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The Picture Not Worth Sharing: An Online Safety Story for Children About Photo Sharing, Consent and Kindness (Ages 7 to 11)
Paperback
Series: Safety Spotters, Book 8
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 16 2026
Pages: 58
Weight: 0.17
Height: 0.14 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
One photograph. One second to press send. And a boy who did not deserve any of it.
The story
Toby is the quiet one, the one whose ears go red when a teacher says his name, who lends people his coloured pencils and does not even watch to make sure he gets them back. For the school talent show he has bought a second-hand top hat nearly as big as he is, and he is calling himself the Great Tobini.
At rehearsal, under the stage lights, he decides to take his jumper off. He should have taken the hat off first.
What follows is twenty seconds that Year 5 will talk about for weeks, and a photograph that is around the whole school before anybody has thought about it for even one of them.
The tell
Your thumb is faster than your thinking. Laughing faces, forwards, captions: each takes one second and each gives the photo a push. Even a private send to one friend builds a bridge for it to travel over.
The pause only works before you press send.
The swap test
Put your own face in the picture and see how the joke feels. If it stops being funny with you in it, it was never as funny as you thought.
And the rule underneath it: not your face, not your picture. The person in a photo owns the joke, the moment, all of it. Everyone else is borrowing.
You cannot unsend a pigeon
Deleting your copy does not bring a photo back from everyone else's screen. So the book does the harder, more useful thing: it is about what you do when a picture is already spreading. Stop pushing it. Delete your copy. Ask others to delete theirs. Never repost it, not even to show how far it has got.
And if the picture is of you, tell an adult straight away, because being laughed at is heavy and you were never meant to carry it on your own.
What your child will be able to do
Treat other people's images with respect: ask before sharing, never pass on an embarrassing image, and know what to do when other people already have.
Curriculum
Aligned to statutory Relationships Education for England, online relationships and being safe, and to the National Curriculum for England, Computing at Key Stage 2 (recognise acceptable and unacceptable behaviour; know ways to report concerns). Maps equally to the Curriculum for Wales Digital Competence Framework (Citizenship: identity, image and reputation, and online behaviour and cyberbullying), Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence (Technologies TCH 2-03a, and Health and Wellbeing HWB 2-16a), and the Northern Ireland Curriculum (PDMU Strand 2, and Using ICT acceptable online behaviour). US grades 2 to 5, elementary, Australia and New Zealand Years 3 to 6. Not endorsed or accredited by any government body.
Reading it
Ten chapters, about 8,500 words, for readers aged 7 to 11, with Maya's Safety Spotter Tips at the back. It is warm and it is funny, and it does not let anybody off, including the children who only laughed.
Good for
The kindness half of online safety, which usually gets skipped. Internet safety for kids, online safety for kids and cyber safety for kids, taught through consent and empathy rather than danger. Staying safe online for kids when the risk is other children rather than strangers.
A mystery for readers 9 to 12 with genuine feeling in it. Chapter books for 9 to 12 year olds, and a strong choice for reluctant readers, because everybody wants to know what happens to Toby.
The series
Book 5 of 6 in Safety Spotters, for ages 7 to 11. Younger readers start with Little Safety Spotters, ages 5 to 7. Older readers continue with Safety Spotters: Case Files, ages 11 to 14.
Free classroom resources, including the swap test, at safetyspotters.com
Check it before you trust it.
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