27 May 2015

Selective Sharenting, Please

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I was already a mom when R opened our joint Facebook account. He did it for Farmville. Well, games and our big boys; it's inevitable. Eventually, he opened his own account and I took over the old one. Over the past six years of using it, I regretfully committed cyber sins — I ranted as if I didn't have a friend, spilled out a lot of controversial family issues and shared around a thousand photos of randomness of my little girl. The latter, in all honesty, can cause a dose of eyes rolling from some single humans in my friends' list. In fact, in 2013, The Wall Street Journal coined a term, called sharenting, to emphasize exactly what most parents do in their social media accounts nowadays.

Sharenting is used to describe the overuse of social media by parents who share content based on their children. It is related to the concept of "too much information".

Wait a minute. How about us bloggy mommies? Are we the number 1 culprit to this virtual hullabaloo? Thinking about it, the anti-sharenting community has a point after all. Sharenting is risky. It compromises our children's privacy. We actually do not know how they will react when they are already teenagers and they see their almost naked bodies in the internet. We're not sure if they'll find it cute like what we felt when we shared it. I once posted a whole album of naked photos of my girl swimming in her inflatable pool on Facebook! She was two, super adorbs and I never thought it can look a bit malicious now that she's turning 7. I deleted the album. I only have 500+ friends on my personal FB but I'm still not sure if all of them do not have pedophile tendencies. Oh, the horror.

However, I'd like to make us, social media folks, feel less guilty when we post a content about our children. It can be linguistically contradicting but let us practice selective sharenting instead. 

You see, we can overshare all we want but perhaps, limit it to our personal Facebook. Or make sure it does not have any information that can trigger digital kidnapping. Or focus on just one topic to overshare. Say, I did a series of sharentings of my dialogues with my girl on Facebook. These dialogues do not contain our current location and activity. It also do not announce where we will be heading or what we will be eating. So far, around .02% of my friends agreed, in a form of a like, that the dialogues are status-worthy. 

First and foremost, Facebook was created to share the updated status of one's life. For us parents, our children is our lives. Enough said.

***
To you single humans in the internet,
You can unfollow or unfriend us if our posts make you feel uncomfortable. We are just excited to digitally share to the universe how blessed we are to raise a wonderful kid. This is what makes us happy. Do not steal this away from us. We promise to be selective to whatever we will sharent. But again, if it annoys you, hide us from your feed. Believe me, you will thank us for telling you that. 
Sincerely, this mom who shamelessly loves sharenting. 

2 comments:

  1. I love your sharenting statuses, Denise! It's actually something I look forward to, what your little princess did/say/reacted to you on a particular day/scenario. It also shows the world how cute and smart your little girl is. ❤

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    1. Hahaha, thanks Peachy! It's my joy to share my girl's silliness to everyone. And besides, I have no one to laugh with kasi here at home. But when husband's here, dalawa kaming nababaliw sa kanya! :D

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