Not so long ago Quite a while ago (took an age to finish this post) I was asked about my decision to blog about my daughter. That is, the ethics of taking away some part of your child’s privacy on the Internet without their consent, or hell, without even their knowledge. My daughter is only three. Nothing about blogging or online journal writing is entirely private so you can read the entire question for yourself here (from the lovely Hand Mirror). Or otherwise an excerpt below.
Several of the bloggers I really respect, in particular bluemilk, put up pics of their children, and I guess this post is really a non-critical question to them:
If I share photos of my child am I just using them as blog fodder, particularly when they are too young to even understand that the shiny box with the red light is being used to record their embarrassing moments for humiliating enlargement later in life.
The Hand Mirror isn’t the only one to wonder about this. Not so long ago the biggest mummy blogger on the block (you don’t need a hint do you?) wrote about her decision to blog about her young daughter.
And I have every reason to believe that one day you will look at the thousands of pages I have written about my love for you, the thousands of pages other women have written about their own children, and you’re going to be so proud that we were brave enough to do this. We are an army of educated mothers who have finally stood up and said pay attention, this is important work, this is hard, frustrating work and we’re not going to sit around on our hands waiting for permission to do so. We have declared that our voices matter.
Dooce’s post came in response to ongoing criticism she receives for blogging about her child. It won’t surprise you to know that someone always wants to “save the children” if it means an opportunity for some moralising. Dooce’s post was full of righteous anger. Good for her. I, like others, appreciated Dooce’s strong defence of mummy blogging even though to be honest I also felt she was a little timid in dealing with some of the pointier ends of the topic, particularly given her level of celebrity. Dooce is such a successful blog that she appears to have achieved that rarest of things in blog land, a blog which makes real money.
Dooce being as successful as she is at producing her ‘reality’ for our entertainment, faces the moral dilemma of both earning the family income through this pursuit and also being responsible for protecting her family from exploitation and intrusion. Dooce writes, although decreasingly so, about intimate aspects of her life such as bouts of depression, constipation, a miscarriage, and arguments with her husband. It is the rawness of her family life, as glimpsed through her writing, which has attracted so many fans. There must be significant pressure to continue to provide this intimacy, and yet with growing fame the costs of lost privacy have also grown. She didn’t address these moral questions in any real way except to say that she takes these considerations into account when she’s drafting her posts. And I guess if Dooce didn’t want to tackle the thornier issues of being her very own Truman Show then so be it.. because frankly, she’s owed a little something just for herself.
Another big name blogger, Bitch PhD also occasionally blogs about intimate aspects of her life including her child, and she liked Dooce’s post. In reflecting on the criticism of mothers who blog about their children she said –
Guess what? “But what about the children!” has been an indirect way of criticizing women for acting like people ever since Mary Wollestonecraft suggested that maybe being educated *wouldn’t* make women into terrible mothers. (And before that, even.)
There is something to be suspicious about whenever people jump on a bandwagon against a practice almost entirely pursued by women, which parent blogging overwhelmingly is. Feminism has a rich history in the liberation of making the personal political – of destigmatising ordinary but shamed aspects of womens’ lives, and the solidarity which can come out of sharing one’s own story with other women only to find theirs are touchingly similar. Indeed, much of my interest in writing a feminist motherhood blog arose from this idea. And yet, to be honest, like some others I’m still rather ambivalent about the decision to blog about my daughter.
When I started writing here it was with several purposes, among them was the desire to create something for my daughter to read when she was older. I’m imagining she’ll want to know more about who she was and how she came to be than I could otherwise recall without referring to this blog. Maybe she’ll also want to know who I was back then, too. But as my interests with the blog have developed, I find myself increasingly writing about other facets beyond the personal and I frequently wonder about their compatibility with the journal of a childhood. This is particularly the case when I write about contentious topics, posts which attract new readers from varying sources, readers I don’t have any kind of connection with, and readers who have an axe to grind. These posts, I know, can incite debate if not outright hostility, and they attract trolls too. And all the time, just above or below each contentious post is a cheerful little post about my daughter, with a photo or two of her. I feel like I am rolling over and showing the trolls my soft underbelly. See, right here, that would really hurt. I’ve tried to prepare myself for the inevitable attack when it comes, and I’m trying to be ready to see it for the stupidity that it will be.. but still, soft underbelly, very soft.
