My husband and I have been discussing this at length recently, given our impending change in circumstances from a married couple to parents in just about three months (!). What level of information will we give out about our new bundle of joy? The gender? The name? The details of the birth?
We want to keep the baby as private as possible to protect our child. We won't be revealing the name in public, or linking to a newly bought domain name just for Baby Ash. Sure, we'll tell you if the bundle was pink or blue and maybe post a single picture from the hospital (babies faces tend to change rather rapidly, we're told), but apart from that I'll be keeping mum (aren't I punny?) on his/her details.
Why? Call me an over-protective mother if you like, but there are some things that I believe don't belong in the public domain unless both parents agree that it's in the best interests of the child. My husband does not operate much in the online space - he's as clued up as an actuary can be about search engine marketing, but prefers to keep his life, family and thoughts private. On the other side of the spectrum, I post about a lot of things my husband wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, but we meet in the middle when it comes to our kid.
There are a couple of people we've taken a cue from when it comes to posting online about the baby. We're nowhere near as well known as them online, but they've given us three different approaches to acknowledging their children in their public blogs.
First, there's Michele Henry from the Toronto Star, who blogged about her pregnancy and is now blogging about her son on Pregnant Pause. She mentions him by name frequently (although I suspect the kid has a different last name from her, otherwise he'd be Hudson Henry...) and has posted a photo of him on the blog (he's more than adorable, by the way). The blog is informative, hilarious and an extremely good read for anyone (I've been reading it throughout my pregnancy), but I wonder if we'd be as comfortable as she is posting photos and details of the baby online.
In the middle part of the spectrum, there's Hadassah Milner. A warmer, kinder person you couldn't find, and she's been documenting her life for a while, including her four boys and her husband on In the Pink. While she frequently acknowledges the men in her life, she uses pseudonyms and grazes over their neighborhood (Montreal is a pretty big city) in an effort to share as much of her life as she's comfortable with. Crucially, she never posts photos of her kids on her blog - something I agree with (while acknowledging that everyone has their own personal opinion on).
At the very private part of the spectrum, there's Barry Schwartz - a guru in the SEM industry and new father to a baby girl, blogging on Cartoon Barry. That's all you know about the kid, apart from references to her gender and when she was born, and a photo of him holding a bundle with hair at the hospital. This is the route we think we'll be going with - people know we have a son or daughter, when he or she was born, but no names, no pseudonyms and no photos apart from the requisite hospital shot.
We'd prefer to use walled gardens, like Facebook or iWeb, which we can password protect for our baby. This isn't to say we don't want to show the world just how gorgeous and amazing he or she is, we just want to control how much exposure the baby has until our kid is 18 and can decide for himself or herself just how much information they want publicized about themselves online.
The pictures here are of two people (myself at the top, my husband on the left) who are well over the age of 18 now, and who have consented to publish some information and photographs of themselves online. We want to give the same decision to our child about how they want to be known online, and inform them of the potential dangers of exposing yourself to people who might not have the greatest social filter in what is and isn't appropriate.
What do you think? What is your advice to two new parents? Are we being too overprotective of the baby, jumping to conclusions about nasties on the web and wanting to keep the child private? Or, are we doing the right thing by controlling the exposure our child has to the outside world before he or she can make an informed decision themselves?
