Asking Your Kids Before You Post: The Veto, The Undo, and The Handoff

TL;DR: The Short Version

If you only have ninety seconds, here is the whole episode:

The quick win: Post your vacation photos after you get home. Same pictures, same story, same likes. It just lands on a Tuesday while you are unpacking instead of live from the pool. The reason is not scary strangers. It is that a live vacation post announces your house is empty.
The wrong question: “Is this photo embarrassing or flattering?” Almost every article online sorts by that. It is the wrong sort.
The right question: “Whose story is this?” Good lighting does not transfer ownership.
Three mechanics you can actually run: the veto, the undo, and the handoff.
Your challenge this week: Google your kid’s name, then reverse image search their face. Do that before you touch a single old post.

Nobody is asking you to delete a decade. Take a breath. This is a system, not a purge.

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The Videos You Are Never Going to See

There are videos on my list for this channel that will never exist. Not because they were bad ideas. A couple of them were, if I do say so myself, pretty good. One was genuinely one of the better ideas I have had.

They died because one of my kids said no.

And when the word family is right there in your brand name, that is not a small thing to hand over. This is my job. Teaching you how to manage tech with your kids is literally the content. I killed the videos anyway.

So today I want to walk you through what about ten years of asking my own kids for permission before I hit publish actually taught me. Fair warning: almost none of it is what the internet will tell you.

Quick context on where I am coming from

I have spent about 20 years in IT, and security has been part of the whole ride. I did not wander into this topic last week and get spooked.

Here is what makes my position a little strange. I have always wanted to be findable on purpose. I want you to be able to Google my name and land on me, the actual me, my actual work, and not some other Sarah Kimmel. I built that deliberately over two decades.

(Fun aside: when I started building it, Sarah Silverman was dating Jimmy Kimmel. You would search “Sarah Kimmel” and get an entire tabloid cycle that had nothing to do with me. They broke up, my channels grew, and the search results eventually sorted themselves out. Thank you, algorithm.)

But I chose all of that. Nobody asked my kids if they wanted it. Including me.

Start Here: The Five Second Fix (Time Shift Your Vacation Posts)

Before any philosophy, here is the one thing you can change today. It is the smallest adjustment in this whole episode and it costs you basically nothing.

I post vacations after I get home. Every single time.

The pictures still go up. I still tell you where we went. You get the whole thing. It just lands on a Tuesday when I am already home, sunburned, and staring at four loads of laundry.

And I want to be clear about why, because it is not what you are thinking.

It is not about predators tracking us down at the hotel pool. It is that my house is empty. If I broadcast that my family is 900 miles away for six days, I have just told everybody who follows me, plus everybody who follows them, plus every screenshot that leaves my control, that nobody is home.

This is not a fringe opinion, by the way. The National Cybersecurity Alliance and CISA both recommend delaying travel posts and turning off location tagging for exactly this reason. Allstate has published survey data showing that a meaningful chunk of travelers post while they are away, and that number climbs among parents specifically. We are the worst offenders, honestly. We are excited. The kids are finally getting along. Of course we post it.

Time shift the post. Same content. Same likes. No live broadcast that your front door is unattended.

The Thing That Changed the Conversation

A few years back, a family vlogging channel got tangled up in serious legal trouble. The case made national news. I am not going to get into the details, because that is not what this show is about today.

But it changed something.

Before that, putting your kids in your content was just what people did. After it, a lot of parents started asking whether the kids in those videos had any say about being in those videos.

That question was long overdue. It is the question we are tackling today.

Here is where I have landed after almost 20 years of this: I do not want to tell their story. But my story includes them. That is a genuinely hard line to walk.

Every single piece of content I have seen on this topic resolves that tension by picking a side. Either post whatever you want, they will be fine, or lock it all down, never show a face, delete everything, salt the earth.

I am not going to pick a side, and I am not going to ask you to either. Because picking a side does not actually resolve anything.

Two people have a real claim to the same memory. My son’s tenth birthday is his tenth birthday. It is also a genuinely happy day in my life. Both of those are true. Neither one cancels out the other.

So you will not get a hard and fast rule from me here. You are going to get a way to manage it. That is the whole point of this show: not handing you a rule to follow, but handing you a way to run the technology in your house on purpose instead of reacting after something has already gone sideways.

Story Time: The Video They Killed (And Why)

A while back I had an idea I was excited about. The premise was simple.

