Is This Tantrum on the Record?The ground rules for writing about your kids.

My 8-year-old son, Eli, recently tried to Google himself. We'd been looking up facts, and he liked the idea of finding himself out there in the ether. When nothing about him came up, he was disappointed. I was relieved. I don't hide the pieces I write from him, but I don't really want him to think of himself as a Google hit magnet, either. It's one thing to know your mother writes about you sometimes; it's another to revel in your own notoriety, however small.

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Eli's aborted search prompted me to think about a question that has poked at me periodically since I started writing this column two years ago: What are the ground rules for writing about your kids, especially on the Internet, with its freewheeling meanness and permanent archive? Will my kids be embarrassed by these pieces at a certain point? Will a bully or (perhaps less plausibly) a college admissions office one day use the foibles I've revealed against them? Or will the kids just decide they'd have preferred to speak for themselves? Is there a point at which any good parent should stop?

When I write about my kids, I'm not only thinking as their mother. I'm also thinking as a professional writer. Those two identities don't always align—they just don't. I like to think that when there's tension, I err on the side of protecting my kids' interests, steering clear of any material that's too embarrassing or private. But I don't trust myself to be the arbiter. My husband vets my pieces when our kids appear in them, and he objects when he thinks I'm exposing one of their faults. (He hacked away at this piece about our younger son's nail-biting habit and now reminds me of this news flash: The nails are in recovery.) Ruth Marcus, who occasionally writes about her daughters in her op-ed column for the Washington Post, has the same rule. "It really matters what your husband thinks," she says. "It's much more important to your life, happiness, and marriage to make those cuts."

Some writers believe their kids are fair game only when they're small. Steve Almond blogged about his daughter Josie for Babble until she was a year and a half and then stopped. "The blog medium has a certain kind of immediacy, and a reciprocal surrendering of privacy, that we don't want in our lives forever—and that Josie may not want, either," he explained. Maybe it's better to confine yourself to events kids can't remember themselves—their "prehistory," as Michael Lewis, author of the hilarious Slate column "Dad Again," puts it. He planned from the start to write only about the first few sleepless, chaotic months after each of his kids was born. Lewis says he reserves the right to break his rule if the material is irresistible, and since his oldest daughter was 7 when his third child was born, he sort of did. But it all seemed harmless enough, and Lewis says (with comedic honesty) that writing about his kids gave him a great incentive to be a better father, because he was watching closely.

But should we all close our laptops once our kids learn to talk? As a reader, I would hate to give up the pleasures of the late Marjorie Williams' writing about her elementary-school-age children, for example, or Sandra Tsing Loh endlessly fretting over her kids' schooling in the Atlantic. But as kids grow, so does the potential for embarrassment and violations of their privacy. Heather Armstrong, creator of the powerhouse motherhood blog Dooce, lost her day job as a Web designer over her posts (which included making fun of working at a startup). She has since taken heat for the intense intimacy of her writing about her family and for posting pictures of her daughter on her site. She says that while the voice of her blog hasn't changed, her "boundaries have shifted and shifted" as her daughter moved from babyhood to preschool age. Her daughter's foibles are less often fodder for her writing, she says, and the real subject is now Armstrong herself. "I look at it as a universal story of coming home with a child for the first time and confronting reality," she says.

Armstrong's approach is a common one among parent-scribes: You caricature your kid a bit, picking out his funny or more outrageous habits, but your parenting struggles are the real subject, and you're the butt of all the jokes. (And your spouse is the font of all wisdom, on the theory that flattery helps.) You mine your kid for material, but you tell yourself that certain categories of behavior are off-limits. That last rule I got from Neal Pollack, the author of Alternadad. His young son Elijah's bathroom habits are fair game for Pollack's blog, but his son's discovery of his sexuality, Pollack says, is not.

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor and an editor of DoubleX.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

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