Previous Loco Parentis columns can be found here.
If there’s one thing I never thought I’d be, it’s a mommy-blogger. I’ve clicked my way onto more than a few mom-blogs during frantic, middle-of-the-night Google searches. While they were sometimes helpful, I always left with the weird, unpleasant feeling that I’d just been party to some kind of child exploitation.
I can’t help but notice that some of these blog kids are living in their own personal versions of The Truman Show. Their lives are serialized online. It seems that everything is shared: their milestones, their struggles, their photos (so. many. photos.), their most vulnerable moments—all offered up for blog readership or, more troubling, blog sponsorship.
Nonetheless, when I became a mother myself, I found I had things I wanted to say about the experience of motherhood. The tricky part was figuring out how to balance the desire to share that experience with my personal values regarding my son’s privacy. To that end, here are the general guidelines that I try to follow when sharing my life as a mother online:
- I don’t publish my son’s name on the Internet. I’m lucky to have been born just early enough that I got to build my own Internet presence. With the exception of an unfortunate Friendster profile that’s still floating around on the Internet somewhere (About me: I like hamsters!), I feel pretty much fine about what’s out there. It seems like common courtesy to offer my son the same luxury. He can build his own Google results. I’m not going to do that for him.
- I don’t use my child’s image to sell anything or offer up his image in exchange for free stuff. This one seems pretty cut and dry to me. There are all kinds of laws in place protecting child models (regarding permits and hours and education and how much of their pay must be set aside in trust for them). I actually find it appalling that these laws haven’t caught up to the blogosphere where I regularly see bloggers using pictures of their kids to sell clothes or soap or toys in sponsored posts and brand partnerships. Regardless of whether the kids in those photos are smiling, they are hard at work supporting their families. They should have the same protections as child performers in any other medium.
- I don’t share photos of my naked/partially naked kid. This is also an easy one. There are just too many people on the Internet doing creepy things. And pictures on the Internet are like grains of sand in your minivan: once you get them in there, you can’t get them out. I have many adorable snaps of my son running around in a diaper or playing in the bathtub, but I keep them locked away on my hard drive. Those are for me, his father, and his future prom date’s eyes only (Hey! A mom’s got to have some fun!).
- I don’t reveal anything that my child might consider private someday. I take this commandment pretty seriously and always err on the side of caution. I have no idea whether my son will grow up to be a relatively guarded person (like his mama) or a chronic over-sharer who loves gushing about his life online. Either would be fine with me, but the point is, I don’t know. There’s a chance he’d be fine with me sharing all kinds of details about his childhood, but there’s also a chance he won’t be and, for me, it’s just not worth the risk.
- I don’t share pictures that could be embarrassing for him later. Speaking for myself again here, but I would not have been happy if my fifth grade bullies has access to photos of me with spaghetti all over my head, or standing in my toddler potty, or that time I put on a pair of my mom’s nylons over my gym shorts. From an adult’s perspective, these kinds of photos are adorable and ubiquitous, but when you’re a kid, you think you’re the only person in the universe with your particular, humiliating brand of weird. I think it should be up to my son, not me, whether he finds these photos embarrassing.
Basically, I keep the focus on myself, and not my son. This might sound difficult, but it’s been surprisingly possible. I have a lot to say about my own experience of motherhood that doesn’t necessitate revealing sensitive information about my child. Sure, there are a lot of essays and blog posts and articles that I sometimes wish I could be writing, but I feel strongly that my child’s privacy and wellbeing simply have to come first.
I once had the pleasure of hearing Tony Earley speak and during his talk, he said that at some point he’d had to choose between being a good writer and a good son, and he decided to be a good writer. If I have to choose between being a good mommy-blogger and a good mommy, I prefer to be a good mommy. For me, that’s an easy choice.
Tags: aubrey hirsch, loco parentis, the butter
This reminds me of a really interesting thing I read about either here or somewhere else w/r/t parenting and the Web. When this couple’s daughter was born, they created social media accounts on all the platforms they thought were reasonable in her name, all with the same password. Each account was attached to the same gmail account that was their daughter’s [email protected]. After that, they left everything alone! Her social media presence/name online was basically on lock until she was old enough to take responsibility for her internet life. Their plan was to give her the password when they felt she was responsible enough, and then she gets this essentially curated internet presence. I thought it was very thoughtful, but I wasn’t sure if it was something that I would do.
I am also ASHAMED that I cannot cite my sources because I am a LIBRARIAN.
That is SO cool. I certainly didn’t think to create a firstnamelastname account ANYWHERE when I was first online, and by the time I did, my real name was no longer available anywhere. How cool would it have been to get a 20 year jump?
