Blogging about family life with appropriate privacy and boundaries

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Blogging about family life with appropriate privacy and boundaries

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What's my advice for parents who are blogging about their children? I think there are tons of parents out there who are blogging. There's a whole genre of blogs called mommy blogs. And we're writing really important stories. We're writing narratives of our families. And I think that's a really important thing to be doing. There have been studies now showing that the most resilient families are the ones that tell and know stories about themselves. But at the same time when you're putting your family stories out onto the internet, you are crossing some boundaries in terms of privacy. And so in my family and for my blog, we've come up with some rules that just help to protect the privacy of my kids and our family and help to make sure that people are comfortable. And so for example, I use pseudonyms instead of my children's names. That way nobody can Google my kids' names and come up with my blog and things that I've written about them. I don't put photos of them on my blog that can identify them. So I often have shots of them from the back or shots that don't have anything to do with them. Again, I don't want them to be embarrassed online. My partner vets anything that I write about our family before it goes online so that she's comfortable with it because I don't want her to feel uncomfortable with that stuff. And there's lots of stuff that the internet is just not the space for. There are lots of challenges that your family might have. There's lots of really good things that are just private. So if one of my family was having a really hard time in school or a hard time with a friend, that wouldn't go on. If one of them was testing really high and skipping grades, I also wouldn't put that on, because that's not information I think the public needs to know. So I think blogging about your kids is really great, but you have to remember that it's not just your story. And make sure that you're respecting the privacy of your kids, not just now when they're little, but as they grow up too, because that stuff, it will always be on the internet in some form. So you have to take that into account.
ALL PARENTS, Safety, Online Safety

View Susan Goldberg, MA's video on Blogging about family life with appropriate privacy and boundaries...

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Susan Goldberg, MA

Author & Blogger

Susan Goldberg is a writer, editor, essayist and blogger, and coeditor of the award-winning anthology And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families. Her writing has been featured on the CBC and the Globe and Mail, in Ms., Lilith, and Stealing Time magazines, and several anthologies, including the forthcoming Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender-Fluid Parenting Practices. Susan is a contributing blogger at Today’sParent.com and VillageQ.com. In 2012, she was chosen as one of BlogHer’s Voices of the Year. She’s currently (always) working on a novel, called Step on a Crack, and on Overflow, a one-woman performance piece about lingerie and breast cancer. Susan lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario, with her partner and their two sons.

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