Children and Privacy

I mentioned that recently we went to see our friend's newborn baby. We took some photos with them and of course the baby. I so badly wanted to share them on instagram or facebook. For what reason? I guess I thought it'd be fun to share with the world that our friends had a baby and we got to meet him. This probably sounds like a silly reason to share someone else's newborn baby, I now realize.

When I got home from the visit, I loaded up my best instagram filters and hit send, just quick enough to get a message from the parents saying "hey would you mind not uploading any pictures to facebook." I never realized that this may be something I should have been asking about and of course, I immediately took  them off and apologized. I felt awful though they were let me off the hook fairly easily.

What struck me about this though was that I honestly felt bad, I felt like I should have known better than to basically expose their new baby to the world without first asking them if it was ok. Is it ok for people to take pictures of your children and post them on the internet for the world to see? It's a loaded question if you ask me and one that taught me a valuable lesson. My friends were not upset that I had done it, they just simply asked me to not to; I gave myself a harder time than they did honestly.

It still stands that I didnt think about it from their perspective. Neither of them are big on facebook (something I didnt take into consideration) and besides the million reasons to not share your private life on public, rather loosely controlled, social media. More so than those two reasons is the fact that people should ask parents before doing anything that can potentially affect (negatively or positively) their child. Something as simple and innocent as taking a picture can go against some basic believe the parent has set forth in their manual on how-i'm-going-to-raise-this-baby and who is anyone to say otherwise?

So this long winded post is about me thinking about the things that I will want to put my foot down on and ultimately trying to figure out the best way to keep friends, family and relatives from breaching those limits. I don't think I'll have an issue with jelly bean being on facebook, he can be famous starting on day one. Perhaps the biggest thing for me will be what people give him to eat (later on of course) and I think it stems from many years of me struggling with weight and always saying that the biggest gift I'll give my child is to teach them to eat a healthy and nutritious diet (but that's a loaded post for a different day).

As I'm writing this I remember that Tiff and I are going to Disney in May to take our nieces for their birthday and Tiff will be 6 months pregnant. I was a little concerned with people wanting to touch her tummy. by people i mean strangers trying to pet her belly. I  am therefore going to get her this shirt to wear in the parks: