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Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
My wife, “Selena,” and I had our first child, “Opal,” four months ago, and we have been at odds over something that happens constantly.
We can’t agree on whether or not to post pictures of her on social media. Selena posts about Opal all the time, all over the place. I get that she enjoys showing off our daughter and how beautiful and wonderful she is, but I don’t think what she is doing is appropriate. She’s robbing Opal of her privacy before she’s even had the chance to have any! If social media had been around when I was a baby and child, I wouldn’t be happy knowing that everything about me had been displayed for the world to see. But Selena says what she is doing is “normal and expected,” and I just need to get over it. Who’s right?
—Is Privacy Passé?
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Dear Passé,
Oh, dear. I wish you and Selena had had this conversation and come to an agreement before Opal was born. It’s an important conversation to have, as you can now see, since people differ so drastically in how they think about this. (Note to expectant parents: Put this on the list, if you haven’t already, of decisions to make—at least provisionally, because things can change—ahead of time. It belongs right up there with cloth versus disposable diapers, breast/bottle-feeding, theoretical co-sleeping and keeping-to-a-schedule philosophies, and how and when extended family will be involved in the early months.) I imagine that you and Selena have always had differing relationships with social media, so you might have predicted that this would be a conflict. Still, although you can’t go back in time, you can certainly work this out going forward.
Because your positions are so diametrically opposed, this isn’t going to be easy. But Selena isn’t leaving any room for your feelings when she insists that posting photos of your baby is, essentially, what everyone does (it isn’t—and even if it were, it would be wrong for her to make a unilateral decision about it when Opal’s other parent is utterly opposed). And you seem to be paying no more than lip service to understanding how Selena feels. (If she has been putting everything about her life online, without regard to her own privacy, for years—as I can only guess she has—it’s not going to be easy to persuade her to stop now.)
One would think there would be no compromising on this, and perhaps what I’m about to suggest will satisfy neither of you, but I can tell you that my grandson’s parents have worked out a way to share and show off his beauty (his perfection! [Grandmama said modestly]) without compromising all of his privacy. While this solution isn’t itself perfect (I confess that even I—wholeheartedly on your side of this debate—am just a little sad that I can’t show him off to all the world on my social media, where I post regularly about everything from my dance adventures to my fabulous manicures), it goes a long way toward making everyone feel OK. Their solution is twofold:
Their Instagram accounts are private, and before their child was born, they both combed through their followers and jettisoned everyone but people they are truly and currently friends with in real life. Even then, they don’t post close-up photos of the baby there: His face is never fully visible.
They opened a TinyBeans account—a limited social media app that exists specifically for this purpose, and is invisible to search engines and targeted ad trackers—and invited only the people they are closest to and who will forever be a part of their child’s life. No one else has access. They post new pictures and videos there every day, and those of us who have the privilege of access to their uploads can heart and comment on them to our joy-swollen hearts’ content.
Will some version of this work for your family? I hope so. It would be a pity to spend the next decade arguing about this. I wish you luck, and every happiness.
—Michelle
More Advice From Slate
My husband and I are two dads, raising our first newborn, who is just 3 weeks old. Prior to having our child, we talked through just about everything, and were pleased to see we were almost entirely on the same page about most things: positive parenting, vaccinations, schooling, finances, our faith tradition, and the like. So I was fairly surprised to find that something we didn’t talk about has emerged as a serious problem.