This week, Beyoncé introduced an athleisure clothing line called Ivy Park. The brand’s name derives from a beloved childhood park she ran in, and from her 4-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy, a regular on her Instagram account and in her videos who also appears in the commercial, on her mother’s back and both wearing Ivy Park-logo headbands.

The response from the public was rapturous. People.com hailed the commercial as “empowering.” One fan in a YouTube response video said: “Some people just create a clothing line just to get money. And I think, you know, she’s actually doing it from a place where it’s, like, coming from her heart, especially when you name something after your child.”

They have a point. I am sure that Beyoncé would not include her daughter in her empire unless she felt it benefited her character. And there is a great deal to admire about the way she empowers others, particularly girls and women. (“My goal with Ivy Park is to push the boundaries of athletic wear and to support and inspire women who understand that beauty is more than your physical appearance,” she said in a statement.)

That said, there is still something disconcerting about seeing celebrities enlist their children in service of their brands, even if there is some ancillary political value.

If I had a friend who told me he was starting a business named after his young child, I might find it cute, perhaps even touching. If he were using his son’s or daughter’s likeness as the logo (à la the Wendy’s franchise), I could understand how that might be fine, though I’d wonder how his offspring might react later to seeing his cartoon image plastered ubiquitously.

But if he also cast his child in commercials, and that was on top of a web campaign in which the little boy or girl was otherwise a prominent fixture, and if my friend already inhaled the rarefied air of the ultrarich and I suspected the deployment of the adorable tyke was a strategic showcase for his own relatability as a normal parent and a measure to downplay the crass commercialism of the enterprise — well, then I might be concerned.

And yet many parents on social media are doing much the same thing, albeit in less conspicuous fashion, and usually with a goal of praise, not profits.

We, too, are using our children on the Internet to burnish our personal brands, from the C.E.O. who wants to let everyone know she still takes the time to attend her child’s piano recital to the stay-at-home caregiver wanting recognition for his exhausting work.

Celebrities are brilliantly monetizing a new technological practice that a mere decade or two ago would have been regarded as gauche and narcissistic.

Obviously, not every instance of posting information about children on the Internet is calculated. Relaying joyful photos or anecdotes for family and close friends is often more convenient over social media. In addition, these networks can provide support and advice to parents who are confounded, upset or isolated.

But they can also be about serving the ego, as demonstrated by a popular, epithet-enhanced blog that routinely calls out parents for self-absorbed conduct on social media.

Earnestly asking for guidance on how to get through a flight with an infant sounds quite different from a faux self-deprecating remark complaining that your baby cried nonstop on the way to your Hawaiian vacation, which seems designed to alert others to both one’s glamorous lifestyle and parental stamina.

Then there are those progenitors who appear to detach themselves from the act of parenting, shruggingly referring to their children online as “the kid” (or “the boy” or “the girl”) when reporting their cute acts. Using the definite article rather than “my,” even sardonically, also might be seen as elevating one’s child from the pack and effacing the rest, as if theirs is “the” sole child in existence.

Less pettily, there are serious questions to be asked here about privacy and consent. For most children raised in analog eras, embarrassing Polaroids and stories were small-scale mortifications at worst. But now the possibility of mass exposure looms, and while most conscientious parents know better than to circulate, say, a photo of a child bathing, they do distribute other data that the young subject may someday wish had been kept confidential.

“It’s hard enough to get through puberty,” Amy Webb wrote, in a widely read 2013 essay on Slate, about a friend’s unfettered Facebook pictures of her 5-year-old daughter. “Why make hundreds of embarrassing, searchable photos freely available to her prospective homecoming dates?”

The 5-year-old clearly cannot approve with full understanding the uploading of these images, just as the only way Blue Ivy can refuse to endorse her mother’s marketing campaign is by throwing a temper tantrum. We have strict child labor laws, and I am certain that any applicable ones were upheld during Blue Ivy’s cameo. (I also imagine that she had fun.)

Social media sites typically attempt to ban users under 13, and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule is designed to safeguard children when they use the Internet.

But there are no specific restrictions concerning what parents share about their own children, though the national police in France — a country we have historically thought of as more laissez-faire than us regarding just about everything — recently posted a message on Facebook warning parents that sharing photos of their children is unsafe.

Mark Zuckerberg clearly disagrees. For someone whose corporate mantra is “openness,” the photos on his public account do not reveal all that much about his personal life. There is a smattering of his wife and an album with friends called “The Great Goat Roast of 2009.” The majority, though, are of business meetings and conferences that could come out of a slick P.R. brochure.

Yet after the birth of his daughter in November, Mr. Zuckerberg went on paternity leave and suddenly began posting pictures of her and of his home life.

I do not doubt that he is smitten with his daughter. Furthermore, parading one’s child in front of the cameras may be an inevitable consequence of mega-celebrity (see under West, North), either because of the futility of keeping the paparazzi and fans at bay or because one is so accustomed to life in the spotlight that it doesn’t seem tacky.

Nevertheless, it is striking that both famous billionaires, aware of how staunchly they must defend their own privacy (Beyoncé, for instance, rarely gives interviews), seemingly have few qualms about sacrificing their children’s.

Only Mr. Zuckerberg knows whether one of his aims was to make himself — and Facebook — more likable to his customers and critics by presenting himself as a regular dad who is happy to change diapers. His letter to his newborn, shared on the site, mixed in idealistic values and objectives around technocratic proclamations such as “Building Facebook has created resources to improve the world for the next generation.”

Detractors quickly noted that the altruism outlined in Mr. Zuckerberg’s letter, which pledged to donate 99 percent of his and his wife’s Facebook shares to their philanthropic limited liability company, may have major tax benefits as well. But no matter; the missive, accompanied by a beatific photo of the couple and their daughter, has been “liked” over 1.6 million times.

For those of us not peddling $185 bodysuits or big data, perhaps we feel guilty for ignoring our children in favor of our devices so frequently that we compensate by highlighting them in our social media feeds. Or, to take a less skeptical tack, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Knowles simply want to express their love for their daughters and are using social media to do so because they are powerful figures in that space.

While love for and from a child is absolutely something to be cherished and celebrated, it may also explain why children are such perfect props for online self-promotion. If someone were to post daily pictures of and stories about his spouse, he would soon find himself without any virtual friends.

Yet children get a pass, not only because they are, as ever, symbols of purity, but also because they are still unspoiled by digital technology, unable to use it themselves with much proficiency. As Rousseauian innocents of the Internet age, they aren’t susceptible to the vapidity, solipsism and toxicity the rest of us have been sullied by.

To integrate a child into a Twitter post or Instagram picture, then, is to acknowledge a deeply intimate connection we have to a world untouched by these corrupting media platforms, to signal to others that when we put down the phone or close the computer, there exists a human being whose life is wholly dependent on us, who wants to hear a bedtime story rather than another hot take on the latest scandal, who loves us not for how many followers we boast but for the tender, sacrificial care we give them.

And yet we use a cold piece of machinery to affirm that warm human sentiment.