Consider the kid.

I have a number of friends from high school who have since reproduced. Facebook is fun for this sort of thing, you can compliment the cuteness of the child with no danger of actually having to hold or entertain said child. Oh sure I’ve met a few off spring. Emma’s baby was only 6 weeks old at the 10 year reunion, and Joanne has brought her boys into the library a time or two. All good.

Thankfully, my friends are the kind who seem to understand that while people might want a peek at the kids, we don’t want the entire story.  Most have at least a few pics of the kids at the zoo, playing in the mud, reading with grandma or first days at kinder or school. Very cute! We don’t want to see pictures of bathtime, potty training, full nappies etc. Frankly, the first person on my friends list who posts a photo of their naked child will be removed from my friendslist post haste.

There’s a couple of things about posting pics of your naked kids online. The first, and maybe biggest issue, is that once you upload that photo you lose all control over it.  You don’t know how many copies are out there, you don’t know who has it or who is passing it on. Certainly you can hope that your friends are not a concern, but you don’t know.  This doesn’t just apply to facebook, in fact you could say it applies more to blogs, but the fact is it’s just NOT a good idea to upload pics of your kids naked.

A friend of mine once directed me to a blog belonging to a friend of hers (and mother of her daughters best friend). Amongst the holiday snaps was one of their 8 year old in the shower. Seriously. Out there, on blogger. I left a comment suggesting they remove it, and found my comment deleted and a note added to the blog saying “Damn commenters think they know it all, don’t you tell me how to raise my child!”.  I ended up reporting the image to Google and having it deleted because, hello? If I can see your blog, anyone can. Locked down accounts are one thing, but public accounts are so incredibly not the place to post these pics.

The other problem is that you’re basically removing your kids right to privacy. If someone took a photo of you on the toilet and posted it to facebook or anywhere else you’d probably be furious, so why is it apparently okay to post pics of kids like this? I understand potty training is a very exciting step in parenting, and sharing it with your friends is understandable, however no one needs pictures. In my day a photo was probably taken maybe once a week, these days you can upload 400 almost identical photos to Facebook in less time than it takes to get a roll of film developed. It just seems to me that some of those photos would be better left unshared with the general population.

I’m not knocking parents, I seriously DO understand that having kids is a fantastic thing (for most people) and wanting to show them off is natural, but on behalf of your kids – it’s not cute splashing their naked butts all over the internet.  Edit your photos before they go up, and take out the ones that you wouldn’t want posted of yourself.

PS. For more scary parentstuff on Facebook, I quite like STFUparents. That’s what inspired this very effing profound post.