Is This Tantrum on the Record?The ground rules for writing about your kids.
Posted Thursday, June 5, 2008, at 7:04 AM ET
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StumbleUponThough Pollack has set certain restrictions for himself, he mostly saw my hand-wringing over the ethics of writing about my kids as the result of "the same narcissistic impulse that causes us to write about our families in the first place. Because most people don't care what we write. This isn't The Osbournes. It's not like 50 million people a week are watching." I imagine he has to see it like that to keep blogging after Gawker went after Elijah last year. Here's the spat—Pollack wrote about his son's excellent taste in fine cheese, leading Gawker to ask, "When is it okay to hate a 4-year-old?" I'm not sure I could have handled it. For me, this is the problem with the argument that our online musings about our kids don't really matter. We make them the potential victims of ruthless (if funny) harangues—harangues that, thanks to the bottomless Internet, might be around for a long, long time. Pollack says about his Gawker fight, "At the time it happened, I didn't have the financial option to stop. So instead I had to stage a self-righteous snit." Honest, and also a little heartbreaking.
In the moment, especially if they're young, kids tend to like the attention of being their parents' writing subject, according to the writers I talked to. "They, of course, love it. They love it too much," Michael Lewis says of his daughters. Eli and Simon may be heading in that direction, too. But are our kids pleased because they think we want them to feel that way? Or because they don't know how bothered they'll feel later?
I asked Rosa Brooks, who contributes to Slate's "XX Factor," to weigh in on this. Her mother, Barbara Ehrenreich, sometimes wrote about Brooks and her brother as stock "my children" characters in a column for Time magazine. When she became a teenager, Brooks remembers feeling mixed about her mother's articles. "I was proud of her and slightly tickled to be included, and also of course as an adolescent wildly irritated." She doesn't feel scarred, though, and now she sometimes writes about her own kids in her column for the Los Angeles Times. For now, her ground rules are to never mention her young kids by name or allow any pictures of them to be published. When they get older, Brooks has promised herself that she'll hand veto power over to them.
Which isn't to say that a kid's judgment should stand in for his parents'. In April, my colleague Bonnie Goldstein wrote lovingly and also revealingly for Slate about her son Nate's trials trying to make it on his own after dropping out of college for a time. He's 19, so his consent means a lot more than my 8-year-old's. Nate said yes to the piece before his mother submitted it. He has no regrets. But his reasoning took me aback: He told me he couldn't really imagine a piece of writing that could violate his privacy. Is that adolescence talking, or will he change his mind someday?
In my paranoid moments, I worry that by writing about our kids, we're encouraging them to loosen or lose their own boundaries. Then someday, they'll hurtle toward the vortex that produced the awful, self-destructive oversharing of former Gawker editor Emily Gould, as she related at such length in the New York Times Magazine recently.
I'd like to think, like many of the writers I talked to, that the small revelations I offer about my kids are harmless. But what if they're not? A few weeks ago, after writing about my 5-year-old son's frustrated search for his pre-soccer snacks, I got an e-mail from reader Marc Naimark. "I was just about to post the following to the Fray," he wrote. "Fortunately Emily uses her maiden name. Otherwise she is being cruel level 9 on a scale of 10 to her kid. Stuff on the internet lasts forever, and I'm not sure that 16-year-old Simon is going to be pleased for his friends to learn that he used to scream bloody murder about not finding his friggin' veggie sticks." This gave me pause. Maybe I need new ground rules. Or maybe at some point it will be time to stop. Except not just yet. Last night, I was talking with Eli about his misadventures at recess and thought, ah, good topic.
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Remarks from the Fray:
The thing that would stop me from writing on the Internet about my child's tantrums, sleep problems, picky eating, manners, etc., is the hatred and contempt that many readers post in response to such writing.
I'm thinking of Emily B's recent essay about her son freaking out over veggie sticks. There were diagnoses of her son as mentally ill, rotten, and evil, with recommendations that she should smack his head or slap his face or knock him around.
I would not create a situation where my child might read complete strangers' rage and violent fantasies aimed at him/her -- by name! (How would an adult feel if s/he found a website where strangers were urging someone to beat or assault him/her??) THAT is what I think would traumatize a kid... the proof that "there are people out there who enjoy thinking about me being hurt" ... more than the embarrassment of mommy telling "funny" stories about modern parenting.
--GentleReader
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This article is written from the perspective of professional writers writing about their kids. I would be very interested to see the thoughts of the folks on this board about parents who blog about their kids, maybe for family and friends to keep up with, but only "public" in the sense that it is on Blogger or where ever, if anyone cares to look. Where are the lines in that case? My sister has a blog about her young children, and she writes updates and posts pictures, and it's a way for family and friends to stay in touch more easily than email updates. Is this a violation of her kids' privacy? At what age should they have a say in what she writes? Does the "permanent" nature of the internet change that calculation at all, with regard to either pictures and anecdotes or consent?
--dwtintx
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This piece hit home; I run the group blog DadCentric, and lately I've been wondering when - not if - I should stop telling the world about my kid. (Pauses to let the "anti-breeders" spew their vitriol.) This actually has more to do with my general parentblog fatigue than anything else; this may be biting the hands of my readers and fellow parentbloggers, but there comes a point when reading and writing about your toddler's adventures in asswiping/food throwing/creative use of new curse words that mom/dad/playground buddies have taught him gets, well, old.
To me, the kid's the least interesting part of any parenting tale. And I speak as one who has two of 'em; my four year old, who I love to death, is probably very, very similar to your four year old son. What's interesting to me, and something that separates great parenting writers from the herd, is the parent - the changes that occur and the stuggles that we face when we're suddenly, utterly responsible for another human life.
--SurfJay08
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For a short time, my mother, the artist, was also my mother, the author. She had a weekly art column in the county paper. Most of the time she'd use her own pen-and-ink sketches to illustrate some technique - the column was meant to inspire readers to explore their inner artist. Her mantra was (and still is) that anyone could draw. She taught high school art for many years and helped a lot of kids realize that skill.
One afternoon she asked me to draw a chair. She handed me one of her sketch pens and a pad of drawing paper. I looked at her, suspicion looming in my eight-year-old eyes. You're not going to put this in the newspaper, are you? I asked. Oh no, she assured me. Of course I won't.
Of course she did.
The column's focus was on perspective and how children develop a sense of how to place things in space so that they make visual sense. My chair, of course, was the "before" while her sketch of a chair was the "after". I was mortified. I think I might be still kind of mad at her - not for using my picture, but for not being honest about it.
Ultimately, that's what Bazelon's kids will have to work out with her - was she honest? Did she set them up to use them for material? (I really don't think she does that - this is something that they might think as they get older.) Are Eli and Simon's foibles (or Bazelon's for that matter) portrayed accurately? And are these stories about them or about parenting them?
So, just a word of advice to Emily, when Simon says, are you going to write about this? - Tell the truth.
--bright_virago
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