Babies can't consent to what their parents post on the 'Gram — that's why this mom wants to talk about children's privacy and their digital footprint.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00My husband had asked me while I was pregnant with our daughter if I would be okay with
00:20not posting her online.
00:21He gave me a lot of reasons that he felt it was an invasion of her privacy.
00:26He felt like she didn't have the ability to consent to her image being out there.
00:33It felt really isolating at first because when your baby is a newborn, you're home so
00:44much, especially as a mom, you're trapped under a baby that you're feeding and really
00:50all you have is your phone as a lifeline to the world.
00:52It was tempting to want to post it and then I went through a long phase where it wasn't
00:57as tempting and now she's talking and she's doing things that are really cute and funny.
01:02But I found for the most part that just sending it to a group text so that you can get a couple
01:06people's reactions kind of scratches that same itch.
01:15I would get texts from people saying, I haven't seen her in so long.
01:19What does she look like?
01:20What is she doing?
01:21What has she learned?
01:22What is she doing?
01:23And it felt so much more like they really cared about our family because they were taking
01:27that extra step of reaching out to us instead of just clicking like when they scrolled past
01:31a picture of her.
01:39Once I sort of got past that initial phase, I started to realize that this actually was
01:44a blessing in disguise.
01:46Since my social channels were kid free, it forced me to take stock of the things I was
01:51doing that didn't involve her and then post about them.
01:54And that made me feel engaged with a part of my personality that I might have lost touch
01:58with otherwise.
02:07What I try to do is look at a moment that I want to share and ask myself, am I the main
02:12character of this moment or is my child?
02:14And if the answer is my child, then it's not going to get posted because that's her life
02:18story and not for me to put online.
02:21But if the answer is me and my child happens to be there, then I will cover her somehow
02:25in order to share that.
02:33My personal platform is not that parents need to stop posting their kids altogether, but
02:38I think it is a valuable exercise to think about what it would be like if you Googled
02:43yourself now and found out that all your bath time photos were online or whatever, not even
02:50bath time photos, but everything you ever did was hashtagged and archived.
02:55She'll never have to go through that moment of being like, you need to scrub the internet
02:59of me, mom.
03:00I can't believe how embarrassing all this is.
03:01Obviously, I'm sure I'll do plenty of other embarrassing things, but it's a big relief
03:06to know that that's never a conversation we're going to have to have.