Like countless parents across the globe, I have a kid, and I have a blog. My kid has a gender, name, and unique personality. This kid does wonderful things I’d love to share with the world. When this child drives me crazy, the siren song of the online audience beckons me to vent. Everybody else is “mommy blogging,” so why shouldn’t I?
I don’t blog about my kid, because I think it’s unethical. I’m not trying to create a new hurdle that women must overcome to achieve the moral high ground of the “good mother.” I just can’t imagine ever being okay with my mother having blogged about my life, in all its shame and glory.
Becoming a parent doesn’t give you the right to offer the experiences of your child up for the consumption of the entire internet. There’s a wide spectrum in the presentation of children online. From the discomforting videos of kids under the influence of laughing gas, to the seemingly benign blow-by-blow account of Child X’s first day at school, countless permutations of putting a child online exist.
I realize deeming “mommy blogging” unethical is a pretty broad statement. Can there be situations in which blogging about your child is okay? Parents like Shannon Des Roches Rosa of
Squidalicious, who blogs about her autistic son Leo, are raising awareness about a unique aspect of a child in a way that provides an invaluable resource to parents and the child-free. But even in these isolated cases, it’s tough to decide if the benefit for others justifies sharing the life of a child, when that child isn’t given a choice.
Increasingly, parents are getting paid, via sponsorships and ads from companies, to share their children’s lives online. New ways to monetize parenting, and by extension, the lives of children, are invented every day. Even before birth, parents-to-be blog their pregnancies for a profit, as in the case of the
“sponsored” nursery furniture provided to Jordan Reid of
Ramshackle Glam in exchange for publicity on her blog.
