I have an ethical dilemma. So, let's ask the readers!
I've always had a foot in mommyblogging. My first posts were about my kids. Kids are such excellent blog fodder, because they're so random and funny. I also have blogged quite a bit about the mute kid and his struggles. I've been purposely vague and never quite given a name to his diagnosis, but any regular reader knows the score.
I'm not sure if I should continue blogging about my kids. Jonah's ten now and, soon, his parents will be too embarrassing to handle. Even worse, the Internet contains information about silly things that he said when he was four. He has his father's last name, which never appears on this blog, so future employers won't find it, but… still… Ian is even trickier. He shouldn't never know how off-the-rails things were for us several years ago. I did some public grieving; he should never read that.
On the other hand, raising awareness is a good thing. Also, it's an opportunity to form a supportive community. The Internet can be a real comfort to parents as they realize that they're not alone. Two readers have started discussing a book
These aren't new problems. I remember Anne Lamott, who has written extensively about her son, had similar concerns.
So, what should I do? Should I write about Jonah walking home from middle school without his t-shirt, because he was so proud of his six-pack? Should I write about the effects of the applesauce? Where should I draw that line between raising awareness and just telling good stories, and protecting the kids' privacy?
Apt. 11d 
I’m personally very interested in “the applesauce.” On the one hand, a young relative with ADD went through a number of medications and eventually got hooked on Adderall and put her parents through a couple years of hell, on the other hand, I can see that C has the attention span of a dragonfly for any subject not of her choosing. My thinking is 1. nobody who deals with C has recommended medication 2. medication stops working after a few years anyway 3. academics are fine. If someone were to tell me that “the applesauce” would have a major positive effect on ability to effectively conduct social interactions (and I can see how it might), I would be very tempted.
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I just do not know. I avoid putting my name on my blog, but as a wannabe PI, I know how easy it is to find out info. On the other hand, finding out so many of you are dealing with similar issues has been hugely helpful. I also have a thing with openness: I think my son’s diagnosis is nothing to be ashamed of, and kids/people like him are part of the coolness of our world. And just because we have a *name* for it today doesn’t mean it didn’t exist before. I’m just spitballin’ here, but it’s a really tough issue.
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I struggle with this, too, especially as we hit the teenage years. On the one hand, I want to blog my struggles (and solutions!) in order to get some ideas. On the other hand, I know my son would not be happy if I wrote blog post after blog post about how he forgets his homework or has started shaving or dating or whatever. So, I try to be oblique about it. I try to read articles about my issues and blog about them. But really, it’s hard to beat the first hand experience. Maybe I should let my son guest blog.
Even though I don’t put their names in the blog, many of the people who read my blog know me in real life and know them. In many cases, I’d probably just be talking to those people and sharing these stories anyway, but not all of them, and I’m sure there’s a portion of the audience whom I don’t have any idea is reading and whom I wouldn’t want to read these stories. I don’t know.
I personally like your stories about the kids, and I think I like especially because they’re not all you write about. I think you can walk the line and find a way to write about them without violating their privacy.
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I vote for stopping the kid blogging before you hit the teen years. When I was that age (12 to 38), I did not like my mom talking about me.
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I don’t know. A great many of the bloggers who started around the same time I did (2004/2005) have cut way back on blogging, or stopped, and I suspect that many of us are feeling constrained by the kids-and-privacy question.
I don’t know. I can easily write about “what we’re reading now” and I just did write a little about “how being multiple-birth kids affects school placement” but I definitely don’t write as much about specific kid stuff as I used to.
Yeah, it’s a dilemma.
(FWIW, most of the homeschool blogs I’ve found are pretty frank and forward about their kids and their kids’ day-to-day activities, regardless of age. Different blog circles appear to answer the question in different ways, probably depending on their perceived audiences.)
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I vote for talking to Jonah about it, and respecting his views. I think it’s not a simple question, because your children are part of *your* story, as well as being part of their own. But, as he gets older, and can have a thought out opinion, he deserves the same respect as Steve. And, I believe that you respect Steve’s opinion by basically not blogging about anything he would find troublesome.
Did you see the article in the NY times about people who had written books about their children (mostly surrounding drug abuse)? It raised interesting issues — because in some of those cases, the story was clearly the families as well as the child’s.
As a reader, I like reading about your kids. I also think that talking about their trials and tribulations (about homework, assignments, school), for both your children is interesting and informative. I think it provides support for others. But, I don’t think any of those positive effects counterbalance your primary interests in how the writing affects you and your children.
