twinutero

This question has been on my mind since I started reading mommy-blogs – more so since I started my own.

What is the difference between showing cute photos of your children to relatives, friends, or even acquaintances met on airplanes, and posting those same photos to a blog? In my mind, a big difference.

Sharing pictures and guess-what-my-kid-did-today stories with relatives deepens a personal and hopefully enduring connection. Same for friends. Sharing with strangers and acquaintances strengthens your connection with that person, but does little for your kids.

In all of those circumstances, though, you have control over who sees the photos and hears the stories, and more often than not you get direct feedback, so you know whether you want to continue sharing with this person.

Not so with a blog, of course. That photo of your baby breastfeeding, your toddler in diapers or your preschooler sleeping are out there for anyone with an internet connection to see.

Call me paranoid, Luddite, introverted (I may indeed be all of those) but I have a problem with posting intimate moments of my child’s life to the world. It is, after all, their life.

“Your children are not your children,” as Kahil Gibran famously wrote and Sweet Honey in the Rock beautifully sang.

That photo, now cataloged on the internet, is a fragment of a life that will expand in a million directions to form a complex adult with a very real and personal past. We’d think twice about posting a candid bedroom shot of our spouse or an entertaining faux pas of a sibling. I don’t think children are different.

Informed consent and benefit-sharing are two basic ethical principles drilled into every student of moral philosophy. It’s generally acknowledged that receiving informed consent from a young child is impossible. As for sharing benefits? Well, why do we blog? To share our “lessons learned” with a community of peers; to see our writing and photography published; to be heard; to gain a following; to earn money….

Few of these benefits go directly (if at all) to the main subjects of the blog, our children. Yet they carry a fair share of the risks, mainly loss of privacy although one could imagine worse.

So where do you draw the line? Have I already crossed it, despite attempts to respect my family’s privacy? Are all memoirs – and blogs are memoirs of a kind – exploitative? As with most ethical issues, debate is open and sometimes the best criterion is “I know it when I see it.”

I’ve seen plenty of insightful, respectful mommy- and daddy-blogs. I’ve also seen many where my sole thought is, “Are those kids going to be pissed….”