On Fatherhood

As I approach a full year of fatherhood, some thoughts have crossed my mind regarding a task (and I use that term intentionally) which has been the most rewarding, difficult, and important work I’ve done so far in my life.  I wanted to share them here, in random order:

• One of the more interesting articles I’ve read over the past year was written by a pediatrician and relates to the “fit” between parents and their babies.  Sometimes, parents get decidedly unlucky with the children they have (e.g., there are very active babies born to older, more sedentary parents who would be much easier to deal with if their parents were 27-year-old endurance athletes).  In this sense, we got really lucky with our little Samantha.  She’s active, curious, and can be a handful, but at least we’re almost always well-rested (unless sick, from the age of four months she’s been out like a light from 7:30 pm until at least 6 am each night – my wife and I have averaged at least eight hours sleep each night for the past year).  I don’t know how parents manage when their babies don’t sleep through the night, and one of the reasons we’re almost certain we’re never having another child is we don’t want to roll the genetic dice a second time.

• I observe other moms and dads from afar and I wonder how it’s possible to be such an all-encompassing “total parent”.  I’m not wired that way; I’m too much of a generalist.  I need to have my work, my interests, and my activities outside the realm of parenthood.  I’m a little envious of those who can throw themselves so fully into the life of a parent (but I’m also glad I’m approaching it this way, as I elaborate upon later). 

• That said, no matter how hard I try not to let parenthood change me, it changed me.  I’ve become more emotional, and more in tune with my emotions than I’ve ever been since my teenage years.  It’s impossible to ignore tragedies surrounding other people’s kids (even if you don’t like other people’s kids theoretically) when you can imagine something like it happening to your own child.  You read about an old person dying of cancer and – especially if they’ve led a long, happy, and productive life – it’s not necessarily sad.  But think of a child dying of the same disease, and it’s awful.  My sense of humor has changed, as well.  I used to love dead baby jokes, but they become less funny when you have a child of your own.

• The worst part of the last year were the (very few) moments where I didn’t know I was hurting my child.  Like for instance, Samantha was losing weight right after she was born, so we had to supplement her diet with some formula so she could gain it back.  I remember feeding her from her bottle in the middle of the night, when she couldn’t have been more than a week old.  Being a first-time parent without any knowledge of how bottles actually work, I was unintentionally choking the poor little newborn – she was getting milk faster than she could swallow.  Now, my daughter is totally fine and healthy today, so I clearly didn’t mess her up too bad that night.  Still, it hurts so much to think about that moment.  Over the last few weeks I’ve shared this story with other dad friends, and it turns out they all have similar moments of guilt (e.g., feeling like they let their child fall, etc.).  I think it’s just a part of the awesomeness of the commitment; it’s impossible to get it right 100% of the time, but it doesn’t mean it can’t make you feel awful when you get it wrong.

• I’ve talked about travel before.  There was a roughly four-month span in the middle of this past year where I was miserable about the idea that I’d never be able to travel internationally again.  I’m better about this now – a big help was when I decided to set my DVR to record all episodes of “Rick Steves’ Europe”, so whenever I feel that sense of wanderlust, I just pop an episode in and travel vicariously for 30 minutes.  So that’s great, but it’s not what I want to talk about here.  I didn’t realize this until I became a parent, but travel’s a loaded topic of conversation among parents.  On one hand, you have parents who never liked to travel in the first place, and couldn’t imagine going on a couple’s vacation without their kid (or sometimes even with them!).  On the other, you have people who love to travel and don’t plan to stop traveling – either with or without their kid.  There’s nothing wrong with either approach, but it’s interesting the extent to which parents judge other parents for having different attitudes toward travel.  As someone who definitely wants to travel the world, and realizes it doesn’t make sense to do so with a small child (though I can’t wait to take a teenaged Samantha around Europe), other parents do tend to judge us.  I think it is part of the “total parent” attitude I mentioned earlier.  Whether I’m actively parenting Samantha 90% or 99.9% of the time, it doesn’t make a difference; she’s already one of the top 0.1% children in the world in terms of how lucky she is.  She’ll be fine.

