A recent study found that 80% of kids have an online presence by the age of two. I’m not sure how they define “online presence” – it could be anything from “someone uploads a pic of a new baby to Facebook” all the way to “parents create Facebook profile for their newborn!” (although obviously a lot more likely to be the former than the latter.)
That’s why articles like these always irk me – they inevitably have this undercurrent of “technology is bad” and “you must be afraid” with their talk of privacy settings and security worries rather than the positives of having an online presence for a child (connection to distant relatives right up to the potential of your child being the next Justin Bieber.)
The reality is that there is a huge disconnect between what parents are afraid of with regards to their children (abduction, school shootings, terrorism, strangers, drugs) and the reality of how young people actually get hurt or killed (car accidents, homicide, abuse – both of these by individuals known to the parents in most cases, as well as suicide, drowning.)
The reason parents fear the first five makes sense – all of them are external and/or catastrophic events, outside of a parents’ control. The five things parents should be scared of are closer and often within a parents’ ability to influence/recognize/control.
I don’t get it as much as I used to but I once got lots of concerned comments when people saw or heard that Shea and I put pictures of Pace online. “We’re more worried about somebody grabbing him when we go to the mall then some stranger on the Internet seeing his picture among the millions that are out there, tracking us down and coming specifically to do something nefarious” was my standard reply. (Well, okay, maybe I didn’t say “nefarious.”)
There are also interesting questions about consent – Pace hasn’t given us his consent to document his life online but as his legal guardians, I see this decision as no different than a parent’s decision to, for example, let their kid’s photo appear in a newspaper story or whatever.
And with that, here’s a picture of Pace enjoying the jet tub at Grandpa & Grandma’s this weekend…
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