One caveat is that building acceptance of differences may in fact payback in your own lives. I have typically developing children, and in theory I believe in diversity of all sorts, and wouldn’t want to exclude anyone. In practice, though, it’s easy to get annoyed and upset at the kid who doesn’t fit the social norms (like mine do). Your stories, and their effect, of expanding my experience with a broader community, induce me try to expand the theory into practice. We live on opposite sides of the country, and are unlikely to encounter each other personally, but I like to think your writing has made me a bit more tolerant in my own community, tolerance that comes from more knowledge, education, and the empathy I think it can build.
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Honestly, I think the horse is already out of the barn here.
You are relatively careful about avoiding last names, and I’m guessing that if you type your kids’ names into Google, your blog doesn’t come up on the first page, but everything you have written so far is already out there, and always will be, on archive.com, or google archives, or wherever. You could take your whole blog down tomorrow, and it won’t take much for your enterprising future-17-year-olds to find everything you’ve ever written about them.
I don’t know what the “right” answer is with regards to blogging about your kids, but I honestly don’t think that stopping or slowing down know will change much one way or the other.
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As my kids get older, I’ve essentially stopped the “amusing kid anecdote” thing, except among very close friends. It runs in parallel with privacy requests for my kids in general. My 8YO has just recently started insisting on showering by herself, and doesn’t want anyone in the room when she gets dressed. She also glares at me if she catches me talking about her within earshot.
I will still tell stories that are strongly from my perspective even when they include her. If I feel it’s *my* story then I’m OK, as long as I leave many of her details fuzzy (and she’s not in the room). Where this becomes difficult is when something’s really stressful for me and I want to talk/vent about it, but it involves the kids to a great extent.
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Amy, I’ll e-mail you about it. Really not sure if I want any information about the applesauce on the Internet.
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And, here I was thinking applesauce was real applesauce and you were going to talk about its effects on the digestive tract.
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Laura,
Thanks! By the way, one of the things I think Lovecky mentions is that gifted kids with attention problems are sometimes able to compensate in the early grades, but then may fall apart academically in middle school or high school or college.
I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do justice to Lovecky’s Different Minds. As Barbie would say, summarizing is hard!
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John Scalzi and Michael Bérubé have both written about this set of choices, just naming two blogs that may not spring immediately to mind for you. B’s thoughts should be readily findable, and Scalzi basically asks his precocious 9-y-o if she’s ok with him sharing stories.
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The vile 9th grader who searches on your kid and then tortures him with an 8 year old anecdote is a real fear. I like your stories, though. The bj view seems right to me. One possibility is to make your references to them Thing 1 and Thing 2, or something similar. The stuff you have put on line will recede into the past, like the old blog posts which only rarely draw comments, but newer stuff will draw more ongoing attention.
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I’ve never been anonymous, and I’ve never dealt with my family anonymously in anything I’ve written. My experience wouldn’t be a good guide, though, first because the only folks who have stuck with my blog are a fairly self-selected group of readers, and second because I really don’t write about them much at all. Melissa–who gets far more traffic than at her blog, through from a similarly self-selected group of people–doesn’t use last names when she writes about the family, and sometimes will just use initials. Our family blog, where we have all our pictures up and use full names to talk about any old dumb thing, is a private one. So, overall, I guess I’d have to say that I tend to think that many of the fears which people have about “exposing” their children are overwrought…but I’m not actually doing it in such a way or often enough to really give me much authority to speak.
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I’ve never been anonymous, and my kids are not anonymous in essays I’ve had published. Hence, their first and last names can easily be found. However, I decided a year ago to stop writing about them (when they were almost 7, 4 and 6 months old)and made a new blog that does not focus on my family. I don’t use their first names on the new blog.
I might write a long post about letting my kids walk home from the bus stop alone, or whether to send my 18 month old to a Mother’s Morning Out program, but none of my posts are really about them — my posts don’t tell you anything about who they are or what kind of kids they are. I might tell a funny story or tell you about my baby waking up in the night, but even these posts are very rare. And my husband is hardly ever mentioned.
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I’ve basically stopped blogging because I can’t figure this issue out, myself. (And I’m read by a grand total 1f 12 people – 10 of them who are related to me!)
Mostly, I think that our kids are growing up with the internet and we are way more worried than we need to be about the effects of a few blog posts on their well-being. They don’t know anything other than a world where everything is open and on-line.
….but then I start worrying about my future 13 year old daughter and a fictional mean-girl in middle school who stumbles across something I wrote and for some reason, that makes me not want to write anything. My daughter is extremely private and doesn’t really like me telling stories about her, under the best of circumstances.
