Parents Should Be Seen and Not Heard

That's an appropriate lead-in for this TIME article about parents inflicting their own sense of cool on their progeny. I found it at the car dealership whilst performing remedial winterization a few days back. The long faces of the other NE Ohio patrons were glued to the gloomy weather reports on the lobby TV and they were probably wondering why I was laughing so hard. (I even had them photocopy it for me which helped to take the sting out of the bill, oy....) Excerpt:

Full disclosure: I have two young sons, and if anything, Pollack gets my experience unsettlingly right. I live in Brooklyn, which along with the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles is the apparent epicenter of the hipster-parent movement. When one of my kids requests the Magnetic Fields on the iPod, I swell with pride as fathers of another era did when their sons completed touchdown passes. And if it's easy to criticize Pollack's preciousness, it's because, like a good, self-aware Gen Xer, he does it for you. "I wonder," he writes, "what Ariel Dorfman, Primo Levi and Arthur Koestler, men who wrote memoirs about actual struggle, would think about the genre of whiny new-parent hand-wringing."

I know it's not the main point here, but this comedic-yet-scary piece segues with my rantings about how bad an idea it is to "live out loud" on the Internet. Putting everything out there in a premature memoir is loosening up parents and future parents to turn their kids into Gerber babies without the revenue stream. They think of their kids as just another part of their life instead of people who should be given some privacy. Ever hear of search engines? The World Wide Web is not a family slide show in the basement, folks!

I've told commenters to my blogs that I'm pretty liberal about what they write in the comments, but start mentioning my kids names there and see how long they stay up. In my view, you can't complain about child molestors if your blog readers know their names and ages and where they're going to school. People need to learn how to discuss things in general terms and save the rest for private email discussions.

In saying this I realize that I am busting on some of the blogs I read and enjoy and I don't mean to offend them or suggest that they don't care about their children's safety. But if I can figure out how to search using target terms to identify virtually public family photo albums and weblogs, then families who put all this personal stuff out there must consider that this trend might be the greatest thing to happen to child predation in a great while. Fortunately the new version of blogger has a feature to configure a blog to be "by invitation only" and require a login; that is what I would suggest for family use.