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| My notes regarding this blog post. |
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.