• Children’s books, for the most part, are awesome.  One of the unexpected pleasures of being a parent has been the experience of reading to Sam.  By now, she has clearly defined favorites, and interacts with them to an extent where you know she knows what’s coming next.  But this post is about me, damnit, and I enjoy them, too.  The best ones are lighthearted, quirky, and/or sarcastic to the point where they’re pretty much designed for parents (see: “Go the F**k to Sleep,” “All My Friends Are Dead,” etc.).  This isn’t to say there aren’t bad ones – some of the older ones in particular tend to be overly sad, which is not cool.  I remember reading one in particular about how the mother and her child were off to some kind of museum but they had no money for the bus?  It was weird.  What do kids (or parents) get from this?  I took the existential bullet of growing up broke so my child didn’t have to.  I’m not reading that shit to her.

Though parenthood changes things, it’s not been the case that parenthood has tilted my world completely off its axis.  We’re lucky to have willing grandparents around, so date night still happens.  Hanging out with friends still happens.  Travel, eventually, soon, will happen again.  Parenthood makes things more complicated, but it also puts life in the proper perspective.  Bad days at work don’t bother me as much as they used to, and nothing beats coming home to a smile and laughter from my child.  I would totally recommend parenthood to a friend.

A Dad’s Perspective on Having (Only) One Child

Those of you who’ve read my writing, especially recently, know the ambivalence I felt toward becoming a father.  I have always steered toward brutal, cold honesty in answering the prying questions that people (sometimes people I don’t even know that well) have asked me, and through years of not wanting any children at all, I’m experienced (to the point of masochistically seeking the argument) in handling questions related to my desire to never have any kids.  But now that my daughter has been around for several months, and is clearly a happy and healthy little Muppet, the annoying questions have started to creep up again – specifically relating to when we’ll be having ANOTHER child.  When will I ever satisfy you people?! 

The answer to this question is, never.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, biologically my wife and I might have another kid, but I’ll put it out there right now that said child would be a goddamned mistake.  We’d cry, and not tears of joy, if we found out we were having another kid.  We’re using every possible form of birth control right now, short of a vasectomy (which is imminent) – it’s not even funny how badly we don’t want another child.

When I mention our only child path to other people, usually in response to a question like “So when are you thinking of having the next one?”, they look at me like I have six heads and wonder what kind of an awful parent I must be.  (One time, I was actually told by someone that I must not be a good parent.  I wish ass cancer upon that person.)

I find there’s a generational difference here, where typically (but certainly not entirely) the strongest expectation of having multiple children is held by older individuals.  The data seems to indicate this is a function of changing societal norms; from 1991 to 2011, according to Census data, the percentage of families with only one child has doubled from 10 to 20 percent of families with children. 

Anecdotally, most of the adults I know who grew up without siblings did so because of a divorce among their parents.  So it’s reasonable to assume that, especially for older folks, the perception of only-child families is they are a sign of a weak or insecure marriage that is about to end.  This appears to no longer be the case, and this is definitely not the case for my wife and I.  Don’t get me wrong, if one of us woke up tomorrow and told the other that we wanted like three more kids, we’d definitely end up getting divorced over it.  But assuming the status quo, our marriage is perfectly strong, even with the occasional torment that is having a child in their first year of life.  I’m fortunate to have a partner who shares my desire for a small-government, libertarian view of the family future.

If you Google “having one child,” there are lots of helpful results that pop up in the first few pages.  Many of them do a representatively good job of listing the pragmatic, social, economic, and even environmental benefits of having only one child.  They’re also all (justifiably) a bit defensive in their tone, as if the authors were all writing their posts in rebuttal to dozens of silent critics.

