The Facebook-Free Baby

[ceejay]

finance.yahoo.com/news/the-facebook-free-baby.html

GROWING UP, I NEVER had tan lines. Want proof? There's a color snapshot on display in my parents' home: a naked 2-year-old is shown from behind, climbing up a bathroom counter. For as long as I can remember, a framed 3x5-inch print has sat next to the sink where it was taken. My dad doesn't carry a copy in his wallet. My mom hasn't distributed it to family or friends. Up until now, unless you were invited into my childhood home, you never would've known this cute little portrait even existed.

Proud parents have been perfecting this genre for decades. While the intimate moments themselves remain largely unchanged, how we choose to share them—much like the tools for capturing them—has evolved dramatically since my parents first became parents in late 1979.


Today, the default is, of course, Facebook. Although privacy settings allow us to control which circle(s) of friends has access to parts of our profiles, many people either don't understand how to use them or prefer not to. Plus, like record labels and print publishers, parents are discovering that once content becomes digital, it can be easily copied and redistributed willy-nilly (hello, grandparents!). The result: photos of kids in compromising, colorful circumstances, and status updates recounting even more compromising, colorful circumstances, intended for a select few, are now spread out over the Web for everyone.

Just spend five minutes on the blog "STFU, Parents," which collects submissions of Facebook status updates and photos just to mock them ("STFU" stands for "shut the f— up") and you'll start to rethink what you should and shouldn't share about your children and parenting.

I WOULD NEVER TELL ANYONE how to raise their kids. But I've decided to draw a line in the sand with mine. When it comes to my son, who is 3 months old, I am doing away with privacy settings altogether—by abstaining. That means my wife and I won't be posting photos or discussing him online publicly (more on that later). Like a kid born into a vegetarian or Amish family, that is just the way it will be.


This hasn't been easy. I'm no Luddite. I fit the profile of what Nielsen recently defined as "Generation C," adults between 18 and 34 who are deeply invested in digital life (the "C" stands for "connected"). I joined Friendster in 2002. Myspace in 2003. Flickr in 2004. Facebook in 2005. I've been tweeting almost daily since 2007. I've checked into Foursquare. Uploaded to YouTube. Updated my Path. And I still post regularly to Instagram, albeit privately.

But I am an early adopter by choice, not obligation. It's not that I want my son to remain hidden from the world. I just want him to inherit a decision instead of a list of passwords and default settings. If he takes part in social media, he'll eventually do so on his own terms, not mine. (At what age? No idea. I'm new at this!)

As more of Gen-C begins having kids, I suspect they'll agree. In the last decade, we've watched parents embrace social media, often too much. I call it "oversharenting": the tendency for parents to share a lot of information and photos of their kids online. Sure, there's a big difference between announcing your baby's first crawl and details of your dirty-diaper duty (or worse). But it's a slippery slope.


In extreme cases, parents wind up jockeying for attention or Facebook "likes" a la 1990s TV programs like "America's Funniest Home Videos" or "Kids Say the Darndest Things." A YouTube video of a loopy 7-year-old after a trip to the dentist has been viewed 110 million times. His parents now run a website that sells $15 T-shirts featuring the kid. I don't blame those parents for capitalizing on the kid's Internet celebrity. But I'd rather take out loans than push for my son to out-cutesy the rest of the world.

"It is dangerous to think of life as a constant competition on 'Hot or Not,'" said Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatry professor at Stanford and author of "Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality." "But that is the message that much of our cyber experience sends us. Directing Internet traffic to our picture, website or posting should not be the goal."

Of course, sharing simple anecdotes and photos is not inherently a bad thing. There's a clear upside for new parents, especially. "Motherhood can be very isolating," said Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and author of the forthcoming book "The Social Machine." "When the babies are really young, you run out of things to do. Sitting there with a camera just gives you something to do. But to what extent is the person posting photos getting real companionship?"

I'M LESS CONCERNED WITH WHY parents use social media or what they may get from of it, than how they're using it and how this choice might affect kids, especially as we've watched Facebook grow from a novelty to multibillion-dollar stalwart.

Timeline, the social network's recent visual rework, displays everything you post, say or do—marriages, divorces, children, friendships, vacations—on the site, in sequential order. The presumption is that, from now on, all children should have their lives documented online.


Two decades ago, parents began registering domains named for their kids. Today, they register Facebook profiles for their unborn children, and even write status updates in first person. Similarly, parents set up Twitter accounts for their infants, and send tweets on their baby's behalf. Messages I've seen range from the banal ("Ate. Slept. Pooped.") to the more self-conscious: "Thanks to social media my day wearing a bear suit will live on to inspire future generations...and embarrass me as a teenager."