I tell my kids to get off their phones. Thirty seconds later, they catch me on mine, doom scrolling like a woman with no principles whatsoever. Completely busted.

The video was about them winning the argument. They get to be the clever ones. They come out looking quick and a little bit smug. I come out looking like every parent watching, which was entirely the point.

I brought it to them fully expecting a yes. Look at it. It is flattering. It makes them look great. It makes me look like the mess.

They said no.

I sat there thinking, “Wait. You win in this one. There is no downside. This is not a tantrum video. This is not a bad haircut. Nobody is laughing at you. They are laughing at me.”

And then it landed.

The wrong question and the right one

Every article you will ever read about this gives you the same advice. Do not post the embarrassing stuff. Do not post the meltdown. Do not post the potty training saga. Do not post the picture where they look bad.

Which means all of that advice is measuring the wrong thing.

The question was never “is this flattering or is this embarrassing?”

The question is “whose story is this?”

And good lighting does not transfer ownership. Making them look great in my video does not make it my video to make. It was still their face, their bit, their moment where they got to be the funny one. They got to decide whether that went out to a few hundred thousand strangers.

Mechanic One: The Veto

Here is the second story, and it is the one that built the rule.

I once asked one of my kids for a voice only appearance. No face. Just a couple of lines of audio, off camera. They said no.

I am fairly confident (I could be wrong) that this was not a deeply held privacy position. I think it was a 17 year old who did not feel like doing that thing that afternoon.

I honored it. I even had a small internal argument about it first, because it would have taken four minutes and I had a deadline. It would have been so easy to say, “Come on, it is just your voice.”

Here is why I did not.

If the no has to be a good no, it is not a no

If you only accept refusals that come with a solid reason attached, what you have built is not consent. You have built an appeals process.

Your kid submits a request. You evaluate the merits. You rule, as the righteous judge that you are.

And I would bet real money that a lot of parents are running an appeals process while feeling quietly certain they have actual consent.

The tell is easy to check. Next time your kid says no to something small, notice whether your very next sentence is a question. If it is “why not?”, that is the appeals process. It sounds so reasonable. And it is doing so much damage, because it teaches them that a no might need a lawyer.

A real no is allowed to be lazy. A real no is allowed to be no for no reason at all. That is what makes it a no.

Important boundary: Do not apply this to chores or homework. If they say no to unloading the dishwasher, that is a different conversation entirely. Part of your job is teaching them which boundaries they get to set for themselves and which ones they do not. That is a whole other episode.

How the veto actually works in my house

The veto is standing. It is free. It does not require a reason. In my house it is phrased about as plainly as it can be:

“This is your choice. You do not ever have to do anything for my channel that you do not want to do.”

The part that matters most is the timing. I offer it before I even ask. Every time.

So by the time the actual question arrives, the no is already pre approved. It is sitting right there, ready to go, and nobody has to be brave to use it.

Think about the difference. If a kid has to interrupt a project their parent is visibly excited about in order to say no, you have made saying no expensive. It costs them courage. And a right that costs courage to use is not really a right. It is a dare.

The boring logistics layer (even when they say yes)

I would be doing you a disservice if I skipped this part. Even when the answer is a happy, enthusiastic yes, I am still watching for two things.

What I check	Why
School shirts, school signage, team names with a town in them	Anything that hands a stranger the specific building my kid walks into every morning.
Real time location	Nothing goes up while they are still standing there. Same principle as the vacation rule.

That is not fear. That is just not handing out a map for free.

The honest limit of the veto

I know exactly what some of you are thinking, because it is the obvious objection: all of this requires a kid who can actually answer the question.

My daughter is an adult. My son is 17. They can hold a real opinion about their own digital footprint and defend it out loud.

If your kid is four, the veto is not available to you yet. So let us talk about what you do in the meantime, because those years absolutely still count.

What To Do Before Consent Is Even Possible

Here is what I actually did during the years when consent genuinely was not on the table.

1. No public faces. Full stop.

The kids were in my life. They were not in my publicly facing feed, particularly on my Family Tech channels.

2. Private accounts, but verified, not assumed

I do have private accounts where I have posted my children. The key word is verified. I actually opened the app and actually looked at who could see the post.

And I do mean actually looked, because these platforms redesign that menu roughly every eleven minutes, and defaults have a charming habit of quietly resetting themselves after an update. If you have not checked yours since the last big app update, that is your Sunday afternoon task.

