Look. I’m not arrogant enough to think this blog is going to take off and make me so famous that I need to keep my children’s names off the internet. If no one ever reads this blog, I’m still going to keep my kids’ names private. I’m going to refer to them by their ages instead.

Why? Because they’re too young to give me their legal, informed consent to appear on this blog. So right now, I’m using their photos but never their names. If I’m somehow still writing here when they’re teenagers, and they say, “Mom, stop writing about me,” I will. If they ask me to go back and remove specific photos from my posts about them, I’ll do that, too. I believe that my children have the right to privacy, and the right to build their own digital footprint. That’s also the reason I haven’t listed my last name on this site, even though I’ve linked to other sites that include it: I don’t want what I do online attached to their names.

With that said, as of this post, I have four children.

The OG, Two and Baby Girl are our biological children (poor kids). The OG is our first daughter, who died after open heart surgery in August 2017; she was four months old. My oldest son, Three, is actually nine days older than The OG. How does that work? We adopted him. We brought him to the United States from Eastern Europe in 2018. My youngest son Two was born in 2019. And our youngest, Baby Girl, was born in summer 2020.

In addition to the privacy measures I’ve taken here, we’ve created an email address and Instagram account for each of our children. We wanted to make sure they got firstlast@email.com, yes. But we also wanted the ability to share photos and videos with faraway loved ones while strictly limiting who has access. Individual Instagram accounts mean I can share birthday pictures without having to unfriend the girl who sat next to me in first grade. She can be my Facebook friend, but she doesn’t need to see photos of my kids. It’s unusual for me to share kids pictures on Facebook. Too many former co-workers and randoms on my friends list. Ioknow those people like that.

Anyway. Do you think about your children’s privacy on the internet? If so, how do you protect it?

Tierra

A malcontent with a heart of gold, Tierra is a first-year medical student, former high school teacher and history PhD candidate, plus mom to four of Bebe’s baddest kids. She curses a lot. Tierra is a DC native but lives in southwest Michigan and will happily exchange writing (hers) for cash (yours).