MY teenager is at an age when being seen with his family is possibly the most embarrassing thing that can happen to him. He refuses to get into
photos and if we threaten or bribe him he puts his hood up and adopts a
pose one of those young actors on the child neglect adverts would be proud
of.
When the boy is all grown up and left the house, we wont be able to
look back with fondness on happy times, instead we'll just wonder how we
successfully managed to make this child so totally and utterly miserable,
at least during pictures.
I do post photos of my family to Facebook. A lot of my loved ones live in
England and America and it's a way of keeping them engaged with our family and to see our kids growing up. But recently my oldest children have been objecting.
They both now have their own social media accounts and want to
control their own digital identities, control what people see of them, and
– in the same way we don't want tagged by well-meaning friends in awfully
unflattering pictures of ourselves after a few glasses of wine – they don't
want tagged in family snaps.
My sons don't want tagged in photographs of family occasions because they are afraid their friends will make fun of them.
I'll not pretend to be able to understand the mind of a 12-year-old, but presumably getting a selfie with your ma is on a par with being caught on camera up the front of a Foster and Allen concert when you're a modern teenager.
So I'm in a position where a couple of years will be absent from my children's lives.
When they are 30 and want to look back on their happy childhoods, they'll
think those missing parts are the years I sent them to the French Foreign
Legion for talking back.
I don't over post about my kids on social media, I try to keep posts about
myself, where I am, what I'm doing. But we all know people who post
non-stop about their kids – pictures, updates, videos.
There is a name for these people: Sharents. They share every single aspect of their child's existences, from their toilet business to their quirky little habits.
I saw someone posting the other day about her nine-year-old wetting the bed. He'll thank Mum for that particular witty anecdote when he reaches big school, I've no doubt.
Sharents constantly post photos of their kids – sleeping, eating, looking
to the right, in the car, wearing a new hat, laughing, smiling. We have all
done it, we have all been that sharent. It's hard to resist when your kid
is the cutest in the world.
And just as sharents exists, so do apps that can counteract them. Unbaby.me helpfully replaces the baby pictures with images of cats or bacon, if the sharent on your page gets too much.
Children are born onto social media. Within seconds of them arriving into
the world their crumpled, chubby faces and oddshaped newly born heads are plastered all over Facebook, the likes running into their hundreds and
thousands.
People you maybe never have met before in the flesh are commenting on their appearance and offering congratulations, even though if you met them in the street they might pass by without so much as a hello or a sideways look, as Facebook etiquette commands.
Children's life moments are captured and posted – first words, first steps,
first taste of food, silly things they have done, their achievements, their
mistakes, laid bare for all to see.
These moments – their digital footprints from birth to now – are online forever, so that when a future employer views the video of that time when they were three and covered the living room in Sudocreme, they won't get the job because they are a loose canon.
Or their future husband or wife can read the post about the time their nappy leaked in Tesco when they were three months old, with near apocalyptic results, complete with graphic photos.
I have been writing about my family for nearly 12 years on these very
pages. I'd say I am as guilty of advanced sharenting as anyone, I suppose
it's part of my job.
I try not to embarrass them too much though, or not reveal too many personal details. I keep most things private.
As far as online sharing goes, ensuring my children aren't bullied over
something I post on social media, or that their identities aren't digitally
kidnapped is high priority.
I am aware of the important of protecting my children's digital presence, that's why I have Facebook locked down so tightly that only friends have access to what I post.
And I have never posted a photo of my children onto Twittersville, it can be a vicious place.
The problem with sharenting is that we are taking our child's private
moments – moments that our own parents may have shared with one or two
people, laughed at over the family album perhaps – and shared them with
potentially thousands of people.
We are making the decisions to make information public on their behalf. What seems funny now, may lead them to earning a nickname in primary school, or being bullied 10 years from now.
Maybe we should all think before we sharent. Our kids will thank us for it
in years to come.