3. Move the daily stuff into closed loops

This is the one that did the most work. Group texts. A shared album.

That is where the video of my daughter pretending to walk for the first time went, the one she staged immediately after watching us lose our minds filming her younger brother’s actual first steps. (She has always understood the assignment.)

Think about who genuinely wants that video. It is your sister. It is your mom. It is maybe four other people. Nobody in your high school graduating class needs the toddler content. They scroll past it. They have always scrolled past it.

A shared album is not a downgrade from a public post. For that specific video, it is a better product delivered to the exact people who actually asked for it.

Mechanic Two: The Undo

When my kids first said yes to being posted publicly, looking back, I do not think they were really old enough to make that call. They were young. They loved being in mom’s videos. The camera was fun. They said yes the way a kid says yes to anything that looks like a good time.

That yes was not informed consent. It was enthusiasm.

Which is exactly why the second mechanic has to exist. If consent is a one time gate, and the gate got cleared by a kid too young to know what they were clearing, then the gate was never a safeguard. It just felt like one.

So: the undo.

It is a takedown right that outlives the original yes and never expires. Control Z for their own face.

They said yes at nine. They can unsay it at 15. And at 19. And at 30. And they do not have to justify it, because see the previous fifteen minutes of this episode.

How the undo actually runs

Once a year, scroll back through the accounts together.

Once a year so it is a habit and not a crisis.
Together because me auditing alone and pre deleting things I have privately decided are embarrassing is just me making another unilateral call about their face. It is the same mistake wearing a helpful costume.

Practically speaking, your kid has no idea what is out there about them. Mine did not. Nobody remembers what got posted in 2019. You have to go look.

And inventory more accounts than you think you have. For me it is two on every platform, the Family Tech account and my personal one, and both have to get cleared. You probably do not run a brand, but count anyway:

The old blog you forgot about
Facebook (all of it, including the memories that resurface)
Your partner’s tagged photos
That one platform you posted to in 2016 and have not opened since

Teach them to look for themselves

While you are in there, teach them two skills: how to search their own name, and how to reverse image search their own face.

That is how they find the stuff that got re shared, including from a place you completely forgot existed. And I would much rather my kid know how to look than depend on me noticing.

How To Reverse Image Search Your Kid’s Face (Step By Step)

This genuinely takes about 20 seconds once you know where the button is. Google folded this into Google Lens, so the wording on your screen may say Lens rather than “search by image.”

On your phone:

Open the Google app (not Chrome, not Safari, the actual Google app)
Tap the camera or Lens icon inside the search bar
Allow photo access if it asks
Pick a photo of your kid from your camera roll
Look at what comes up, and tap Find image source if you see it

On a computer:

Go to images.google.com
Click the camera icon in the search bar
Upload the picture (or paste an image link)
Click Find image source to see where that image actually lives

Heads up, because this one trips people constantly: the camera icon does not show up on images.google.com in a phone browser. If you are on your phone and cannot find it, you are not doing it wrong and your phone is not broken. Use the Google app instead, or tap your browser menu and choose “Request Desktop Site.” This is exactly the kind of thing that makes people assume they are bad at technology when really the interface just moved.

Two honest caveats so you are not confused by your results:

This will not reach anything inside a private Instagram account. It can only find what is publicly out there.
If nothing matches, it will just show you similar looking photos of strangers and move on. That is a normal result, not a failure.

“I Have Been Posting for Ten Years and My Kid Is About to Have Opinions”

I know some of you are doing the math right now. Ten years of public posts. A 12 year old who is one birthday away from having a lot of thoughts about it.

You are fine. Take a deep breath. There is nothing here to panic about, and this is not an overnight problem.

Here is the order I would actually do it in.

Start with the searches. Google their name. Reverse image search their face. Look at what comes up, together.

Why first? Because that is what a kid at school is going to do. As your kid starts a new school year and meets new friends, some of those friends will absolutely Google them. You want to know what comes up before they do. That is the only genuinely time sensitive piece of this.

Everything else can wait for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Then go ahead and schedule that lazy Sunday. Literally. “Next Sunday we are going through my Instagram.” One account, one Sunday. That is the pace.

You are not deleting a decade this weekend. Nobody is asking you to.