In this strange world we live in, having two or three children is considered normal, but having zero, one, or four (or more) is considered, for some reason or another, wacky.  What is it about two or three kids that makes it so ostensibly reasonable?  I suppose there are perceived benefits for the children – someone to lean on, someone to help when the parents get old and die, hopefully friends for life.  But some of the most well-adjusted, successful, and happy people I know never had that – either because they’ve never had strong relationships with their siblings, or because they never had siblings in the first place.  Indeed, scientific research (led by work out of Rutgers University) seems to indicate that only children do not differ from children with siblings in many (if any) meaningful ways.  There’s some weak evidence that only children (and firstborns) tend to be more socially dominant, but even if it’s a real effect, I’d argue that’s a good thing (especially for my daughter, who I hope always speaks up for herself among others).  Anyone who claims having only one child is bad for the child is speaking in the language of pseudoscience.

***

All except one of the top Google results from the query mentioned earlier appear to have been written by female authors.  While the societal pressure mothers must feel in all parenting decisions is probably greater than that felt by dads, I was surprised that there were hardly any male perspectives on this issue.  So I wanted to write a few paragraphs on my thoughts regarding having only one child, why it helps the entire family, and why other people should really shut the hell up about other people’s personal life choices.

For me, and given what I value, having one, and only one, child is awesome.  At the time of this writing, my daughter is between eight and nine months old, and she’s already starting to exert her independence.  Earlier today, she sat up on her own and played with her toys for like thirty minutes straight.  Then when she started fussing, I picked her up and laid her down next to me on the couch - a college basketball game was on, which we watched together.  At the time, I thought to myself, “Man, she’s really acting more like a person these days.  I can’t wait to see the future, and I’m so glad I don’t have to go through the newborn days again.”  (If you asked my wife, who did not like being pregnant one bit, she might tell you the same thing about the human gestational period.)

I am thrilled to have the full human experience of raising a child.  I strive to be as involved in her life, now and forever, as I possibly can be.  I’m fortunate to have a wife at home full-time (for now), and together we work to create a home life for our daughter which is loving, secure, and nurturing.  It’s a fantastic experience, every day is different – but a BIG part of my ability to get through this with sanity intact (because there are trying moments) is knowing that I'm only going through it one time.

Having another child, to me, just feels counter-productive to what I want to do in my life before I die.  I only get one pass at this, and old age comes before you know it.  I’m lucky to have a creative and meaningful career doing work that I love, and even luckier to have the flexibility to travel a ton (both for business and pleasure).  If I were stuck with a young child for the next six years, my travel goals would be postponed at least until my children were old enough to travel with us.  Travel is one of the most important aspects of being alive to me.  I’d rather be dead than unable to see the world, and children (especially in their first few years of life) are, let’s face it, burdensome travel companions at best.  I can’t wait to travel with her when the time is right, but I find it personally irresponsible and undesirable to take a child under the age of, say, ten overseas for a two-week vacation.

And of course, each child carries a price tag – close to $250,000, if you believe the most recent data.  Naturally, having a child is about more than dollars and cents, but I definitely see the economic value in sticking with “only” one child.  I hope my daughter can pick her desired college (within reason) knowing that she won’t be burdened with extreme student loan debt. 

Having one child helps the entire family.  Whenever we have a rough day, whenever I feel like my daughter is being high-maintenance, nothing calms me down more than realizing “This is just a day.  This is the only day you’ll have to go through this.  You’ll never have to go through it again.”  Having a child has, in this one micro-sense, made me slightly more Zen (which is a good thing).  Having two or three of them, I know for a fact, would drive me absolutely batshit bonkers.

***

This is all about me, my family, and what works best for me.  What works best for you is likely completely different, and I wish you only the best along your path.  Why can’t others wish the same for me?  Why the stigma surrounding having one, and only one, child?

