Why asking permission may not be enough
What to do when kids find their entire lives on the internet
I’m old enough to remember Matt Lauer smirking his way through a “Today” show segment, circa 1999-ish, about a wacky, new fad adults were doing before they went on dates.
It was called Googling, he told us. And they were doing it
What a concept! Dial up your internet, type a person’s name into a search engine and … stuff pops up about them?
I remember wondering. It was an innocent time.
Last month, the Atlantic wrote a story about kids Googling themselves and finding their entire lives documented online, from in utero sonograms to potty training updates to soccer scores. Ninetytwo percent of toddlers already have their own unique digital identity before age 2, the article reports.
“It’s weird seeing myself up there,” 11-year-old Cara (a pseudonym) told the magazine. “And sometimes there’s pics I don’t like of myself.”
Cara was trying to get up the courage to approach her parents about taking down some of the photos they’d posted on Instagram.
A few years ago, after reading Devorah Heitner’s “Screenwise,” I vowed to start asking my kids’ permission before posting any photos of them on social media.
“Asking them for their permission before sharing a photo of them creates a positive boundary,” Heitner told me at the time. “It teaches them, ‘You can say no to a friend taking or sharing your photo.’ ”
That idea of reminding them that they have agency over their bodies and can use their voices to exercise that agency resonated with me. Occasionally, I have slipped and posted a vacation photo or athletic achievement without asking them, but I’ve mostly stuck to it.
That Atlantic article has me wondering whether that’s enough.
Not all of the kids in the article minded having a deep well of internet information out there.
“We thought it was so cool that we had pics of ourselves online,” 13-year-old Natalie (another pseudonym) said about Googling herself with friends. “We would brag like, ‘I have this many pics of myself on the internet.’ You look yourself up, and it’s like, ‘Whoa, it’s you!’ We were all shocked when we realized we were out there. We were like, ‘Whoa, we’re real people.’ ”
Ouch.
I called Heitner on Monday to get her thoughts on the article and what it should mean to those of us in the thick of parenting today.
“We always have to be mindful of our children’s humanity in a very deep way,” Heitner said. “We have to think of their identities as their own and remember that their identities are going to be in flux.”
A kid may welcome — even crave — internet fame at, say, 9 or 11 or 15. But they may regret some of that exposure as they get older, Heitner said, when they want to forge their own identities without a lot of preconceived notions to combat.
Maybe when they’re applying for colleges. Maybe when they’re applying for jobs. Maybe when they’re falling in love and want to swap life stories over late-night coffees at all-night diners and not worry that their life story, sonogram on up, is widely available within a few keystrokes.
“The internet is forever,” Heitner said.
She urges parents to pause before discussing a child’s diagnosis on social media, knowing that child will someday be an adult who might not want to disclose that diagnosis to a potential employer.
She urges parents to consider whether social media is the best place to seek recommendations for help in areas that are potentially embarrassing — bed-wetting, for example — knowing that a classmate of your child’s can walk by an open laptop or hop on a parent’s phone and see what your child probably doesn’t want others knowing.
She urges parents who let their kids post videos on YouTube to disable the comments.
“No one needs to be commenting on an 11-year-old’s magic tricks,” Heitner said. “Because, inevitably, there will be some terrible person out there who comments on your child’s weight or race.”
She urges parents to think long and hard and lovingly about where their stories end and their children’s stories begin.
“I think people have the best, kindest intentions,” she said. “But I think we need boundaries.”
The goal, Heitner said, doesn’t need to be to keep your child’s entire persona off the internet. That would be close to impossible, given that sports teams and school clubs and friends and family are likely to post images and information about your child even if you don’t.
“But I think you want to be careful not to foreclose any future opportunity,” she said. “You want to think about whether what you post could, in some way, undermine your child’s possibilities in life. And whether there’s a way for what you’re posting to actively embarrass your kid.”
My rule for writing about my kids — on social media and in my columns — has always been, “Would I say this out loud in front of them?” If yes, I let myself write it. If no, I don’t.
But Heitner’s words have me thinking more critically about that. Especially this:
“We want to teach our kids that people are real even if they’re not very Google-able,” she said. “That crossing guard is real even if she’s not your Facebook friend. It’s very human to want to quantify how you’re known in the universe, and you want to teach your child that’s not all based on likes and followers.”
This is tricky stuff for those of us who write about our lives for a living. But I think, actually, it’s tricky for everyone.
“Parenting is isolating, hard work,” Heitner said. “I do think there’s that urge to understand what others are going through and share what you’re going through and feel less alone because of it. And I think we need to have empathy for that.
“But,” she continued, “I think we need to work hard to find ways to do that that are a little safer for our kids.”
Even if what we’re safeguarding is their right to roll out their life story at the pace and place that make them comfortable.
I want to honor that. I’m going to work hard on honoring that. Join me?
Check out Heidi Stevens’ new weekly podcast with family therapist John Duffy, “On Purpose: The Heidi Stevens And Dr. John Duffy Podcast,” now available on iTunes.