Mechanic Three: The Handoff (Yes, This One Is About Grandma)

You know this situation. A relative posts your kid without asking. Grandma, an aunt, a cousin. Somebody who loves your children enormously and has genuinely never once considered that the photo might not be theirs to share.

Every piece of advice on the internet tells you the same thing: set a boundary with Grandma. You make the call. You have the awkward conversation. You are the enforcer. You absorb all the friction. And your kid never even finds out it happened.

I do the opposite. I refuse to be the middleman.

I go to the relative and say something like:

“In our house, we ask the kids before we post their picture. Would you reach out and ask them directly if you can post this photo?”

Or, if it is already up:

“Would you ask them directly if they are okay with you keeping that photo live on your account?”

And two things happen that absolutely do not happen the other way.

What happens to your kid

They get an actual request, from an actual person, about their actual face. And they get to answer it themselves.

That is not a lesson about consent. That is the real thing, with real stakes, and they are in the driver’s seat. Which is exactly where I want them to feel like they are. You cannot teach that in a conversation. They have to do it at least once.

What happens to Grandma

When the rule comes from me, it is “Mom being difficult,” and it lasts about three weeks.

When the rule comes from the kid, it is a person she adores telling her what they want. That sticks. That reorganizes how she thinks about the photo before she taps share next time.

A rule relayed through you is a rule she has to remember. A rule she learns from her grandson is one she now believes.

Incidentally, this means fewer awkward conversations for you. You have exactly one, and then you are out of the loop. Which is where you wanted to be the entire time.

The Law Is Quietly Catching Up To This

You have probably seen headlines about actors and AI. Voices getting cloned. Faces showing up in things nobody ever filmed. There is real legislation moving on this, and the shape of it is worth understanding, because it turns out lawmakers are landing on the same rules some families are already running at home.

The NO FAKES Act

The NO FAKES Act (Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe) cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously by voice vote on June 18, 2026, and headed to the full Senate.

Important status check: it is still a bill, not a law. As of this writing it has not received a floor vote, and reporting suggests the timing is genuinely uncertain. Some senators raised First Amendment concerns even while voting it out of committee. So treat this as a thing to watch, not a thing to rely on.

Now strip out the Hollywood part and look at what they are actually fighting for. It is one thing: the right to say how your own face gets used.

That is the same right I handed a nine year old when I asked if I could put the softball video up.

My favorite detail in the whole bill

Somebody in Congress had the exact argument I had in my kitchen.

The bill caps how long you can license your own likeness at 10 years, and then it comes back to you and you renew. They wrote in an expiration date. They decided a one time yes should not last forever.

That is the undo. That is federal lawmakers independently arriving at the undo.

And here is the part I did not know when we recorded, which is even better for parents: the bill treats kids differently and more protectively. Licenses involving a minor are capped at five years, not ten. They require court approval. And they automatically terminate when the child turns 18.

Read that again. The proposed federal position on a minor’s likeness is that any deal is short, a judge has to sign off, and it dies on their eighteenth birthday no matter what. Congress looked at kids and said: shorter leash, more oversight, automatic expiration at adulthood.

The state laws are already here

While the federal bill works its way through, several states have already passed child influencer laws, starting with Illinois in 2023, then Minnesota and California in 2024, and Utah in 2025.

Utah’s law (HB 322, signed March 2025) is relevant to me personally, since I live here. The short version:

It applies to content creators earning at least $150,000 a year from monetized content featuring their minor kids
Those creators must keep monthly records and put a percentage of earnings into a trust the child can access at 18
Critically, it includes a “right to delete.” Once someone turns 18, they can request that a content creator delete or edit social media content featuring them as a minor. Social media companies also have to maintain a process for those requests.

Minnesota’s law includes similar privacy provisions, and California has been working on expanding its own right to delete.

Here is the honest caveat: none of these laws apply to the average parent posting first day of school photos. They are aimed at monetized content at real scale. But the direction is unmistakable. Lawmakers keep independently arriving at the same two ideas: kids get a say, and a yes should expire.

And then there is Matthew McConaughey

My favorite footnote. Matthew McConaughey’s attorneys secured eight trademarks from the US Patent and Trademark Office, including a sound mark for him saying “alright, alright, alright,” a motion mark of the delivery, and a few video clips. They applied back in December 2023, and the USPTO granted approval in December 2025. The stated goal is protecting his voice and likeness from unauthorized AI use.