The elderly gon’ act elderly, but I’d implore anyone who reads this with an open mind to think twice before judging (at least out loud) the life choices of other people.  Having one child is okay.  Having like seven of them, assuming you can afford the clothes and have the space, is also okay (though I’m not sure we should ever hang out, or talk about the presence/absence of a higher power).  And also, having NO children is totally okay!  In fact, I salute those of you who never want to have any children – we should plan an around-the-world yacht tour for twenty years in the future.  You’re keeping the world a greener place for everyone else.  The last thing the world needs is more people.  Yuck: people.

My Approach Toward Personal Finance (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Grow Money)

As of this writing, 2015 has not been a great year for the United States financial markets.  As of
today, the S&P 500 index (possibly the truest representation of the US stock market, seeing as it's the broadest index) is down 6.69% for the year.  To contrast this with previous performance of this index since 2009:

• 2009: Up 23.75%
• 2010: Up 13.14%
• 2011: Down, but only 0.87%
• 2012: Up 13.91%
• 2013: Up 30.5%
• 2014: Up 12.93%

With the exception of 2011, the last six years have been like a shotgun blast, and everyone who had the cujones to buy and hold through an awful 2008 has made a ton of money since then.  For every dollar you invested on January 1, 2009, you had $2.60 on December 31, 2014 (not adjusted for inflation).

Over the last decade, I've had more than a passing interest in the field of personal finance, since I believe it informs us a great deal about the human condition.  Conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican, we're all capitalists and we all work to make money, hate it or love it, ostensibly to improve our lives.  Money is inherently neither good nor evil; it just is, because of rules we've agreed upon as a society.  It's truly fascinating, especially when you consider how even the world's greatest economists can make only marginal progress toward understanding how money "works".

Anyway, I wanted to devote some space here to discuss not only my approach toward personal finance, but also some of the best teachings I've ever had regarding the topic.  I'll try in this article to keep things interesting and not go too deeply into the weeds.  I will also try to show you with concrete examples how I calculate stuff (this may be in polar opposition to the previous statement), because I've developed a system over the past several years that I feel works very well - at least for me, though I admit I am the type of guy who is happiest inside a spreadsheet.  Let's get started...

Belief #1: Invest, and Ye Shall Be Saved

When I graduated from Rutgers in 2006 and got my first job, my father insisted I start contributing to my employer's 401(k) plan as soon as possible.  As I've mentioned before, I lasted at that job for about eleven months before leaving for graduate school.  I invested about $3,000 over those eleven months, rolled it into a self-directed IRA after I quit, and lost almost half of it in the Great Recession.  (I made a stupid investment - I failed to diversify, a mistake I routinely try not to make again and invest dozens of hours each year in order to avoid in the future.)  Since then, though, I've turned that three grand into over four grand, just through compound interest (without saving a single additional dime into that account).

In fact, in thirty years (when I'll be 61 years old), that measly three grand will have grown to over $146,000, not counting inflation and assuming the S&P 500 index continues to grow over the next thirty years the same way it's grown over the last hundred-plus years*. (*NOTE: This may not happen, but it likely will.)

One of my favorite tools on the entire internet is MoneyChimp's Compound Interest Calculator.  It's simple, but elegant.  You input the amount you've already saved; how much you plan to save each year in the future; input an interest rate and a number of years, and that's it.  The calculator spits out how much money (in present-day dollars) you'll have at a certain point in the future.

You can play around with the above calculator as much as you'd like, but over many instances of using it, I've learned the following:

• Interest rate matters a ton.  If you assume 7% compound interest over a thirty-year period (a safe, conservative assumption), you'll get about 20% the output as if you assume a 12% interest rate.  Which interest rate is more accurate?  No one knows for sure, but my favorite personal finance article ever claims that historically, over a thirty-year period, the S&P 500 index has never returned less than 12% annualized.  More often than not, I assume 7% because I'm a pessimist, but 10% or even 12% is probably more accurate. 