My daughter’s privacy is an altogether different concern. I couldn’t have known it when I first started posting photographs of her, because she was a baby then, but at three she has emerged as a very spirited introvert. Already she is resistant to being photographed (see above), and it is probably only a matter of years before she refuses to have photographs of herself put on my blog. I will of course respect those wishes and I’ve seen other blog writers go through this process without incident, moving from blogs with photos of children to blogs without photos. I think it will be a comfortable evolution when it happens.
When I first started blogging I noticed something right away – the blog looked a lot more interesting with pictures. I post photographs of all of us on here but my daughter is definitely the main subject. I love looking at photographs of her and I photograph her a lot. With all these photographs being taken of her it isn’t so surprising that there are a lot more photogenic photographs of her than there are of me. This is one of the key reasons why she appears more on this blog than I do. And regardless of any future angst about privacy that she might have, I can at least assure her that I only ever posted her best photos on the Internet, which is more than I can say people have done for me. (Yes, those Facebook photos you keep tagging me in, enough!). With friends and family I try and respect their privacy by not including particularly identifying photographs of them on my blog.
Blogging, like any autobiographical writing involves an inherent moral judgement by the writer. Not just how much to reveal about oneself but how much to reveal about others? This blog is written with love. So, for instance I tend not to blog too much about my arguments and tensions with others, even though at times this has meant I’ve not talked about what are fairly universal and important themes in motherhood. I personally believe such blogging would be unfair – I’d control not only the version of events but the dissemination of that story. I apply these same cautions to talking about my child, some aspects of her development have been deliberately ignored here. My partner is deeply private, he prefers not to think about my blog and rarely reads it. And really, strangely I’m a relatively private person too, though with a “two drink limit” to sharing, much like that described nicely here by Breed ‘Em and Weep. I’ll post any thought/confession of mine that I’d be willing to share with strangers at a dinner party, after two glasses of wine, which is actually quite a lot (of sharing, but not even that much wine). Only twice have I questioned something I’ve written and neither of these revealing posts were specifically about my daughter.
Some people’s criticism of mummy blogging is about the potential threat of ‘stranger danger’. I realise there are some safety risks with blogging, but in reality, after considerable research, I believe they are minimal. Maybe I’m somewhat desensitised, because there are a lot of parent blogs out there, and I read quite a few of them, and they are posting a lot of photos of children.. and nothing much is going wrong. It is unlikely that many paedophiles are trawling blogs for a glimpse of your child’s underwear when sadly they have so many other more sinister, and even more benign, sources of material out there. Strangers aren’t really the biggest threats to your children. I live with a lot of anxiety about the danger of strangers, more than I care to, and I want to try and contain that paranoia within reasonable limits. I don’t want to succumb to hysteria. Having said that I’ll admit that one of the most disturbing elements of blogging is seeing the source of traffic to your site through your Google search results. Some seriously unfortunate terms somehow bring people to my site. I take heart from the fact that they’re ‘single clickers’, they don’t appear to be looking around my blog, they come, see it isn’t child p0rn after all and leave. All the same, in a nod to personal safety and privacy I don’t post any of our real names, no, not even my daughter’s (Lauca is a pseudonym). I respect their rights to embarrass themselves online to new friends and potential employers and not have me do it for them, so I’ve ensured that any Googling of their actual names won’t bring my site up. And in an effort to avoid being “Dooced” myself I don’t post about my work or even the topics I specifically write about for work, which has meant on occasion that I’ve missed some really good stories on my blog.
As a mother I will make mistakes, many of them, and parts of this blog may be among them, but in answer to the Hand Mirror’s question I can only say that I’m writing this blog with love and I’m exercising the caution of a mother (which is considerable). Right now my daughter wants to drink everything from a syringe. Her drinks are served with a syringe on the side so she can self-administer her drinks with a squirt into her mouth. Deliciously eccentric and very much her. Maybe she’ll find this tidbit to be over-sharing one day, or maybe she’ll enjoy these little insights. Becoming a mother is like no other process I’ve experienced, her life is tightly woven through mine. For the past three years I couldn’t have described my life without describing motherhood. When I come back to read this years from now, this little story of her insisting that her drinks be served with a syringe will remind me not just of her three year old determination but of other things too, things about myself. Of my exasperation with those kinds of demands. Of my incredible patience, patience I didn’t realise I was capable of, and which I may no longer be capable of when I get old. It will remind me immediately of that special experience of doing something silly for a small child because it is possible to bring them great, great joy (and harmony) by complying with such requests, that you do it for them even though you know it will double your cleaning up.
