Pregnancy

[BrandNewMommy]

I am expecting my first child, I am on Facebook, and I have a Twitter account. I consider myself fairly social-media savvy. However, this article still had me a bit dumbfounded! Facebook is making it possible for people to add their unborn child to the friends and family section of their profile - you can even add a photo!

Here is a link to the article: Facebook Lets Expectant Parents Add Unborn Children to Friends & Family

This seems a bit crazy to me, but I don't know - is it the new norm for a child to have a large internet presence before they are even talking?! What kind of internet presence do your young kids have? Did they have them even before they were born?

[MsMacy2]

Wow! There are probably some newborns who are more active than me on Facebook! 

My kids' internet presence is fairly limited to just some photo sharing I do with close friends and members of my family. I use Picasa web albums. I choose to keep them private and just share them with certain people. I sometimes post photos on facebook, much more rarely, but have many friends that do regularly. I think as long as you are conscious of privacy settings, this is a good way to share photos with those you are close to.

This is certainly an interesting trend!

[RebeccaAnderson]

My husband purchased a domain name and is building our own family blog/website about our upcoming addition to our family.  It helps that he's a Web designer/developer, but he decided he didn't want any of the social networks to 'own' our content or dictate what we can post, how long it's available, etc.

[BrandNewMommy]

I have friends who have all been sure to secure gmail accounts for their unborn children before birth! Amazing how technically tuned-in our world is.

[ktcprescott]

We are online quite a bit - facebook, email and we have a family website I put together - but our children (the oldest 2 are 6)  have no internet exposure.  They will be plugged in, so much more than we could ever imagine, for the rest of their lives.  Right now my husband and I do not see the value in getting them online right now.

[RebeccaAnderson]

I do not plan to create an email or social network profile for my child.  Most of those portals require the individual to be over age 13; what kind of message does that send my child about honesty if I lie about her age in order to set her up w/ a username/profile?

[JacksMom]

Well the FB feature is just really dopey, but this topic of kids and digital footprint is a topic that is so complicated in many ways and simple in others.

The simple part >Digital Footprint. What you put out there, never ever really goes away. We need to teach our children about how our values about personal boundaries as well as personal safety and security extend to social media too.   Everyone should read Facebook's privacy laws really closely. Facebook owns the content published on their site.  I recall a year or so ago that I saw friends posting sonograms of their unborn children and I just don't get it.

The complicated part > We can't completely shield our children from technology. It wouldn't serve them well in this digital age but how do we teach them balance?

We can decide what is an appropriate age to start using some of these technologies and teach them how to use them wisely. And we have to model the kind of behavior we want our children to exhibit. 

I am also seeing "responsible use of technologies" workshops showing up in grade school curriculums and they are geared towards both parents and children. There is also an interesting article on an NPR related web site from a parent/  journalist on why she thinks kids should be encouraged to blog (but do so safely and responsibly). Here article is on the  KQED  Mind Shift Blog entitled Six Reasons Why Kids Should Know How to Blog

JacksMom