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Kids and social media: do we post too much online?

Alison and Nick Hallworth with daughters Tully and Cassidy

IN FAVOUR

ALISON HALLWORTH embraces Facebook and other social media as a way to share life with her daughters with family and friends.

My husband, Nick, and I have two beautiful daughters, Tully, three, and Cassidy, 20 months. Nick’s family lives in the UK, as do a number of our friends and wider family. Tully’s godmother is a New Zealander and Cassidy’s is based in San Francisco. We have people we adore, and who adore us, in countries all over the world and this means the internet is the best thing ever when it comes to keeping in touch. Social media enables us to remain engaged and in regular contact in an easy, practical way.

Nick and I are both social media tragics, fully engaged in our passions: family, music, writing, activism and news, not only in real life, but online, too. Primarily we – okay, I – share pictures of our girls via Facebook. Our privacy settings are pretty tight and all our Facebook ‘friends’ are people we know. As well as photos, I share funny things the girls say, milestones and the moments that make my heart grow so big I feel it might burst. Our daughters are awesome and it gives me great joy that they are part of the lives of all the people who love them, wherever they are, on a regular basis.

I think that’s an amazing blessing. In addition to that, as a blogger I sometimes write posts about my kids, and also share via Instagram and Twitter. Part of this came about through my experience of postnatal depression. When I started sharing my experience, others shared theirs, so sometimes I write about my girls because they are part of my story.

Tully and Cassidy use apps and like to look at pictures shared by our family and friends on social media. They see their cousins online more than they see them in real life – that’s just the way our world works. We believe having a solid understanding of social media, and seeing us use it in a thoughtful and integrated manner in our everyday lives, is much more educational than keeping it off limits.

I wonder what the girls will think about my social media use when they’re older, but I’m confident that as much as I demonstrate safe ways of crossing the road, I also demonstrate safe online behaviour. I want to encourage an openness to share our individual stories, which is an act as old as time. It’s just the way we record them that has changed.


Teaki Page with her five children

AGAINST

TEAKI PAGE prefers not to share too much online about Shaneen, 15, Ethan, 13, Jordan, eight, Aiden, three, and Jenna, 19 months.

I remember the early days of Facebook as a lifeline when I was a single mum. It gave me a life outside of children and there was always someone to vent to when I’d had a hard day or was facing a challenge. There was something about that little red notification signal that was comforting when I was lonely or bored.

Fast forward a few years and my usage has changed dramatically. After many years of watching other mothers battle it out on social media, I’ve realised sharing too much definitely has its downfalls. Now I use social media to boost my profile as an author, but as a mother I now realise my posts about parenting will always paint one of two pictures: if they’re negative I’ll appear as a whinger, and if they’re positive I’ll appear as a fake or a bragger. Neither is an image I want to project.

My concern is that those posts I wrote years ago could come back to haunt me, or worse, my children. It bothers me that I could’ve typed something awful in the heat of the moment and that it may have struck a chord with someone, somewhere, who’s never forgotten it. What happens if that someone has a child the same age as one of mine and one day says, “Oh yeah, I remember her, she wanted to run away from her kids”? I also
worry that my children might find something I wrote long ago and be hurt or upset by it.

That’s not to say I don’t ever post, or tweet, about parenting. I do, but for the most part it’s about how we should back off each other. It concerns me that mothers are feeling more pressure to be perfect than ever before.

While we know on a logical level people only show us what they want us to see, it worries me that on a deeper, subconscious level we may fall into the trap of thinking we’re the only parents who aren’t perfect – the only ones who yell at our kids, or stick them in front of the TV when we could find a better way to entertain them.

I don’t want to question everything I do as a parent for fear that people on social media will judge me, and I certainly don’t want to read a post that criticises a parent and think “Was that aimed at me?”. Who needs the anxiety?

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