I’ll never forget the conversation. We were at a friend’s engagement party about 6 months after our oldest child was born. We ran into a friend we had not seen in many years. He expressed congratulations on our first born and as proud new parents do, we were beaming and gushing about how wonderful and perfect our new baby was. We shared some highs and lows of becoming parents and eventually showed him a picture of our bundle of joy. What he said next was unexpected and sobering.
“I’m so glad the baby is healthy. I was worried something was wrong with the baby because Sarah has never posted any pictures on Facebook.”
Flabbergasted, it never dawned on me that this would be what some people would think. I knew people may notice that we never post photos of our kids or their names on social media, but it never occurred to me that anyone would think we had something to hide.
This conversation only reinforced our mutual decision to never share our kids’ faces or names on social media. And by social media, I really mean MY social media. My husband has never and will never have Facebook or Instagram. I have been blogging and sharing my life publicly since 2011 which I have always had mixed feelings about for privacy reasons.
We made the decision one night toward the end of my first pregnancy. We were discussing an unsettling fact that my brother had shared with us a few days before. At the time, my brother was an engineer at a major social media company, and he told me to never post our baby on social media. He said we’d be amazed at how many complaints they got when parents find out their child’s face is being used on a fake profile, in a meme, or worse, in an offensive or lewd manner.
I knew that because I had my blog and shared a lot of my life on social media, if I tried to exercise some restraint in posting our kids, it would be a slippery slope and it would only be a matter of time before I was sharing every moment. I decided it would be best to go all in (or all out, depending on how you look at it).
Five years later, I have stuck to my word and never posted my kids’ faces or their names on social media. I have no shame in deleting their names in comments left by well-meaning family and friends and in a few rare cases, I have had to ask friends or family to remove a photo that makes me feel uncomfortable.
One positive that has come from this choice is that I often get texts from family and friends asking to see pictures of my kids and people are genuinely excited when they receive pictures of my kids or our annual Christmas card (for some people they only see my kids once a year!) Even better, when people see my kids in person they love to see how much they’ve grown (ya know, like the good old days)! We’ve created shared iCloud albums that we share with close family and friends as a way to stay connected and share memories. These have become a timeline of their lives that the kids love to watch streamed on our Apple TV (bonus- it also makes for easy photo organization).
Some may call me paranoid, some may say it’s not a big deal and everyone does it, but for our family, it works.
This fall when my blog and social media accounts went viral for this post, I was never happier that we had made this decision to keep our kids off social media. Multiple news outlets, digital publications and websites were featuring my blog, and many of them had dug through my blog and social media with a fine tooth comb trying to find images and information about my family and my life as a mom. Many of these media outlets shared a ton of pictures from years ago. With over 120,000 shares and a “reach” in the millions, I also became subject to the trolls that make Facebook such a dumpster fire in our society. Many “commenters” on Facebook were leaving nasty comments like “Why do your kids need to eat all the time, they must be fat” or “You should be cutting your grapes, your kids will choke and die”, “Your kids must be in charge at your house”, “My kids eat what I make and you’re raising brats if you do this”. With every new comment, article and share, I thought to myself, “Thank God we don’t have their pictures out there.” It was easy to tune out the internet trolls because I knew they weren’t actually looking at my babies when they said those nasty things. Haters gonna hate.
Let me be clear and I hope this goes without saying, I’m not sharing this today to shame or offend any parents who share their kids on social media. I think this is an extremely personal decision that should be respected in both directions. Whatever you do, I support it. I LOVE seeing other people’s kids and babies on social media.
I am certainly a minority in this area and the overwhelming norm is to share your life and your kids on social media today. I am sharing this because in the last few weeks since we welcomed our daughter, I’ve received more messages than ever asking what her name is and when I will share some photos of our newest bundle of joy. I wanted to share so you all understand that it is intentional. Don’t get me wrong. Some days I take a picture of my kids and think “Oh, how I wish I could share this with the world!” because my heart can’t contain all of my love for them and when you love something or someone that much, you want to share it with the world. But then I remember all of the good that has come from my decision to keep them private. I remember that someday they will grow up and decide how much of themselves they want to share with the world, and hopefully they will be glad that they can start from scratch.
