When writing about kids gets too frank

This is something that I think of every once in a while, but also put it to the back of my brain as we have quite a ways to go before my two year-old is at the age where he has friends at school that may be reading my blog. That said, I think I will have to side with him and honor his request if he asks me to curtail the details. Right now I can freely share delightfully embarrassing antics and photos with all of my friends and family, but I will probably blog differently once I know that the readship includes his friends. For now, it's my story to tell, but as this little dude evolves I know his opinions will too - which is still so incomprehensible when he throws a toddler fit over which color cup he wants his milk in.

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I love talking and writing about my baby, but I don't think I'll continue keeping a blog or anything public once she's school-aged. Its awful for a kid when complete strangers know waay to much about them. My dad was a minister at our church when I was young and he ran a lot of the retreats and special programs. When he would give talks, he would often use stories about us kids as examples. It was absolutely horrifying to go to church on Sunday and hear "I'm sorry you had a fight with your best friend" or "I think its so cute that you were afraid to flush the toilet until you were 7" and I'd be like "who are you and can I just curl up and die now?". When I was about 8 or 9 we had to sit down with my dad and work out a plan on what he could use and what he couldn't. We decided that stories from our babyhoods (under 3) were fair game but for pretty much everything else he had to ask permission first. And if he ever slipped up, he had to ask his audience not to repeat the stories. I think that adults don't always realize what will be embarassing to little kids. Its all just so cute to us. I would hate to put my kid through that same embarrassment.

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I have to agree with Katie. My mom is a parenting educator in a very small town in Alaska, and invariably she uses my siblings and I as examples in her work when she is working with her clients. Fortunately for us we were quite a bit older when she started using our example, and the clients were not members of our immediate connections in the town.

One thing that it seems my mom had done that was the best part of her using her kids as examples or learning moments was to highlight what her role was in raising us - or what she learned about being a parent. Making it about your relationship with your child and not the child minimizes the impact.

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At least for me, it's been a tremendous incentive to blog as anonymously as possible. No real first names, deliberate vagueness about actual location - although I'm not as good about that as I should be - for my spouse's sake as well as our daughter's. We have an open adoption, and I talk about that on my blog as well, so that's an extra incentive to not be too specific. Unfortunately, once the cat's out of the bag, so to speak, it makes things a lot tougher.

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My mom was a teacher, and she was really bad about telling "cute" (read: painfully embarassing) stories to her teacher friends, who would often tell them in class. I went to small schools, so it was one of those things everyone seemed to know by recess. (I unfortunately needed a bra in 5th grade, and having to hear that story repeated in my 5th grade math class... puberty is hard enough without having to hear about that for the rest of 5th and 6th grade.)

I never could get her to stop, and I remember spending afternoons looking up schools in other parishes and trying to convince either set of grandparents to let me live with them. I was about ready to try and convince my parents to let me do homeschool so I wouldn't have to deal with "cute" stories.

I try not to write anything about Paul that would bother him when he's old enough to care. If something does bother him, I'll just make it a private entry. I'm glad he shares his name with a baseball player, and a former cabinet member, since it makes it less likely he'll pop up on the first 20 or so pages of Google.

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Like Kate above, my dad was also a preacher when I was a kid and I distinctly remember when I was about 8 or so giving him The Talk about not using examples of us kids during his sermons. Aside from that, though... think about it this way -- how will you feel if your kids write a blog to their friends about their goofy mom? As long as everything is kept in perspective, and neither side tries to deliberately embarrass the other, and no one has thick skin, I think it's all good. But you do have to be sure you don't have (or rather, won't have) a double-standard.

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Isn't it our duty as parents to provide as much material as possible for future therapy sessions. I mean, it was the 70's, but orange and brown plaid? Who wears that?

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As an adoptive parent, I think about my child's life story a bit differently than bio parents might. I haven't been part of my child's life for his whole life. He has a story before me, and I am the keeper of that story. But it's his.

As parents, I think sometimes we forget that we don't own our children's stories. And I'm not sure we Gen X parents know boundaries with our kids like we do with our parents. Although I love to hear my dad's stories about me growing up, I'm glad the whole world can't read them. I want to own those stories for myself.

I suspect that, down the road, more and more parents are going to get a backlash from their kids about parents' blogs. I suspect it will be a defining issue for our kids! If, someday, you are old and in an institution, will you want your kid taking photos of you and posting them online?

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I talk about the girls a lot, both here and on the blog. I was so new to all this I didn't even think about a user name so it's all out there I'm afraid.

So far as I know, nobody in town reads my blog except my son. It's as much a journal for the girls as it is about them. If they ever had problems with it, I'd either stop or change directions. I doubt they will. If they don't get flak over my Letters to the Editor, I don't know why a family friendly blog would faze them.

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I actually think about this ALL. THE. TIME. I'm really paranoid about what I write about my two-year-old daughter, to the point of asking myself "will she hate me at 15 when she finds this?" I've also seriously cut down on how much I talk about her on my personal blog -- and I know her featuring on my blog will decrease drastically over time.

K.

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This has been a topic of conversation here for a long time. I do talk about my kids in my writing, but I always give them pseudonyms in print (and online) so they won't be Googleable in the future. Sure, people who know us can put two and two together, but I think this takes care of much of the problem.

Parents have to be able to talk about all aspects of parenting -- not just the soft-focus stuff.

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No one in my "real" life reads my blog. It's just the internet community. Therefore, I think my son is pretty safe.

However, if I start posting nude pictures of him or start painting a very bad picture of him in my writing, I think that draws the line for me.

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