Nina In New York: My Sharent Shame

A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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By Nina Pajak

Sharenting, noun ['SHer·ənt/]. The act in which a parent uses social media to communicate details about his or her child or children, including photographs, anecdotes, and requests for parenting advice. Also includes "mommy blogging." See also: fool, idiot, dummy, rube.

See also: everyone you know (of a certain age). But this practice isn't just annoying or tiresome to those who have had the misfortune to agree to be our friends online—it could be downright dangerous. A new study out of the University of Michigan has found that the act of "sharenting" is extremely widespread and could lead to privacy breeches for our kids. According to The Washington Post:

. . . parents may be divulging not just their struggles in raising their children, but also their child's physical location and habits, which can be fodder for predators. And perhaps most saliently, parents who think they fully understand how to protect themselves and their children online often don't, and they accidentally open the door for inadvertent disclosures. The ever-changing landscape of online privacy means that what you think you're protecting today might be "fair game" tomorrow.

This may sound quite obvious now, but it came as a bit of a mind-blower to me. As crazy as it seems to some, parents today don't even think twice before posting photos and stories online, and we very often tag said posts with location information or include it in the caption. "Enjoying the sun out at ___ Park!" "Brooklyn baby!" "Play date at the ___ library!" "I HAVE A CUTE BABY LOOK AT ME WE'RE SO FUN (on the Upper West Side)!!!!!!" Everyone does it. I mean, everyone. Smart people, dumb people, young people, not-so-young people. Even grandparents are getting in on the act. We all do our best to keep our various profiles restricted to being viewable only by those we know, but how well do we really know the people we "know," ya know? And even if some have trimmed the friend list to only those they trust, had it occurred to anyone that laws and policies could change and render our efforts to maintain privacy completely worthless? I mean, call me naive, but the thought hadn't even crossed my mind.

On top of security, the embarrassment/consent factor is another that was mentioned in the study and which is worth some extra thought. There are offenders within the accepted "sharent" community, and anyone on social media has seen them. They are the people who write with impunity about diaper disasters and vomit situations and share photos of naked newborn babies covered in vernix. They post long, personal stories about gripes with other parents or the excruciating details of potty training a toddler. This has always struck me as a poor idea, mostly because I thought of it as being a bad look for the parent poster. I've seen the placentas of people I haven't actually seen in person in twenty years. But this study adds a whole new dimension to this sort of misbehavior. If you post a pic of your kid in the bathtub now, you realize that ish will be up there until the year twelve billion. You may as well carve a copy of it next to Mount Rushmore, because that would probably be a less permanent way to go. Of course, if you did that, it would be amazingly impressive and you'd naturally need to Instagram that puppy right away, in which case you're back where you started.

Here's the crux of it, as I see it: sharenting is about us, the parents. We're proud of our kids and want to show them off like all parents have since Musafa held Simba over that cliff, and that's great. But the need to do this online has very little to do with our kids, and much more to do with our own egos and desires. We need help, we need support, we need our friends to see how good we are at producing adorable offspring and living adorable lives. It's not like we can post enviable vacation pics or arty shots of martinis anymore. Our children are our lives, and we exist in a society in which distilling our lives for public consumption is the norm. I'm not speaking from a place of judgment here—I'm just as guilty as the next mother on Facebook. But this has gotten me thinking.

Sure, sometimes the need for help or the desire to share a funny story or photograph are pure and worthy, and it's hard to see how that's so bad. And the advent of mommy blogging has led to a lot of conversations that have opened us up and made formerly taboo topics ones that are once again safe to discuss. Women actually want to help one another, believe it or not. There's real merit in that, and I think it would be a travesty if that came to an end. But if we're being honest, the important stuff is a slim percentage of what's out there, compared the self-indulgent stuff. So I'm challenging myself to take a step back and rely a bit more on the old ways. Consult my actual friends for help. Bore people with photographs when they come over for dinner. Call my mom and tell her what my hilariously cute kid said to the waitress at lunch. I'll just take a breath and be okay with that level of publicity. I'm not saying it will be easy. I'm getting anxious just thinking of following my own advice, but it seems like the right thing to do, or at least attempt to do. Sure, our parents messed us up in myriad ways, but at least they kept those pictures of us pooping in the big kid toilet safely in a photo album. And the only people who know those stories about our first playground kiss/public nudity/ballet recital debaucle are our own weird relatives. I'm going to do some preemptive damage control now, before I give my daughter more reasons to resent me than she'll already naturally have.

We'll see how long this lasts.

Nina Pajak is a writer living with her husband, daughter and dog in Queens. Connect with Nina on Twitter!