• Time matters just as much.  Realistically, most people I know will have to save at least one million dollars before they can retire.  Assuming you draw down 4% of the total in retirement each year, having a cool million saved means you can live on $40,000 each year (tight, but maybe doable if you make some adjustments).  That 7% (or 12%, or whatever) interest rate really works its magic over medium-to-long periods of time.  That's the power of compound interest; it, y'know, compounds.

• Continuously investing matters, but not as much as having already invested.  It's pretty clear, if you didn't know this already, that continuously investing a set percentage of your paycheck matters a lot toward building wealth.  You get to "dollar-cost average", which essentially means you invest the same amount whether the market's up or down at a given time.  Your dollars are more powerful when the market is down, but since you've set it and forgotten it, it only matters in the long run.  As an exercise, though, hop on the Compound Interest Calculator and assume you've already invested $200,000.  Set your interest rate to 7%.  If you set your annual addition to twenty grand, you'll have $3.7 million dollars after 30 years.  If you invest thirty grand instead, you'll have $4.7 million; more, but not a ton more than $3.7 million, in my opinion.  What matters most is having the two hundred grand already invested - if you only had, say, twenty grand in the stock market right now, you'd have to invest $45,000 each year in order to hit that same $4.7 million dollar mark in thirty years.  Since no one I know can afford to save $45,000 per year, it makes sense to save a little bit each year, starting from an early age.

The point I'm trying to make here is, I've made a number of important decisions in my life, most of them good ones (I think).  Perhaps the most powerful of them is to save early and often.  I'm not sharing specifics in this blog post (with good reason), but if anyone's ever looked at me and thought that I have my shit together financially, it's because I saved early and often.  Even when it would have looked better to spend.

Belief #2: Track EVERYTHING.

I keep tons of spreadsheets, but the two most germane to this article are (a) my monthly budget spreadsheet and (b) my net worth tracking spreadsheet.  I'll discuss both of these in some detail, below.

I update my monthly budget spreadsheet every time a significant life event happens (e.g, a change in income, a change in employment status, a change in family status).  What it contains changes each time I update it, but the core worksheet is always the same.  Down the left-hand side, our household's monthly expenses are listed, row by row.  My wife and I have separate columns, beginning with our gross (pre-tax) monthly income and ending with our net (post-tax) monthly income.  After that, we deduct each expense from that amount (depending on whose responsibility it is to pay that bill).  At the bottom of the spreadsheet is the amount of money we have left over each month after saving and  paying our bills (a very fortunate thing for us).

Below is an example of what I'm talking about, with the details completely blacked out:

The devil is in the details: your spreadsheet is only as honest as you are, and if you routinely blow your stated budget on "Credit Cards" or "Dining Out," you might as well wipe your behind with it.  There are several items on this list I've had to revise (sadly, mostly upward) over the years to reflect reality.  But in the long run, it's turned into a highly useful tool which has allowed me to quantify our ability to output more money as a household than we've input, each and every month.

My net worth spreadsheet is password-protected, and if my wife outlives me, it's going to be a pain in the ass for her to open it.  I update it twice per year; once in May (which happens to be the month we closed on our house in 2011; this was the single most impactful financial decision of our lives to date, so it makes sense to track our wealth each May) and once in December (as my income is bonus-dependent and I get said bonus in December each year).

I update this spreadsheet relatively infrequently, because a person can drive themselves nuts (and make bad decisions as a result) worrying about month-to-month fluctuations in net worth which end up signifying absolutely nothing.  While there are personal finance sites (such as Consumerism Commentary) out there which focus on regular people updating their net worth monthly, this feels less like reasonable personal finance and more like lifestyle porn to me.  If I have my specific details taken care of with my monthly budget spreadsheet, the net worth spreadsheet is for the big picture stuff and as a result, it does not need to be updated any more than twice per year.