Hmm…maybe we can get the kids to blog for us. Then they can chose what the say.
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I will probably keep blogging about the kids, particularly about Ian’s issues. I need to draw new lines now that they’re getting older and I just have to figure out where the lines will be. I’m not sure about the applesauce issue. Will my kid be embarrassed or harmed by revealing too much information about this? There’s so much stigma around applesauce. But, on the other hand, the applesauce had a really big impact on his speech and I want to tell people about it. And no side effects. And it’s out of his system by the end of the day. I’m a HUGE convert to the beauty of pharmaceuticals.
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I’m a HUGE convert to the beauty of pharmaceuticals.
I hope it will be happy, but it seems to not last- things don’t work the same after a while, you need more, etc. But that’s not the real danger. The real danger, to my mind, is two other (related) problems. First, as side effects build up (and they almost certainly will), treating them with further drugs, which in turn have further side effects. This is especially bad in the large number of doctors who treat the side effects of various medicines as if they were primary illnesses themselves, as evidence that you need more and further drugs. I’ve seen this with family members many times. Secondly, as tolerance and dependency builds (as it does with almost any drug), the belief that the bad results of not taking the drug for a short period are evidence of the need to continue taking the drug all the time, forever. People know this is dumb with alcohol, narcotics, or cocaine, but they imagine it’s not so with doctor prescribed things, but that’s just false. Not watching these things and keeping them in mind is a path to hell, for everyone involved. (Not that there are loads of other great options in many cases, of course.)
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I don’t know what to say, but I was curious about just how easily these things could be found, so I googled your last name plus “Jonah” and a twitter of yours showed up on the third page. So, yes, it’s very easy to find, unfortunately.
That said, I have found your posts about Ian to be really illuminating, and there’s something reliable, even trustworthy, about them even though I’ve never met you, because I’ve been reading you for so long. It’s kind of like if Tom Brokaw started talking about his kid. Maybe this is what bloggers like you are, in the best cases – you’re the old-style anchormen.
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Here’s another possible issue with regard to blogging or publicizing “the applesauce” more explicitly: don’t forget that these medications have recreational and street value. There’s a potential (for instance in middle school or later) that somebody at school might cultivate your kid in order to get their hands on his meds.
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I used to blog under a pseudonym but now blog publicly. In either venue, though, I was aware of how the window’s closing as kids mature. Both of my children have served as guest bloggers (under their blogging pseudonyms of Eldest and Youngest). And if I discuss them in the blog, it’s with their full knowledge. In fact, both of them have, at some point or another said, “you need to put this on your blog!”
That said, parenting is my own story. Even parenting a special-needs child is still my own story, although it naturally involves youngest. But, honestly? When I’m parent-blogging, it’s more often to blog about dealing with the system or dealing with others. Not so much about the child, herself.
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af – that’s so incredibly nice. Thanks!
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No good answer here, but after years of pseudonymous blogging, this is the first year I’ve blogged under our real names. So far, it’s been a relief.
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So, I rarely comment. One reason being, I have a small child. Another being, I am a little paranoid about the traceability of Everything I Have Ever Said on the Internet by hypothetical future employers, students, etc. (yes, even random comments on blogs). So you’d think that I’d be dead-set against any type of personal blogging, but I’m not. I tend to think that (good) niche blogging is one of the most positive contributions the internet has made to public culture. As a new mom, I’ve gained a ton from reading about others’ experiences, and remained connected to my own culture, which for now is half a world away. Basically I think that talking about kids is fine so long as the author remembers that blogging is publishing – self-publishing, but effectively the same as submitting a piece to the NYT op-ed page or what have you. It’s okay to respectfully reveal details that have some kind of meaning beyond the pedestrian, in controlled quantities. Beyond that, it does make me uncomfortable. As others have said, it’s a fine line. I wouldn’t want the enterprise to shut down, but I think restraint is called for. You do a good job, Laura. Your respect for your kids and their privacy always shines through and I’m sure you’ll figure out how to continue that as they get older.
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Thanks, Tamar. I’m thinking about writing about how Ian embarrasses Jonah. We joke about that all the time at home with Jonah and among family/friends. I think that will be my line. Anything that we already talk about publicly is fair game. Jonah sort of knows that I have a blog, but has never read it. I’ve never told him that I write about him. I think I’ll come clean with him this weekend.
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I have recently started a blog which markets kids books. The idea with this website(blog) is to pull kids in to participate and to make comments. Reading the issues discussed inthis blog has made me aware of the potential pit falls for proceeding with such a blog. Thanks for raising the subject.
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