To Blog, or Not to Blog

An excerpt from a February article in Details on overparenting:

It's not like we're the first generation to turn out Frankenkinder. Since the dawn of time, parents have been dressing their kids in ridiculous sailor suits and dragging them on ski trips to Gstaad. But lately it feels like we're scaling new heights as bad examples. We create parenting blogs that transform our preschoolers into fetishized celebrities.

And a snippet from a September 2009 article in Newsweek about the risks we parents incur when we broadcast the every whim of our children:

Ouch. And that was before blogs, or Facebook. Thanks to three of the hallmarks of our age—oversharing, overparenting, and narcissism—the intimate details of the lives of many little ones, from toddlers to teenagers, have been pasted in public forums by their mothers and fathers. Soiled nappies, tantrums, mental illness, meth. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes comforting; sometimes it touches on something important.

And sometimes it just seems wrong. Some broadcast the exploits of their offspring in a way that violates not just their privacy but their trust. I can't be the only one who is very glad my parents never wrote about my formative years.

Both articles touched a nerve with me because I’ve been consciously grappling with the issues the authors bring up – celebrity culture, rampant narcissism, privacy concerns, the risks of alienation and embarrassment – ever since I started this blog four and a half years ago. I suppose it’s true that whenever parents write and share in a publicly accessible forum the stories involving their family, they’re one step closer to the aforementioned repercussions. But I would argue that the sheer act of sharing is not enough to take us down this undesirable path; content, manner, and frequency of distribution play a much larger role in leading us to such an abyss.

And so as your humbled blogger who’s appreciative of all those who stop by this blog, I thought it was important for you to know that I am constantly weighing all these forces when deciding what to share – I post the things I feel my family and friends might enjoy and even cherish, and I leave out the stuff that my kids might point to years down the line as a reason for why they hate me. (The only time I go rogue is when there’s some delicious wordplay to be had, at which time all deliberate considerations as to what I share go out the window.)

I write the blog because I enjoy the exercise, but I also write because I want to be able to go back and remember the significant – and less significant – times we spent together as a family and with friends. If that makes me narcissistic and exploitative, well then, so be it.