Twenty years from now, there will be a man who is besotted with my daughter. He will go through every single photo of her life and feel like he knows her when he really doesn’t. He will print the photos of her and build a creepy shrine on desk. He will make a picture of her when she was 2 her cell phone wallpaper.
I almost lost my life at 2 years old.
The memories are non-existent in my head, but the lore is that I was a rambunctious child who liked to throw the couch cushions on the floor and hide the remote control.
There was a coffee table and during my rambunctious stints, I hit my head and hurt my nose. No one knew it then, but I had suffered internal bleeding.
Infection set in and I was rushed to the hospital on life support.
My entire family came to the hospital and prayed in the chapel for my recovery.
My maternal grandmother attributed my bad fortune to the fact that my parents and uncles had taken too many photo of me as a baby. The camera stole my sole. That God was punishing them for stealing my soul.
The pictures ended then. Between then and now I have a small shoebox of a smattering of photos from me from 3 until 25.
My grandmother didn’t know it then, but cameras really do steal your soul.
In this day and age of Social Media, photos are not seen as precious or valuable. Except they have become way more dangerous. Some children have an entire record of their lives from in utero to their first steps to their first dance.
Once posted on social media sites, these photos and memories are no longer the property of the beholder but a corporation. Who are carefully tracking information of millions of people for targeting.
Relationships online are so tenuous and our connections are unrightfully substantiated by attention. Paying attention to someone’s post does not mean that you have a strong connection to that person. When a person posts something online, its in an effort to water our attention plant. For what? To verify our existence? To justify that we are doing something right and to invite the feedback mechanism of approval to make us feel better?
My sensitivities might be a bit higher being a public person. I will meet people who think they know about me because they have accumulated the superficial tads and bits that I’ve curated or more likely than not, have been curated for me on social media. They regurgitate things they have read and seen back to me and feel they know me well.
That’s just not true. Some of the most important things I savor and protect.
It is my job as a parent to help my child make their own decisions. To grow into their understanding of consent. This idea of consent and letting people share their private thoughts and moments against their will is an egregious break of trust. If my child grows up with me sharing their first potty training success, why shouldn’t the first person they sleep with post their sex tape. As a parent, if I post every aspect of their life the person they have become might become numb to the nuance that their power has been stripped from them. Sure, the example is a huge leap, but the context of consent is the same. Private memories to be shared are at the prerogative of the person who is living them. Not witnessing them.
If being raised with a healthy sense of consent isn’t the issue, it’s also training the child to believe that every moment is worth applaud and notoriety. Is it? Isn’t this a slippery slope to raising a narcissist? If everything is special, then nothing is special. That’s certainly not true either.
My hope for my children is that they are self sufficient, smart and independent people. The tools of which will require them to navigate and building their own principles. Forge their own relationships and build their own system of trust. It is only then that they should be able to share the aspects of their life that they want.
My family has always been my inspiration for life’s best work. The most important job I have is to raise children to be the best they can be. Not to provide ammunition of future ridicule because some jerk they go to school with found something I posted.
Before I entered the public arena, my former career in media tech has also taught me to be wary of the content we offer up free to corporations. What seems innocuous and the lowest effort way to share with our family and “friends” is actually being used for someone else’s gain. Right now I imagine there are studies being taken place on Facebook making a qualitative analysis of parent based on their quantitative posts of their children.
Social media has opened us up, but some things should be shut down.
Being tech executives, my husband and I have the luxury to create a private intrasite to keep our favorite photos and videos for our future generations. Not many people have the ability or knowledge to this. One day they can take over the site and determine what they would like to share. Much like some of us older folks have photo albums. We get to decide what we want to scan and share. That’s how it should be.
Oversharing is under respecting your child’s discretion.
Remember, Facebook timeline is a scrapbook for stalkers.