It won’t always be this way, her life story won’t always be woven so tightly through mine, it’ll be clearer one day where mine ends and hers begins. She’ll become more and more a separate individual. And when that happens, this writing and those photos will be a gift for her and I both.
Without a crystal ball, the following can’t be claimed to be more than a hunch, but I really think the “future employer googling” argument is flawed. As more and more people blog, use flickr and other online recording means, no search engine on the planet is going to be able to get around the simple fact that there are way too many people called your kid’s name. I have a pretty unusual name, but if you google me, you get a virtual porn star and a French musician. I am there in a school photo on someone else’s blog, but you’d be hard pressed to know you’ve found the right one. My kids’ names already produce a plethora of info, none of which is about them. Simply excluding your surname is probably sufficient to lose them in the noise.
The question of recording stuff that might be embarrassing in later life is one that presupposes that it is sensible to be embarrassed by things you did when you were little. I just don’t buy that, and I won’t let other people’s insecurities affect my decisions. Not to mention that my mother happily tells all the “embarrassing” things about me when I was a child to anyone who will listen. Word of mouth just has a new vehicle. I squirm a little when she tells the tale about me painting a family friend’s newly built toilet with my own faeces (I can’t remember exactly how old I was, but too old for this to be easy to right off – maybe 3ish?), but ultimately, this is not still in my behaviour catalogue, so I refuse to be embarrassed by it. Although I would love to know why I did it. 🙂
There are things I don’t blog about, but most of that is because of consequences right now. There is the odd one or two things I have hesitated about on the basis of future ramifications, but I think the risk is generally very small. I also understand that this is a punt, and I could be proved wrong. I’ve placed my bet time will tell. I place my bets about lots of other more significant choices in my kids’ lives, I don’t think this one is such a big deal.
This is such a wonderful post – I came away from it with a much enriched perspective on this issue. Thank you, for several things:
1. Coming back to that Dooce post and recontextualizing her comments for me. Because she’s so self-deprecating all the time I think I generally don’t read her with a serious mind, but reading this again makes me realize that she states this very well. What has amazed me about becoming a mother and joining a community of mothers where I live (and online) is the amount of thinking that goes into parenting, thinking that in earlier years was transmitted either in a denigrated format, as old wives tales, or was coopted and then authoritatively transmitted by male doctors and educators. The “I will lay claim to this thinking myself” aspect of mommy blogging, which Dooce I think emphasizes by using the word “educated”, is truly revolutionary. Public writing allows mothers to reassert their legitimate expertise in the practice of parenting.
2. Thinking out loud about the child vulnerability issue. It was excellent of you to contextualize this as well and to highlight the ways we can think of this as pure misogynist hysteria. On the other hand, there’s still the issue. I think a lot about how having a child has made ME vulnerable, though my love for him, to millions of fears that I never had before motherhood and thus inevitably curtailed my agency in a number of unexpected ways. This mutual dependence of primary caregiver and child is an intense, intense thing and though I can appreciate rationally coming to a decision about an acceptable compromise between my autonomy and his wellbeing, my own experience is that finding this balance is less a matter of thought and more of a gut-driven groping around for a situation that doesn’t make us all crazy and that we can all basically live with. The need to communicate about one’s life and the people in it is a legitimate human need.
A brilliant discussion, bluemilk, thanks.
“I can only say that I’m writing this blog with love and I’m exercising the caution of a mother (which is considerable).”
I like this statement a lot; it sums up the crux of the issue for me. I don’t feel uncomfortable about blogging about my kids and I’ve never really been able to articulate why I’m okay with it. And it’s because I trust myself to know what the appropriate boundaries are, what the potential threats might be, and I trust my motives (using my kids for GOOD instead of EVIL).
The Mummy blogs I read are without exception highly reflexive pieces of writing; if the authors take such care to unpick all sorts of personal, structural, cultural, behavioural issues, I think it’s fair to acknowledge they also take care with the issues of privacy and danger they indirectly engage with.
