One of my favorite family traditions involves hanging around with my dad’s parents and his siblings where they all make fun of each other for the stupid, goofy, awkward things they did when they were kids. They were a wild and crazy brood prone to frequent collar bone breaks.
One of the strangest parts, of course, is that most of the stories are being told by the person who looked the most ridiculous in that story. They have learned to laugh at their embarrassing moments.
A fascinating thing about the internet is the ability for random people to connect with other random people to the point where they feel like friends even though they have never even seen each other. Don’t believe me? How many of you would know who I am without the internet? I probably have more people that I consider friends that I have never seen than actual friends these days.
So now we have all these great cyber friends that we share our deepest, darkest fears, secrets, crude jokes, and doubts. And parenting stories. And we all have these amazing cameras that fit in our pocket allowing us to shoot video of anything happening in our lives and upload it to our blogs and YouTube for our real and cyber friends to enjoy.
All of which reminds me of America’s Funniest Home Videos. What always gets the laughs? Some guy getting his nuts smashed. Some old lady falling while dancing at a wedding. Some cat with his head stuck in a jar. High brow stuff like that.
YouTube has inherited a lot of those great traditions and added a new one, apparently. Parents film their kids on the naughty chair (or whatever the disciplinary penalty box is called in your house). The kid is screaming, crying, promising to never be naughty again, promising to always be naughty again. The real train wreck stuff.
And some of these kids being disciplined are really much closer to being babies which brings up the appropriateness of even disciplining these kids much less spreading it around the internet.
The author of that article says:
The lack of respect it takes to film a child’s most embarrassing moments as entertainment and the misuse of time-outs that are now serving as punishment rather than guidance, basically makes this type of treatment abuse. No, it is not reportable by standard definitions, but again if you humiliated an adult and video taped your punishing him, it would be considered abusive.
Preach on.
Outside of the immediacy of the act of videotaping these vulnerable moments and the breach of trust that can cause, though, there are more long lasting repercussions when we start to post those videos on the internet.
Yes bitching and moaning to our friends about pulling the cat’s tail again while we down a couple beers can be an important stress valve but what happens when our friends increasingly become more cyber and the way we tell them is indexable by Google and searchable by their classmates, teachers, future girlfriends/boyfriends, future employers.
And unlike in the real world, once something is released on the internet you loose complete control over who has access to that information. You can’t tell the internet “Keep that one story a secret please.”
So where should we draw the line. I tend to try to follow 2 rules.
- Anonymize. Nobody needs to know the real names of our families. We are all semi-fake to each other anyway. Fake names are perfectly fine. Just think of them as nicknames.
- Don’t beat down our kids. Normally when I talk about behavioral issues I try to provide some kind of insight into what I think was happening and what I am going to try to help the kids through those issues so that other parents can either get some new ideas or share some of theirs with me. If I don’t have an important life lesson, I try to just use it to show that sometimes being naughty is really more about kids experimenting and sometimes you just have to learn to enjoy that, too. For example the picture above is from this post where Pookie made a mess and we realized that he was just being a kid.
Now someday our little kids will be grownups with kids of their own and we can all sit around the Christmas tree telling embarrassing stories about them when they are old enough to handle it. Until then, let’s try to keep things classy.
What rules do you use to determine what you will and won’t write about or post videos of your kids online?
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Obviously, I don’t have any kids yet, so I can’t write anything about them. I do write things about family members and friends, but I don’t use the persons real name, and I try not to write things that I think I wouldn’t say to that person’s face or tell in their presence. However, I have posted a few rants where I mentioned no names, that I would not have wanted the person it was directed at to read. I try to make the rants about a specific issue, and not about the person, to try to make it as confidential as possible. I figure, it’s my blog, I can vent on it if I want to.
I guess with what Rachel has said this doesn’t work. Many times when someone rants, many more people than just the one it was targeted at feel the heat and get their feelings hurt. Just because names aren’t mentioned doesn’t mean feelings aren’t hurt. WHne someone says something than everyone looks at each other and themselves and feels like they did it. The “Anonymous rant” or “calling out” of what was to be directed at one person is unfair and anti-confrontational. If you are upset or want something to change, help the person learn to change don’t yell at a whole group on the internet and hope the person “gets it.”
I try to only post videos and pictures of the happy times. I may write about something “bad” that happened, but I don’t post photos very often of the boys. I also have two blogs, one “personal” and one that is somewhat family related but not central to my own family. I use fake names for the boys on the blogs as well as Twitter and Brightkite – although I use my real name on both. If you know me, you know my children anyway so I don’t worry much about it. It does keep their names somewhat shielded at least.
I’m sure I’ve written things about them that they will find horribly embarrassing when they get older (like the time Little P smeared poop all over everything in his room), but as for their discipline, I don’t share that.
Great posts like this is definitely why I keep your blog in my RSS reader. I use a nickname for myself and my every member of my family. I don’t post many pictures and use more traditional means to share those (if you can call email traditional).
I never post things of her being naughty (fortunately it also happens rarely), I like to share happy things. I want the world to be a better place, the media works too much on spreading the other stuff.
One of the interesting things about the internet is all the different ways people use to include it in their life. It is just amazing the power that Flick, Snapfish, blogs, social media sites, etc. have to both extend and tighten communities. It will be interesting to see how people use it 10 years from now when they really get used to how permanent it can become. It seems like teens and people in their 20s are already opening up to the idea of almost any aspect of their lives being broadcast on the internet.