The rows of this spreadsheet represent our core assets (e.g., investment accounts, home equity) and our debts (e.g., mortgages, car loans, student loans).  Each May and each December, I update the spreadsheet with the present values of each asset and each debt.  The formulas I've created calculate our net worth as the simple subtraction of our debts from our assets.  Below is an example of this, again with the details completely blacked out:

The most important column in the spreadsheet is the "YOY (delta)" column.  This calculates the year-over-year appreciation (or depreciation) of each row in the spreadsheet.  I mentioned before this is a big picture spreadsheet, and with the information this column provides, I make big-picture decisions about whether our household's finances are heading in the right direction.  I put a ton of faith in the "YOY" column.

The most important row in the spreadsheet is the "Net Worth" row (of course).  It's nice to see our net worth grow each year (though it frankly may not in 2015), and quantifying the extent of the growth builds confidence that what we've built so far can continue to grow with time.

Belief #3a: Buy and Hold
Belief #3b: Don't Trust Most "Experts"

I put these side by side because they together inform my beliefs regarding long term investing.  The first statement is my strategy for selecting investments, and the second is my strategy regarding taking advice about these investments.  (I realize if you're reading this column you may be taking my advice - do so with a grain of salt, as I am not a financial professional, just a regular guy making it through this mortal coil as effortlessly as I can.)

The second statement might be the more controversial of the two, so I'll address it first.  There are undoubtedly financial advisers out there who believe the truest way to grow their business is by serving in the best (e.g., fiduciary) interests of their clients, there are many more who believe the truest way to grow their business is through higher commissions charged to their clients.  In general, I don't trust many people in the financial field because through my work, I've seen many of them don't operate in the best interest of their clients.  I can afford to make this claim because of Belief #3a, which allows me to state virtually no one knows how to play the stock market in the long term, so the best you can hope for is to ride the stock market.

This, too, is a somewhat controversial claim.  Each year, there are mutual fund managers whose funds beat the market.  There are even some who may beat it reliably for a few years.  My argument is the percentage of mutual fund managers who routinely beat the market is the same as the percentage of online poker players who routinely make money.  (It's a low percentage, in both instances, though you wouldn't believe it if you heard other people's boasts.)  As a result, I invest my money passively - meaning I don't count on human beings to make informed stock picks, instead choosing to invest in entire markets and indices (such as S&P 500 index funds).

This doesn't mean I don't pick stocks occasionally.  I do, but it treat it the same way I treat my online poker habit - as gambling money.  I put a very small percentage of my portfolio towards it.  If I make money, great.  If I don't, no big deal.  It's just for leisure and entertainment.

But when it comes to saving for retirement - something I hope to do at some point in my fifties - the stakes are as serious as they can get.  My belief is that despite whatever amount of intelligence I may have, I am not smart enough to pick stocks and I am not smart enough to pick stock managers.  I can only control the fees I am charged, so I seek to keep these as low as possible.  I do it by investing in index funds, but there are other methods that work too. You can read one of the books I reference below, if you're interested more in this.

***

There are other topics I could write about here as well (such as diversification, which may alone be more important than anything else described above), but I'd be stepping way out of my depth in doing so.  I'm telling my personal story here, and of course, your mileage may vary.

If you're interested in learning more about this (to me) highly interesting topic, here are some books which have helped me over the last ten years:

• The Wall Street Self-Defense Manual, by Henry Blodget: The first serious personal finance book I ever read, written in newbie-friendly terms (and only 98 cents!).
• A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel: The go-to guide for the rationale behind passive investing.  A bit more technical, but still a good read.  I re-read it, usually on the beach, every couple of years.
• The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio, by William J. Bernstein: The most technical book I've ever read on the topic (written by a neurologist and investor), but worth the effort.  When I mentioned diversification above, this is the book I refer to when rebalancing my portfolio each year.