(Trademark, incidentally, not copyright. Please do not strike me.)

Which I find genuinely delightful, because it is a man with a legal team spending real money to secure a right that your 17 year old already has for free in your house, any time they feel like using it.

So the world is finally catching up to a rule some families were already running at home. If you are hearing this idea for the first time today, you are not behind. You are just early to the part where you do something about it.

The Three Mechanics At A Glance

	The Veto	The Undo	The Handoff
What it is	A standing no, offered before you ask	A takedown right that never expires	Sending the request to your kid instead of enforcing it yourself
When you use it	Every single time, before the question	Once a year, on the calendar	Any time a relative posts without asking
What you say	“This is your choice. You never have to do anything for my channel.”	“Next Sunday we are going through my Instagram together.”	“Would you ask them directly if you can post this?”
Requires	A kid old enough to hold an opinion	An hour and a list of your accounts	One slightly awkward conversation, once
If your kid is little	Use closed loops instead (shared albums, group texts)	Start the inventory now so it exists later	Works at any age, honestly

Your Weekly Challenge

This week, it is two searches.

Google your kid’s name.
Reverse image search their face.

Do this before you touch a single old post, because it is what a classmate would do. It tells you what actually matters instead of what you are anxious about.

That is the whole challenge. It takes about five minutes and you will learn more from it than from an hour of scrolling your own archive.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I ask my kids for permission before posting photos of them online?

If your child is old enough to hold and defend an opinion about their own digital footprint, yes. The most useful version is offering the no before you ask, so refusing does not require courage. If your child is too young for that, the equivalent move is keeping their face out of public feeds and moving daily photos into closed loops like shared albums and group texts.

At what age can a child actually consent to being posted online?

There is no fixed age, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. The practical test is whether the child can hold an opinion about their own digital footprint and explain it. A nine year old saying yes because the camera is fun is enthusiasm, not informed consent. That is why a takedown right that outlives the original yes matters more than the age of the first yes.

What should I do if my child says no without giving a reason?

Accept it. If a refusal only counts when it comes with a good reason attached, you have built an appeals process rather than consent. The tell: notice whether your next sentence is “why not?” A real no is allowed to be lazy. This applies to being posted online, not to chores, homework, or safety rules, which are separate conversations.

Is it safe to post vacation photos while I am on vacation?

The safer approach is to post them after you get home. The concern is not strangers finding you at your destination. It is that a live vacation post signals that your house is empty. The National Cybersecurity Alliance and CISA both recommend delaying travel posts and disabling location tagging. You lose nothing by time shifting: same photos, same story, posted Tuesday.

What do I do when a grandparent posts my kid without asking?

Instead of setting the boundary yourself, hand the request to your child. Ask the relative to reach out to your kid directly and ask them about the photo. Your child gets real practice answering a real request about their own face, and the relative is far more likely to internalize a rule that came from a grandchild they adore than one relayed through a parent.

How do I reverse image search my child’s face?

On a phone, open the Google app, tap the camera or Lens icon in the search bar, choose a photo from your camera roll, and look at the results. On a computer, go to images.google.com, click the camera icon, and upload the picture. Note that the camera icon does not appear on images.google.com in a mobile browser, so use the Google app or request the desktop site. Reverse image search cannot see inside private Instagram accounts.

Are there actually laws about posting your kids online?

Several states have passed child influencer laws, including Illinois (2023), Minnesota and California (2024), and Utah (2025). Utah’s law applies to creators earning at least $150,000 annually from monetized content featuring minors, requires a trust for the child’s earnings, and includes a right to request deletion of content once the person turns 18. At the federal level, the NO FAKES Act cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously in June 2026 but remains a bill, not a law. None of these apply to a typical parent posting family photos.

I have posted my kids for ten years already. Have I ruined something?

No. Start with two searches: Google their name and reverse image search their face, together. That tells you what a classmate would actually find, which is the only urgent piece. Everything else can be a scheduled Sunday afternoon, one account at a time. You are not deleting a decade this weekend.

What You Can Walk Out With Today

Three things.

A veto you can offer before the next time you ask.
An undo you can put on the calendar for a lazy Sunday.
A handoff ready for the next time somebody posts your kid without asking.

None of that requires you to delete a decade, lock anything down, or be afraid of the internet.

It just requires you to ask first, and to accept the first answer you get.

Until next time, this is Family Tech powering down.

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