protection of the vulnerable at the centre of how adults are expected to behave toward children. The concept of amanah, sacred trust, applies directly. The child who cannot yet speak for themselves, who cannot understand what it means to have their image circulating among strangers, has claims on adult protection that this tradition treats as close to absolute.

This is not a foreign framework imported to critique local behaviour. It is already present in the culture. It has not yet been applied, explicitly, to a phenomenon that did not exist a generation ago.

The question before pressing publish

Neither Al-Maqbali nor Ambu Ali argue that children should disappear from family social media entirely. The question is not whether to share but what, and with what understanding of what is at stake.

Ambu Ali offers five principles she uses when working with families: the child’s interest comes before the engagement metric; moments of weakness, punishment, or distress are never made into content; the child’s dignity sets the standard, not the potential for views; parents should not post what they would not want shown to strangers in person; and before publishing, one question is worth sitting with — would this child, at twenty, be glad this was filmed?

These are not complicated rules. They are the normal obligations of parenthood applied to a new context.

The child is not a content asset. They are a person who did not choose to be filmed. That is the distinction.