Again, there's a difference between discussing and posting images of your child, and hijacking his or her identity online. Either way, it's difficult to say what the consequences of oversharenting might be. In her 2008 article "Why Youth Social Network Sites," Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, discussed how creating social media profiles bolsters a teenager's sense of identity. However, it's somewhat unclear what happens when an adolescent inherits a digital legacy—told through photos, anecdotes or even those faux-narratives—from his or her parents.

"More than ever, a 'digital legacy' is a very difficult thing to shed," Mr. Aboujaoude said, "and the 'reinvention' can turn out to be an exercise in wishful thinking."

"We're a culture that's used to a lot of things being ephemeral," said Ms. Donath. "To a large extent that is now disappearing."

In other words, the more of our lives we put online from the beginning, the more there is to contend with later on. On the other hand, my son has been born into a world that subscribes to online existence as the ultimate decider of truth. We say things like "Pics or it didn't happen." We get creeped out by people who are un-Googleable (I mean, right?). As MIT professor Sherry Turkle put it, "I share, therefore I am."

I'M TORN BETWEEN wanting to offer my son a tabula rasa, and tapping the efficient, frictionless nature of digital tools to share him with our family and friends. My wife and I live hundreds of miles from our immediate family and some of our closest friends.


By lowering the supply of him online, we've actually increased the demand. It's been only three months, but my wife and I have received emails, text messages, phone calls and Facebook messages all hounding us for images of our son. Initially, we sent out one email with one photo taken the day he was born. Then, we set up a Picasa folder and invited only close family and a few friends, but it doesn't rally the same excitement or immediacy of an Instagram upload.

Our current networks are already inundated. It doesn't seem practical to boot the people I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing a naked-baby-climbing-the-counter photo with, for instance. Playing with Facebook's settings to find the right nuance seems like more trouble than it's worth.

What then? I have no idea. But I want to find out. I'm starting to explore every app, website and service I can that will allow me to balance both goals: preserving my son's blank slate, and our desire to share him with our friends and family. So far, I'm intrigued by Snapchat, an iPhone app that auto-deletes photos within 10 seconds of their being posted. On Google+, you can host a private "Hangout" or live chat with up to nine devices. There's Socialcam, an app for sharing and emailing videos. I'm not expecting to find a perfect platform. And I'm pretty sure I know how to avoid oversharenting. But there's got to be a happy medium.

[Deleted]

I cannot eyeroll hard enough at this article and I have too many thoughts on it to articulate clearly atm.

But dude, unfuckingclench.

Blank slate. ::snort::

[ceejay]

I think about this, but I just take the time to set my FB settings just so. It doesn't take that long.

But I do hate my mom posting DD's pictures all over the place.

[charminglife]

I'm just shocked that people are buying $15 t-shirts featuring the loopy dentist kid.

[wrathofkuus]

thedoghousediaries.com/3448

[DownToEarth]

May 15, 2012 16:17:19 GMT -5 @habbsies said:

I cannot eyeroll hard enough at this article and I have too many thoughts on it to articulate clearly atm.

But dude, unfuckingclench.

Blank slate. ::snort::

I agree - if you can't figure out your own appropriate line for sharing you're a dumba$$. Or if you have so many "friends" that your list includes people you don't want knowing about your kids and you still share - you're a dumba$$.

Seriously, it's not that hard to figure out where the line is for what to share that works for you. So what if a mom who is super involved in her kids every movement decides that she wants to share more? Plus I like the funny-things-my-kids say story.

[heyjude]

Well what does he want? A cookie. I get to some extent what he is referring to but to refuse to post photos of your kid on Facebook seems like an overreach, esp. if you keep your account on lockdown and limit who you friend.

[brookles]

I like this-- it's great when people try to protect the privacy of people who are too young to express an opinion. I'd be mortified if my parents had shared details about me the way that some parents overshare about their kids on Facebook (and if FB existed when I was growing up, my dad would have been one of the biggest offenders out there).

[Deleted]

May 15, 2012 16:24:26 GMT -5 heyjude said:

Well what does he want? A cookie. I get to some extent what he is referring to but to refuse to post photos of your kid on Facebook seems like an overreach, esp. if you keep your account on lockdown and limit who you friend.

But his kid will have to remember passwords from birth. OH NOES!

[msmerymac]

I don't even have kids, but I've thought about future kids and whether or not to post pictures or details about them online. (I have a ton of friends with kids, so I see the status updates daily and I guess this is when I think of it.) I lean towards no.

I know people who don't post pictures of their children or put their names on FB. They're much more rare than those who do. I guess my thought is that it's THEIR image and their legacy and their digital footprint, and I don't have their consent to do it.

Also, my dad's girlfriend's facebook is WIDE open and she has almost exclusively pictures of her grandchildren on it. Thankfully we live far from my dad. But not posting pics of kids on FB means she won't be sharing those pics on her FB. I can hope. Granted, this is probably the woman who would buy my daughter her first Barbie or other toy I might not be comfortable with, so maybe I need to unclench a bit.