Also, Mummy blogging isn’t only about drawing the previously private world of mothers into the public sphere; it stakes a place for kids’ voices and experiences, too. Kids are rarely allowed space beyond the domestic sphere – and sometimes not even much space in that sphere – and I think this is a way of showing that kids are in fact complex *people*, even if they don’t necessarily have the words to write this for themselves. It might be in the future our kids say ‘no thank you’; but maybe they’ll see the practice as something worthwhile and take it up themselves, ‘speaking back’ to our own readings of the situation, and thus claiming further space for themselves.
Thank you so much for this amazing response to my query. I really identified with a lot of the points you made, although I am but a baby Mommy blogger really and in general have been writing more about other stuff lately, as the newness of being a mother recedes. I particularly appreciated your focus that you are writing about Lauca, and motherhood, and everything else, with love. I wrote a little while back about my ambivalence about becoming a mum and I had to edit myself a little in terms of not writing anything I thought Wriggly might read later and take the wrong way. Because at the end of the day if he reads anything I have written about him and doesn’t feel the love then I’ve produced something that doesn’t truly reflect how I feel about him.
That god Lauca’s a pseudonym. I always thought it was a crap name, but was too polite to say 😉
That’s the other thing about blogging – stuff the future, there are people prepared to be critical and offer their opinion right here and now whenever we post personally.
And I think the future arguments are speculative – my blog mate Rachel is 25 and 10 years of her life is online (most recently here, and on flickr. Lauca’s normal will be different to ours, and we can’t predict what it will be.
And I hear ya on the syringe. Try having an eccentric extrovert, though …
It’s such a pandora’s box this ethics of blogging … but your blog is written with such love and consideration for your daughter, I would be suprised at any recourse down the track. Just to empathise, my daughter went through the syrine drinking stage too, last year at 4. This morning she wanted to drink her milk out of a saucer, like the cat…talk about messy!!!
When I set up my blog, work life web, I had to jump through a few ethical hoops and read some interesting stuff on the ethics of blogging…including ‘blogs are firmly located in the public domain and for this reason it can be argued that necessity for consent should be waived’… ‘cyberspace is simultaneously publicly-private and privately-public’…and lastly ‘Blogging is a public act of writing for an implicit audience’- (Hookway, 2008) this last point particularly resonates as I have read your, and other quality parenthood blogs. It is unlikely that pedophiles are going to be attracted to blogs such as yours because they are not the implied, nor invited audience…It may also be the case, that our children, when they are old enough to read, may not be all that terribly interested in what we have written about them …however, I could be wrong here…but I appreciate your deep thought and insight into the issues around children, privacy and blogging..
Aside: what’s with the syringe thing, I mean how do they get the idea that that’s how they’d like to drink stuff in the first place?
Julie, Presumably medicine. My kids will swallow anything if it comes out of a syringe. When you need to administer godawful flavoured medicines at times, you do nothing to change this attraction. Doesn’t seem like a big leap for the kid to decide that all fluids should come from one! Oh I do hope it doesn’t occur to Charlie… 🙂
Thanks Ariane, we haven’t had to give Wriggly much medicine yet.
Hmmm…. I’m a trusting soul, and I hadn’t worked out that Lauca is a pseudonym. Being a trusting soul, I also hadn’t googled it, which might have alerted me to the pseudonym thingie.
I use titles on my blog – Mr Strange Land, and Miss Nine, the elder Miss Seven and the younger Miss Seven (there’s 20 minutes in it). It identifies the children without revealing their identities. I have only occasionally posted photos of the girls, and then only of the girls at a distance. It’s about keeping just a bit of a distance.
I think that maybe, if I had started blogging earlier, I might have put more photos of them up, because I am so very proud of them. Julie, Blue Milk, I know you think that Lauca and Wriggly are the most wonderful children in the world, but trust me, mine are better! 🙂
Great post. Stop by my blog to pick up an award.
