Do You Talk Too Much About Your Kids on the Internet?
As parents, we wring our hands a lot over how our children will handle social media during their teens and teens. We regret that at their age there were no such things . They are not mature enough to take responsibility, they still cannot understand the long-term consequences of what they publish, they will not understand that once it is, it will be forever.
Do you know what else was not around when we were their age? Parents who published on the Internet all the details about us in childhood. Updates on our progress in potty training, blog posts describing our latest tantrum, or videos of us delightfully pronouncing the word “chocolate” as a “nutty wick.” You can’t google our names and find photos of dentists brushing their teeth for the first time, or photos of us holding tiny chalkboards and announcing that on our first day of kindergarten, we already know we want to be a “ballerina” when grow up. …
We talk with our kids about the importance of protecting their privacy online, even when we post photos of them in the bathroom, in pajamas, in bathing suits; pictures that would humiliate us. Photos that probably don’t humiliate them when they’re young, but can be great food for bullying as they get older, and their friends even get a little sophisticated on their Internet searches.
All of these childhood photographs – if they exist at all – are exactly where they belong: buried in an old scrapbook at the back of the closet.
Writer Christy Tate recently wrote in the Washington Post about the moment her fourth-grader daughter received her first laptop. The first thing that her daughter did? Find her mom’s name and find all of the published photos and essays written about her in the earliest years of her life. And she didn’t like it.
I read some of my old articles and none of them seemed embarrassing to me, although she might disagree. A few years ago, I wrote about a frustration in her social life – a girl she considered her best friend suddenly stopped talking to her. While I have written about this experience from the perspective of a mother trying to help her daughter through a difficult time without succumbing to anti-girl stereotypes about so-called mean girls, she may not like seeing a painful episode from her past spread across the Internet. …
Even the fact that I read – and now, ugh, write – about her daughter’s embarrassment seems like an invasion of her privacy.
For parents like Tate – and, frankly, myself – who devote at least part of their professional lives to writing about parenting (and, more broadly, their own children), the stakes are particularly high. But any parent who posts on social media is essentially a content creator. We are creating new digital content, and even if we do so with all the privacy settings correct, hundreds of people will be able to see that content.
So what are the basic rules we should set for ourselves?
1. Protect your identity and physical location
For the same reason that many of us avoid posting certain types of personal information on our social profiles, we must also be careful not to associate our children’s online names with their birthdays, addresses, school names, or other personally identifiable information.
Report your fifth birthday ( sob ) on the day of the party (or a day close to their actual birthday), not their actual birthday. Post photos of your first day of school from your backyard instead of next to the school’s welcome sign. Make sure you don’t see these street signs in front of the photo of her riding her scooter down the sidewalk. Disable location service when taking photos or videos with your phone.
2. Keep their image a secret.
Now I feel better about it than before. When my articles started appearing in major national publications a few years ago, and one or two scary trolls (or two) began to take particular interest in us, I began to understand all the ways my son appeared on the Internet – starting with my profile picture.
It’s great that your privacy settings are locked as much as possible (and of course you need to), but if we have our children’s faces next to ours in their profile pictures, their images are still available for everyone to see. Is this a big deal now? Probably no. Could this be in the future? There are many reasons why you (or your children) may one day want this to be kept private.
And whatever you do post, even on your personal accounts, ask yourself: Would I be upset if a friend or family member posted this without my consent? Because after you post it, as soon as you create this digital content, you are essentially transferring the rights to it. If it upsets you if someone posts it, it might be best to leave it completely offline.
3. Ask their permission.
By the time my son was seven years old, he became morbid that I send – or even send text messages – certain images of him. A discreet photo of his “focused face” while working on the verbal fight could have infuriated him. (What surprised me at first until I thought, “Hmmm, do I like it when people film me candidly? Very NO.”
He is now eight years old and I ask him before I take a photo, I ask his permission to send it to grandparents, aunts and uncles, and I ask him if I can post it to a private social media account. It all depends on him.
He knows that I am a writer, and knows that I sometimes write about him. He doesn’t read everything I write, but I tell him what I’m working on and he contributes. He even sometimes offers me topics for discussion (his last sentence was on race, if that gives you any idea of the types of our conversations).
I don’t pass him every line yet (he wouldn’t have the patience to do that), but I also don’t want him to wake up one day feeling overwhelmed by what I’ve shared.
4. If in doubt, do not post
Over the years, I have personally realized the depth with which I write about my son. A line in the sand began to appear on me when he was about five years old, when he began to spend most of his waking hours away from me and not with me. He made friends of his own and started out, and he had a life of his own , besides the two of us, partying all day long.
My experiences with him in childhood were transformed into our experiences when he was a toddler and preschooler, and now they are becoming his experiences. Now that I am in doubt about the publish button, I put myself in its place. Would I care if my mom tweeted this joke that I came up with when I was his age? Would I have thought that this photo, with a funny expression that fully reveals his personality, would be cute if I was making a grimace?
Could my words or the images I post embarrass him, hurt his feelings, or make him feel like he’s not the most important thing in the world to me when he’s old enough to look back? If I’m not sure, I either delete it or move it to the private folder where it resides until I decide to share it with him one day or throw it away entirely.
At the very least , the decision not to publish – or not “ share ” as our parent’s over-sharing becomes known – could be a good example of the restraint we hope they will display on social media.
We are the first generation of parents to worry about what our children are sharing on the Internet; and they are the first generation of children who have to live with what we tell about them.