Close your eyes and picture your first job interview. What was the worst possible secret that could have been revealed in that moment, ruining your chances for employment? Odds are a photo of you being potty trained, floating around the Internet, wasn’t a deal breaker. But today’s kids face a different reality. A recruiter could Google their name and discover a picture their mother posted of them as a toddler with a weird rash.
I hear a lot about the need for teenagers to be cyber-safe. We as adults are supposed to teach teens to not make dumb decisions like sexting their girlfriends, or signing on to Chatroulette and meeting a 50-year-old-pervert who lives in his mother’s basement. But nobody talks about how parents manipulate their children’s cyber identities on a daily basis and don’t even notice.
When a baby enters the world he has no virtual footprint whatsoever. As an online entity, he is cyber-blank.
Then, before you can say “cherish the moment,” a baby’s arrival is announced all over social media. The hospital organizes a 2-minute slideshow set to music which Dad uploads to YouTube. Grandma posts pictures on Facebook. Aunts are on Instagram. Mom writes a very happy Tweet as soon as she touches her phone.
I don’t think any of these behaviors are wrong, but I do think it’s interesting that society has entered this new normal without considering what we are giving up.
Eighteen years from now, will that baby want his life to be so carefully documented on the Internet? Will he resent how his parents portrayed him as a child? Would there have been any benefit to being cyber-blank?
Most adults who are 30 and over got to choose their own online identities. We carefully uploaded our user profile pictures because we had a blank slate. But our children will have no fresh start, because by the time they’re old enough for social media, their online reality will already be written for them. There will be hundreds — if not thousands — of digital pictures following them forever with annotations like “Charlie’s scared of Santa,” and “Katie loves spaghetti!”
Is this good, bad, or neutral? Can any of us really answer that question with 100 percent certainty?
Mommy-bloggers are the ones in most need of self-examination, and I say that as a mommy-blogger. I’ve written “Teaching My Baby to Read” for four years now with the mission of sparking a national conversation about how massive parental involvement is the key to high-quality education. But for the past three years, I’ve shown no pictures of my children’s faces. I made this decision after Googling my own name, Jennifer Bardsley, and seeing images of my children pop up — as well as photographs of an erotic model also named Jennifer Bardsley.
In a word, “Yuck.”
These days, Internet-virgin status doesn’t last long. The question is, Mom and Dad, are we concerned?
Jennifer Bardsley is an Edmonds mom of two. Her young adult novel about a teenager whose lack of a virtual footprint makes her valuable in a digital future is being published in 2016 by Month9Books. Find her on Twitter @jennbardsley and at www.heraldnet.com/ibrakeformoms and teachingmybabytoread.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