And no, I don't think it's essential to give as much of a shit as I do about this in order to be ultimately successful.  I just think you need to care enough to (a) invest some money and (b) not get screwed over by nefarious individuals who claim to serve your best interests, but do not.  You'd take care not to get pick-pocketed when visiting a foreign city; you'd be well-served to do so when thinking about growing your money.

I Just Wasn't Made For These Times: My Disdain For Kid "Stuff" on Social Media

My notes regarding this blog post.

My daughter, thankfully healthy as anything, with ten fingers, ten toes and a smile that melts me, turns a month old on the day I write this sentence.  Today, I decided to scroll up and down my Facebook news feed, and am pretty disheartened by what I see - posts of substance pretty much ignored, immediately next to pictures of creatures that contribute nothing besides some sort of "cuteness" I don't really understand, which are themselves adored. 

I admit I pretty much do not like children.  I like my own kid, sure, but (with a few exceptions) I don't like other people's kids. That being said, I really have no way of understanding why other people like other people's kids so much, especially on social media.  In this post, I'd like to dive a bit deeper into my attitudes regarding this subject.  I do so well aware that my opinions may be somewhat unpopular and/or subversive.  To this, I say: tough shit.

I suppose I should start with a little background, explaining how I handle pictures of my own daughter on social media.  Thankfully, my wife and I are pretty much of one mind on this.  My opinion is baby pictures should be like sexual threesomes: pretty uncommon but when they happen, they're always conducted with trustworthy and tested people.  To that end, we created a Facebook group where people can ask to join, we can accept them into the group, and everyone is happy.  The people in the group can see as many pictures of our daughter as their heart desires, and everyone who doesn't want to join the group can have their News Feed filled with other material.

With a heavy heart and while grinding my teeth to nubs, I'll admit I halfway like it when people "like" pictures we post of my daughter.  It makes me feel important and that I've created something of value to other people.  But in reality, my daughter is at least two decades away from the possibility of creating anything of real substance and value to the world, and though it pains me to say this, objectively speaking she very well may never create anything of real substance and value to the world (though I truly hope she does).  Neither will your kid, most likely, or the kid next door.  Most of us are like that kid from the Super Bowl commercial years ago - desperate to claw our way up to middle management. 

What I'd prefer, regardless of the grim implications of the above paragraph, is for my daughter to grow up with a grounded and well-reasoned sense of individuality, personality, values and an appropriate level of self-importance.  And, frankly, I'm scared about her generation and what they might grow up to become, as it pertains to the impacts of the behaviors their parents use on social media on the healthy growth of these attributes.  Allow me to explain.  I was a Facebook early adopter, starting to use the platform as a college student in 2003 at the age of 19.  And predictably, I was a member of the first generation to seriously get themselves into trouble using social media.  Plenty of my female classmates posted ridiculously racy pictures of themselves on the platform back in the day - trust me, I (and my male cohorts from the Rutgers University class of 2006) remember this.  Some of these folks will eventually run for public office, and get in trouble for it - we've already seen this happen.  It'll get way worse in the years ahead.

The above is sort of an extreme example, but on a day-to-day basis, I feel what most parents do (specifically, posting unfiltered and frequent kid pictures to their social media presences) is a well-intentioned mistake.  It's well-intentioned because it comes from a place of love and value - we love our kid so much, and clearly other people "like" the pictures we share, so why not share the pictures we take of our kid to other people?  But it's a mistake because it presumes something which is fundamentally untrue; specifically, that everyone who views these photos wants to see those photos.  Our children aren't as popular as they seem when we post pictures of them online, but the impression they ARE popular influences our other parenting decisions in ways we might not understand or even be aware of, and that's bad news bears for the future.  Think about the popular kids from your middle school days and how fucked up they likely grew up to become as adults.  That's what we very well might be turning lots of kids into - the gross manifestation of our adultified dreams of being the popular kids in middle school.

