I completely support this and I intend to do something similar for my kids. Anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them.
I’d been printing off photos in various sizes (wallet to 8x10) and sending them along to my parents/grandparents - but it does take more effort to follow through. I do post photos of kids to a private account but maybe once or twice a year.
Ironically she switched to an android phone because she had too many photos I think and was always running out of storage. Of course the new phone had no photos, and her old phone would have been just fine if she was happy to start over too.
As soon as anyone visits their house, they immediately see recent pics of the kid.
It's been a big winner.
1. We regularly share photos through private photo albums. This allows her the same exposure to photos of the grandchildren as social media would.
2. We made it clear she's free to share photos with people via direct text messages. It adds a bit of friction and keeps the photos relatively private.
3. Explained that it's the right of our children to control their presence online (with some parental assistance). They aren't old enough to do that so until then, please don't share.
4. Emphasize many times that it's about protecting and empowering our kids. It's not about preventing her from showing off her grandchildren.
That said, I expect to be downvoted into oblivion.
> anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them
I don’t know, I mean a lot of parents tell themselves they are doing a lot of things, me included, that they have no control over in reality.
I sympathize with the parents who try to turn their kids into celebs. We made this celebs-rule world.
For every one person, kids or adults, who feels exposed online, there are 99,999 more toiling away in obscurity.
On this forum probably the children are going to be fine. Their parents are rich enough that even if you are not a nepo baby in the strictest sense of having a famous last name, they will be fine. They can do whatever and they will be fine.
If you’re some random person, obscurity is crushing. If you’re not a nepo baby and you have no above average cognitive gifts, which is 80% of people, getting some attention can change your life.
Most people have the level of drama, the stupidity, the vapidity of influencers. You just didn’t know that until TikTok. TikTok doesn’t cause this, it doesn’t even exacerbate it.
And social media DOES benefit them, it IS rational. It’s the textbook definition of elitism to tell people who found a little fame and like it that they aren’t like the smart kids or true blue nepo babies, who can be offline and still thrive in this world.
I agree with the first but not the second. I think "social media" is a net good, by far. At the same time, there are negative effects: one is that it creates a constant audience for whatever stupid thing the Influencer wants to do or say, which is an incentive for them to say or do stupid things.
To me this feels like the cell phone discussions of the mid-90s (people who refused to get cell phones because they didn't want to be constantly connected). Eventually almost everyone realizes that the world has changed. Unless you keep your kid from interacting with the world, there will eventually be little you can do to prevent them from having some online presence.
> In contrast, as my kids play sports, most of their peers are trying to build their brand -- as NIL deals are almost directly correlated with your social media popularity.
If the kid wants to "build their brand" with parental permission, that's one thing. It's another thing entirely for random people unrelated to the kid to record them and put it online.
Aside: I wonder if it’s going to be a different experience for kids in the generations that have thousands of photos from their childhood available to them. As someone interested in knowing more about my past, I can’t help but to think it will be a good thing to know all the cool stuff they did, whether they remember it or not.
- Hey, thanks for inviting me to your wife's birthday party. I had a lot of fun. But could you please remove my pic from your Facebook post?
- Why did you show up in the first place? OR You're in a lot of the pics; I can't remove all of them. OR Are you too good to be seen in pics with my wife and her friends? OR Are you hiding from the law? Did you murder someone?
I feel like photos are nothing special, a lot of the friction/anger people are just responding to perceiving an accusatory tone. (But I'm willing to let the odd photo slide, so maybe dropping the worst arguments made life easier)
Weird and potentially dangerous as well. When I was a child, adults warned us about "stranger danger", but now parents advertise their children to potentially dangerous strangers…
What I find truly weird is how many people there are that don't find it "weird" or at all concerning in any way to openly share such photos so freely.
The typical security precautions are very hard to maintain in real life. e.g. should your child win some spelling context or a regional crosscountry run or whatever, how would you explain to them that their name and photo are not appearing among all the other winners?
I'm reminded of the scene from Jurassic park, where nedry is chastised for using a man's name during a clandestine meeting at a restaurant, and nedry yells out "Dodgson! We got Dodgson here! See, nobody cares!"
Same. There is something unsettling about willfully pushing kids into the attention economy, it can't be good for mental health long term and definitely assists nefarious actors build permanent profiles of them.
As long as everyone has an Apple device it just works, and I assume there is probably a similar way to do this with a Google photo album (although I will say, I think Google is way more likely to do something sketchy like default everything to public or make it easy for someone to publish content accidentally).