Social media has changed how we parent. Let’s face it- we compare, we share (sometimes overshare), even brag about our kids.
When I was 20, I found out I was pregnant for the first time. I had minimal experience with kids – I’d barely held a baby! At the end of my fourth semester of college (literally right before finals week), I gave birth to my oldest son, Noah. Since then, he and my two other children have been the light of my life. Parenting was never something I thought I’d be good at, and I still struggle with so many aspects of it – but here I am, with a kid that has competed on the Rubik’s cube at a national level, survived a harrowing near-death experience, plays drums and guitar and piano BY EAR, takes advanced classes … and that’s just my oldest! I’m brimming with pride, if you haven’t noticed. This, however, is my current conundrum.
Noah is 14 now, and starting high school this fall. Recently I changed my profile picture on Facebook to one of us together, and he rolled his eyes and asked me to switch it back to something else because he didn’t like how his hair looked in the picture. The picture was taken shortly after his baptism, and his still-wet hair stuck out in every which direction. Then there was me, grinning ear-to-ear because my boy wanted to get baptized.
He doesn’t like having his picture taken to begin with, and he definitely doesn’t like me sharing it with a few hundred people on Facebook (most of whom he doesn’t know well, or personally). I’ve since changed the picture, but I did recently share one of him kissing his little sister when she was a few months old (cue the additional eye-rolls from both of them).
We did have a conversation about it, though, and I realize his perspective. He’s his own individual. When I share pictures of him or videos of him playing music or solving a cube, I’m sharing it like it’s my property to share–and it simply isn’t anymore. When he was two and I shared the picture of a finger up each nose, he didn’t understand that it’d be viewable by hundreds of people. Now that he’s old enough to understand what social media is and who sees it, he’s definitely not thrilled with most of the things that I have shared because I thought they were cute at the time. (He did, however, do a 10-year-update to the picture with a finger in each nose, and that 10-year comparison picture is alive and well floating around on the internet somewhere).
I explained to him that he’s my greatest accomplishment – this baby that I carried and gave birth to has grown to do so many great things already. But I do see now that he’s a young adult, and he has the ability to share his own accomplishments if he wishes (although he doesn’t have social media yet). These accomplishments are not MY accomplishments, but his. I can’t take credit for the amazing things my kids do – just for raising them to be kind, hard-working children. I try to imagine how I’d feel if when I was a teenager, going through the most awkward phases of my life, if my mother showed her friends and family ridiculous pictures of me. This makes me glad that social media wasn’t around when I was in high school – and makes me understand why my son has asked me to clear things with him before posting anything.
I will, from now on, respect his privacy and his autonomy in regards to sharing. Well, except for this post. #Sorrynotsorry.