I've purposefully avoided the word "consent" so far, but I'd like to bring it up now as another pitfall of posting pictures of your children on social media.  We all know some adults who've elected to remove their social media presences entirely.  More rare, but still out there, are the adults who never signed up for social media in the first place.  We have no way of predicting whether the incidence of social media usage will continue to stay as high as it is at present - it could be the case, twenty years from now, young people will prefer to communicate with each other via Virtual Reality goggles, engineered telepathy, or not at all.  I'm being a bit absurdist here, but it's true that when you (or I) post a picture of our child to social media, we make the decision for them to put them out there, and they have absolutely no way of consenting to that decision.  They may very well elect to have no social media presence as an adult, and - to me, at least - it's a big deal that we honor that potential choice.

"This is all a straw man - much ado about nothing - you're making a mountain out of a molehill - it's no big deal," some may react to the tone of this article.  I agree I take social media more seriously than I should - I also take TV commercials (and just about everything else I somewhat care about) more seriously than I should.  I do this because my life philosophy, which has taken years of deep thought to flesh out, is everything we take the time to do in our lives has some importance, whether we consciously see it or not, and even if it outwardly seems like we're wasting time doing it.  I'm also an idealist with impossibly high standards, and I feel like in an ideal world, we'd take the time to preferentially "like" articles of substance (say, articles about new scientific or technological findings) vs. some post-fetus with crust on their face.  (Maybe I just need new/different Facebook friends, but I look down my list and see a ton of highly educated people, so I dunno...)

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I've talked above about kid pictures specifically, but let's expand the discussion to include posting kid-related status updates, in general.  I do this sometimes, but before I do, I scroll down to make sure (at least) the previous two posts had nothing to do with my daughter.  This is because the last thing I want to seem to be to others is "one of those people" whose lives entirely revolve around their kid.  (Even if it's partway true, when you have the sundry demands which come with a newborn.)

I value my busy, non-kid-related adult life - I go to work and there I work creatively and productively, I hang with friends, I go to dinner with my wife weekly, and I have hobbies that have nothing to do with my child.  Forgive my judgment here, but I'm a bit scared of parents who don't live that way.  It makes me feel like they might be a bit lacking in the individual substance department themselves, like they became parents to fill some void in their personality that I'm fortunate enough not to have.

To an extent, I have fewer concerns about consent when you're posting some words about your kid than when you're posting a picture.  I feel like people are more protective of their pictures than they are of stories someone else tells about themselves.  Also, there's a relationship between parent and child that comes through in text better than it comes through in a picture, and there's nothing inherently wrong with a person sharing their thoughts or observations about parenthood online - especially if those thoughts or observations are funny.

But it's still a post about someone else who isn't you, and especially when the child gets old enough to conceivably have their own social media presence, it feels a little awkward and wrong to me.  I reserve the right to change my mind on this in the future, but assuming she grows up well-adjusted, I'm okay with my daughter having her own Virtual Reality-based, engineered telepathy system online presence when she's about the age of a freshman in high school.  From that point on, all Daddy is going to post about is his beer brewing, even though he'll remain very proud of you, sweetheart.  From that point on, you're in control of how you present yourself - to your peers and to adults - on social media.

With that approach, sure, she'll make mistakes.  But she'll also learn the same way my generation learned (from using AOL from the age of 13 on and from making mistakes in chat rooms - believe me, I made lots of mistakes in AOL chat rooms in the mid-to-late '90s) to cultivate a smart, sensible online presence.  That's probably the ideal, not only here but also in every parenting decision, right?  How do we get from a blank slate to making smart and sensible individual choices?

The online world is a scary place and I'm surprised at the cavalier attitude my (mostly well-educated, mostly intelligent and mostly high-achieving) social network takes with respect to their kids' online presence.  I'm not sure my opinions will ever jibe with the mainstream on this, but I felt like my thoughts had also never been written thoroughly regarding this topic.  Hopefully others can read this and maybe it'll provide some food for thought, if not getting people to agree with me, at least seeing where I'm coming from.