Interesting. I do wonder if, by the time their daughter comes of age, their choices will seem a little quaint (“Geez, Twitter, mom? Why don’t I just tear out my brain implant and write everything on a keyboard while I’m at it?”).
True, the particular sites will probably make the whole thing moot by the time she’s older, but it does provide a way to control her media presence -no-one else can now pretend to be her and she has the internet equivalent of good credit.
I read that! Not sure if it was original to the site, but I saw it published on Slate.
It was on Slate. 🙂
An interesting idea, but they’ll need to keep logging in on occasion, changing passwords and keeping the accounts active otherwise they’ll get shut down or someone will work their way in. It happens on Twitter all the time; I’ll see an account post that has been dormant for months, but it’ll be an ad for some “secret to weight loss” or such.
Really dumb but serious question on your third point: how would you classify pictures on vacation/in water? Because they are nearly naked, and now I am questioning my entire Instagram/Facebook feed.
This probably seems like a non-answer, but I’d make a judgement call based on the photo itself and the degree of the sharing (is it a private instagram account, or a public blog?).
Reviewing all of my pictures now for future embarrassment levels and inappropriateness. It used to be a public IG account but I just made it private again (I don’t get much traffic), and the ol’ Facebook is set up to pretty strict privacy standards, too. No blogs anymore for me!
Ugh, there are some creeps out there who will be gross about even the sweetest most innocent photos. I’ve come across a few of them on Flickr, and I can see which photos they’ve favorited, so I can see all the little girls in bathing suits or topless or in the bathtub alongside their favorite photos of sexy women. Just now I even found one whose account name was “ilove_littlegirls.”
Ugh, I even just found a guy who had a whole album of “ex girlfriend’s daughter” age 11-12, with sexy comments about her skin, her stomach, her weight. And also photos he took of random little girls he saw in public. (And also a bunch of pictures of his privates, no thanks.)
I love this post because I made this decision as well and follow these same rules for my son. It’s been a lot easier than I thought not to over share. And while some family members ask where the photos are (then I email them photos privately), I know my friends are quite appreciative I don’t overwhelm their feeds! Ha. As a writer, I’ve learned that writing about the experience of motherhood doesn’t have to involve sharing intimate details of my son’s life and I haven’t found that it’s held me back in my writing. I read two great motherhood memoirs tin which the specific details of their children’s lives weren’t present and they spoke to me more than some other memoirs which can not claim the same discretion.
Thanks for writing this Aubrey. I have a question that isn’t really resolved for me yet. One of my children is on the autism spectrum and has other special needs (anxiety and depression) and these challenges brings up lots and lots of things for me as a parent. As a writer, I want to write about these questions. We don’t share the same last name so there’s some separation already, but I also wonder about the ethics of defining his challenges in a public forum. Someday –perhaps soon! he is 11–he might well be googling my name and I struggle with the idea that my words might confuse or hurt him. He knows he has autism, anxiety and depression but he knows those things in age-appropriate ways. We try to make our home stigma-free and I try to minimize his sense of my worries for/about him. So for now I haven’t written publicly about him (except like this, where my handle is not something he would know or search for), until I have some better understanding of how to do it ethically and compassionately. At the same time I think it could be helpful for other parents to read about our experiences. So…. I’m not sure. Anybody have ideas about how to navigate these waters?
My qualifications to advice you on this include having no children and no expertise on autism or anxiety or depression, but maybe you could write about him under a pen name, like you do here?
Thanks paddlepickle, that’s a good idea! It’s funny, I had considered using a pen name for other writing which deals with being a survivor of sexual abuse, and then decided it was important for me to go with my real name (though I can understand others might make different decisions) so I’ve been in this no-pen-name! head space, but it’s a really different issue writing about my kid and I think it *would* make sense for me to use one in that situation.
This is something I wonder about too, with my special needs kids. Some experiences are so traumatic that you want to write. I tend to agree with Liza Long, who wrote the I Am Adam Lanza’s Mom essay that turned into her book, The Price of Silence, which advocates for speaking out about mental illness in families so we can all learn from one another.
Does the no-names on the internet rule also carry over to private social media accounts like facebook? I’m just thinking through how these rules (which i agree with) would apply to my life, and I think that would be the only one I would have trouble with. My fbook is about as locked down as it can be and I regularly cull my friends list.
Heh. We have friends who have a hard time remembering SteelyKid and the Pip’s legal names, because we consistently use their Internet nicknames online (we did announce their legal names when they were born but not since and Google takes little notice of those posts).
I’m glad to find that I have always, common-sensically, as it were, followed these rules ever since I started blogging back in 2008. But my delicate conscience has even pricked me about blogging about other people.
https://thenewcomer.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/ethi…