What kris said.
a lot of what you say is based on your on-line anonimity. for those of us who have chosen not to have that (in my case, for political reasons), a lot of the points you raise won’t apply. even if i write with love, my children will be able to be easily identified and their lives would become public in a way that i don’t think they would be comfortable with. which is not to say that i’ve shielded them or hidden them from the publicity that i’ve been involved with. they’ve appeared on national tv (in nz) with me, and been photographed in the local paper. next year, photographs of them will appear in a book i’m involved with. but all of that has been done with their full consent, and i don’t reveal anything of their personal lives because i think it is personal to them.
another issue is that i’ve started blogging when my kids are much older than yours. they are much more aware of their privacy. nowadays they will start sentences with “you are not allowed to tell anyone about this, not even [family members]”. just knowing that they feel like that means that i don’t think i can tell anything unless they want it told – at least not in a public and permanent form like a blog.
but even after reading what you’ve written, i’d still feel uncomfortable sharing photographs and stories of my kids on an anonymous blog. i just can’t get around the notion of informed consent, and while i respect your point of view, find that i just can’t bring myself to share it. i agree with the whole journal thing, and how they would love to see it when they were older, but i wouldn’t make it available to the public until they were ready to say that it was ok to do so.
very well written though…
great post. truly great post. you’ve given me so much to think about. thank you.
I am feeling desilusionada at reading that Lauca is a pseudonym. My bubble has popped.
I like what you wrote, but I agree with stargazer that we feel entitled to blog material in this way because of our children’s ages. This is offensive, but I’m going to say it anyway: It’s like photographing tribespeople. It’s okay if they are naked and didn’t consent because they are brown. I sometimes feel that creepy sense of entitlement. The “bathtime.jpg” photo that I took of my daughter (just of her face) is something that gets daily hits on my blog. I can’t imagine what the consequence of that would be, but it seems improper. After all, there are no photos of me in the bath on the internet, you know? I like what Ariane said about consequences, because I am betting that they will be minor.
I take the point that people in some social categories are vulnerable to being photographed or otherwise used without their consent because of how we (refuse) to see their agency, but with respect,I’m not sure about the analogy. I think there’s a difference in the motivations of a tourist photographing indigenous people and those of a parent photographing their child. I think the drive to photograph particular groups can be about capturing the exotic other, and so presenting one’s own self in a desirable way (adventurous, ‘authentic’, etc) – it’s a form of consumption. When I photograph my kids, and post my photos, I am doing it out of love and out of a desire to share who they are with others who face the same issues and experiences as we do, and with my kids as their future selves. And I think I do that respectfully, trying to get at my kids’ subjectivities, rather than seeing them as an object to be consumed.
For me, answers to these issues depend on motivations, and respect and care are central to how I am thinking about the questions.
I also felt a bit surprised / disillusioned that Lauca was a pseudonym. I must be honest like the other person above who said that they weren’t really into the name! I’m afraid I’m old-fashioned when it comes to naming kids.
I have a completely off-topic comment to make, while we’re making confessions… Bluemilk, have you ever, ever, ever considered changing your website to make it a bit easier to read? Just black text on a white/light background is a lot easier. I figure you have the small text because you like writing long posts 🙂
OK now I have probably offended you enough…
Right on, Kris. I agree that the analogy doesn’t work perfectly, and I thank you for the word “agency” because that’s just the word I was looking for.
Coming late to this discussion, but I thought I’d engage with your comment that Lauca will probably like to read this later.
I started blogging about my kids inspired by my father, who wrote a weekly letter to his mother for about 50 years – when he left home at 12 to go to board school, until she stopped being able to read about forty years later. I loved reading them when I joined his life – partly what he said about me, but also reading what he thought about the world.
I’ve now got a blog just about the kids (very hard to find, now that they’re at school and their classmates might read it, although it was highly googleable with their real names for a while) for the family to read, and my own more pseudonymus (sorry about the spelling, I’m being lazy) one. In some ways its a bit of a shame they are separate, as the boys would probably enjoy the mix, even though they’ll enjoy the parts about themselves more.
I agree with the others that in future everyone will be online, so it won’t be that big a deal. I did find though, that once they got to school I did not want the parents of their classmates, or their classmates themselves reading what I was writing about their lives. It’s sometimes hard enough that our friends read it – we find ourselves censoring the boasting and the quirkiness in ways that we wouldn’t if it was just for us and posterity.
Coming to this discussion awfully late, but what a great post.
This statement “I can only say that I’m writing this blog with love and I’m exercising the caution of a mother (which is considerable).”
So to the point.
My own experience is that as my kids have gotten older I’ve been more cautious, like someone said at the top, not because of future employers, but because my ten year old’s friends will soon be old enough to potentially be reading blogs. Also I’ve always kept my surname and my husband’s off the blog, just to reduce the chance of googling, though I don’t blog anonymously.
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