[pixy0stix]

I get badgered by the grandmothers if I don't post pictures of ZB on FB. Then my DH (not the gmas) spreads them willy-nilly. sigh...

Also, I thought I was gen-x, or maybe gen-y, but not gen-c.

[heyjude]

And how ironic. He's oversharing his desire for Internet privacy for his kid. But his kid will be able to google this article and simple sleuthing will link him to it foooorevvver!

Bwhahahah.

[heyjude]

If he really wanted to protect his child's privacy, this would have been written anonymously. But you can't up your own Internet street cred that way...

[marie427]

Facebook is how people share content now, whether this guy likes it or not. There are enough steps he can take to prevent becoming a feature on STFU Parents. This is the other extreme end of the spectrum and it's just as eyeroll-worthy as extreme oversharing.

[Deleted]

I definitely think there are pros and cons. You don't have to share everything your kid does or says on FB, but leaving them off your page completely? I don't know...my kid's a huge part of my life and isn't that what my FB page is about? My life? Things that interest me? You can share tidbits without becoming some of the crazies on STFU, Parents.

That said, I will say we've gotten a lot of flack from family and friends for not sharing our kid's name on FB. What can I say...right before delivery, I read an article about identity thieves using FB information (including names and birthdates) to steal the identities of children and I got paranoid. So we don't use Rook's real name on FB and when a friend has posted his name on my page, I delete it. Again, paranoid, I know. But it's one (weird) thing I feel pretty strongly about, so yeah.

[Deleted]

You know, I really think people take the internet entirely too personally, especially when it comes to random, generic pictures. If you want to maintain your child's privacy, then you don't use their real name and you're careful about personally identifying information in pictures or on your FB page.

That's now you maintain privacy, not by refusing to mention your kid or post any picture of them at all.

Just viewing your kid's picture is not some kind of violation of their privacy just like walking around in a public playground isn't a violation of their privacy either.

[frauschmindy]

My H has a cousin that will absolutely not allow any photos of her children on the net, unless they are attachments in an email sent from her or her husband specifically. I always assumed she had some vague fears about child porn or abduction, but then I realized there are no pictures of her either.

I'm several years away from kids, but I'd like to think I won't overshare. And I never post pictures of other children anywhere.

[heyjude]

Not posting your child's name on YOUR Facebook is also very weird....

[earlgreyhot]

Let's all pin a rose on sanctidaddy's nose.

It's a lot of work managing no pictures of your kid ever online. Everyone has a digital camera and people like to share. I try and limit, but MIL comes to visit and uploads all the pictures she takes directly to FB not making the connection between my wishes and her desire to share. That's an extreme case, but it's happened in varying degrees with all my family members.

[msmerymac]

May 15, 2012 16:42:39 GMT -5 @frauschmindy said:

My H has a cousin that will absolutely not allow any photos of her children on the net, unless they are attachments in an email sent from her or her husband specifically. I always assumed she had some vague fears about child porn or abduction, but then I realized there are no pictures of her either.

I'm several years away from kids, but I'd like to think I won't overshare. And I never post pictures of other children anywhere.

Yeah, I'd be pissed if, for example, the parent of one of my kid's classmates posted the class picture on FB. I think I'm in the minority on this one because I think I've seen discussions about this before, but maybe it wasn't on PCE.

I guess it also depends on how you use FB. I don't use it as a primary mode of communication. I very occasionally check into places, but even that makes me feel weird (Hi! House thieves! I'm not home! I'm 8 miles away!)

Neither of my parents on on FB, none of my in-laws are on it. So I don't see it as being a quick and easy way to share pics of our kids, regardless.

[meshaliuknits]

The place we take babyliu for swim lessons allows you to photograph your kids swimming, but at the start of every session someone from the office goes around to the classes and tells them photos are fine but please do not upload pictures that have other children in them to social media sites. Start of this last lesson someone's grandmother shouted "Not even FACEBOOK?!" She was completely outraged, like someone had told her they would be taking the baby and her purse home with them but she could keep a poopy diaper.

This story had nothing to do with anything. I just thought it was funny.

[Deleted]

I really don't have a problem with people posting pictures of my children provided they aren't identifying them.

Honestly, I think it's a bit ridiculous to expect otherwise. You have to know that other parents have your kid's face in the background of their pictures, particularly people you don't know. I think it unreasonable to expect people to hoard perfectly good pics of their kid at the playground just because they caught your kid in the shot.

[meshaliuknits]

I think it stems from a previous lawsuit. Not at our pool but another community pool nearby. I don't recall specifics, but it's totally about not being sued.

The "policy" makes me giggle b/c there's absolutely no way to verify that anyone's following it. I don't have a facebook account and it's my ass in the pool anyway, so it's real easy for me to follow the rule. But it's not like they verify accounts at the end of a day.