Kenny Bodanis believes the stories of his children are not his to tell. What do you think?
With any personal project, be it starting or expanding a business or writing a personal parenting blog, there generally is a tipping point where the project’s author must decide whether certain risks are worth the potential rewards.
In business, these risks are usually financial. As a blog author, the risk is personal. It is directly correlated with how much of yourself — or in my case, my life as a parent — I’m willing to share. When my children were newborns or toddlers, sharing stories of their illnesses or foolhardiness was no more risky than sharing what was for lunch.
My kids are now 8 and 6. I don’t share their names; I don’t share photos of them. These precautions are specific choices I feel will save them from possible embarrassment a decade from now. After all, these posts may be stories involving me, but they are the children’s stories.
Recently, my wife and I dealt with a particularly emotional episode with one of my kids. Whether to share its climax and resolution online forced me to closely balance the consequences to my child of making this episode public and forever, against the philosophies which motivate me to write about my life as a father.
What is the reward?
My motivation for sharing personal stories of parenting — especially as a father — is three-fold:
1) Encouraging a dialogue, both online and within other households, about difficult topics which parents feel they may be alone in dealing with. An emotional crisis with a child can be particularly draining. Reading of a similar experience within another household may not only provide the reader with a resolution, but also with some comfort in knowing their child’s crisis is not unique.
2) Create further awareness of fathers’ expanding roles in the home, and particularly as parents to their children. This includes admitting to challenges, successes, and failures of being a hands-on father, and/or balancing office work and family life.
3) Create and increase readership. As fun as it is to write as an outlet for your own psyche; an audience provides the real juice for bloggers.
What is the risk?
Anything published online is online forever. Your keyboard’s ‘delete’ button is akin to dusting under the coaster on the coffee table in front of you — the rest of the house is still filthy. Not only does the information exist as imprints on your blog provider’s server; once it’s been Tweeted, and Facebooked, and Stumbled Upon, your post is now hurtling through the internet galaxy, on a lost journey through cyberspace.
Your child’s fight with vegetables at the dinner table, their seminar on baby-making, and their bout with the flu, are matters of the greatest public record ever kept.
As for this week’s incident; I asked myself the following question: would I publish a similar story about my wife?
No. Why? Out of respect. Should that change because a child is too young to properly express their right to privacy? What are the chances these stories will live long enough to regret them 10 years from now? By then, one would think patience for digging through Google for high school fodder will have drastically diminished.
Some of the most successful parenting bloggers freely discuss their ongoing separations or divorces; their family’s struggle with a special needs child; or negative feelings towards other parents in the playgrounds and malls of America.
If my wife and I were ever to go through a serious rough patch, I understand there would be some value for another adult in a similar situation to read of my experience. However, I would not want my children to first learn of my personal feelings towards their mother online five years from now, rather than hearing it from me directly. They shouldn’t be informed of trouble within the family at the same time as their friends on Facebook. They should also have a right to not have the online community included in their family’s gossip.
But, unless your focus is recipes, or product reviews, or giveaways, the personal blogger’s axiom is: the riskier the story; i.e., the more personal the account of an event, the more traction it will have online.
Traction is part of the game. It’s up to each of us to decide at what point traction leads to being run over.
At what point is it wrong to turn an online community into a support group?
How do you decide how much of your family you are willing to share?
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photos: timmcccune / flickr, Mates by Paul Watson, Eclipse 1999 by Elsie esq.
Hey Kalin and Archy, Thanks for reading, and most of all thanks for the most civil conversation I’ve read in a comment section! There is a string of similarity, I think, between child actors and bloggers’ kids. Even when they are aware of their presence in the public eye, they are often too young to understand to lasting ramifications of that publicity. This often results in personal struggles later on. That being said, I don’t think there are many bloggers who, through tremendous fame, will turn their blog into The Cosby Show; but, while there are very stringent rules governing… Read more »
Yes. Though I guess the ethics are similar to child actors, who gets to make the choice?
I’m not sure there is any significant similarity there. I assume (please correct me if I’m wrong) that child actors, unless they’re -very- young, are aware that what they’re doing will be seen by a lot of people. Furthermore, their acting is not part of their private home life.
Ahh I get ya, I was thinking more along the lines of PrincessFreeZone’s blog where I believe the child has a lot of input into the makings. If it’s just talking about a child that has no idea, then that is quite different.
Quite different indeed. 🙂 Thanks for that clarification.
Amen! My brother & I are the offspring of 2 journalists/writers, and we were often fodder for books and newspaper columns. I can only speak for myself, but I grew up with the feeling that nothing was private. And then there was the teasing from other kids. It just wasn’t pleasant.
It’s an interesting dilemma. I’d editing my narrative nonfiction book now about my experience throughout my wife’s pregnancy with our oldest. He was only a fetus, then; and my wife approved the whole project. BUT things will get dicey if it comes to a sequel with my older kids. I’ll have to not only consider their feelings now, but the perception of the stories to teenagers 10 years from now. I agree too many parenting writers throw the filter out the window.
“I think there’s too much of a tendency for some parents to forget that their children are not extensions of them.”
Quoted for emphasis.
Blogging parents should use pseudonyms for themselves and their children. Parents on Facebook should familiarize themselves with privacy settings and consider how their child would feel, both now and later, about what is being shared about them.
Good points. Every time I read a parenting blog, especially one where the children’s real names and pictures are featured, I ask myself the same question. And, quite frankly, every time a parent uses his/ her child’s picture as the main portrait photo on a social networking account, I shake my head. I think there’s too much of a tendency for some parents to forget that their children are not extensions of them. I have actually met kids whose parents make a habit of sharing their stories with the world against their will. That kind of thing tends to push… Read more »