There's someone missing in celebrity family photos.

We’re in the era of oversharing. Parental oversharing, in particular. Snapshots from children’s birthdays parties or playdates or mealtimes, once confined to dusty frame or plastic photo album, are now filed in feeds, stories and profile

We see the names, the faces, the milestones, the previously private family moments of even the most public people. Most are carefully curated for their audience, while some show the dirtier, more tiresome side of being a mum or dad.

But there’s one thing, or should that be person, that tends to be missing from all.

The nanny.

As a recent article in The New York Times noted, celebrity Instagram feeds almost never capture the person sharing in the care of their children; the person picking that child up from school, making their meals, bathing them, reading to them so that the parents can maintain their careers.

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s nanny – nowhere. The reported six nannies that care for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s children – nowhere.

“Posting your nanny is like posting your address or your kids’ school,” lifestyle blogger Dikla Goren Dekel told the outlet. “It’s too much information.”

Yeezy Wave Runner 700 ????

A post shared by Kim Kardashian West (@kimkardashian) on Oct 18, 2017 at 9:11am PDT

But more than privacy. Because it’s non-famous folks doing it too, people who’s social media is limited to a select group of their 400 closest acquaintances.

So could it be that parents are just perpetuating a myth; forging a fallacy (perhaps subconsciously, even) that that they can do it all, have it all, all the time, without help?

Nanny Jessica Marshall thinks so. She wrote recently for Kidspot about being asked to step out of a family photo at her charge’s third birthday party. A party that she had planned, for which she’d collected the RSVPS, bought and hung the decorations, prepared the food, baked the elaborate ‘Elsa’ cake.

“Later, happy pictures of the birthday party litter the family’s social media feed, but in each photo I am cropped out or not included,” she wrote. “Praise is heaped upon the parents for throwing such a magnificent birthday party via the comments and likes. ‘Such delicious food! And what an amazing cake!’ I cannot help but feel hurt at the erasure of my existence and all my hard work.”

How does Meshel Laurie do it all? She pays other women to help. (Post continues.)

For some, sensitivity to class structures no doubt also plays a role. Not wanting to flaunt – or be judged for – the fact that they are in a privileged enough position to afford assistance.

But none of that changes the fact that in private, these men and women are often treated like family, even considered a “third parent”, but are invisible in the public record of that family’s lives. The “forgotten faces”, as one family therapist described it to The New York Times.

As Mia Freedman wrote here previously, it wouldn’t be hard to change.

“Every time a woman pretends she has less help than she actually does, she is Photoshopping her life in a way that’s actively bad for other women.

“All women – famous or not – have to get real with each other about what it takes to make a family work. It takes a village, and if that village includes a nanny or an army of nannies, you’re very, very lucky and you have nothing to hide.”