Mum, The Boys at School Read Your Blog

Can you imagine, your 8 year old, year 3 child comes home from school and tells you that? My first thought 'Oh dear Lord, what is on the blog that I do not want children reading?'. I purposely do not make friends with children I know on facebook and I would not engage with children on Twitter as I believe that social media is for adults and I have control in those areas. But my blog, it is public and open, anyone can look at it.  JJ knows that it exists and what it is called, he has found my youtube channel and told friends about the reviews that he does for me. What is he opening himself up to inadvertently?

Image Credit

I do not want to find that JJ has become the brunt of anyones joke or a target for bullying because I shared too much on my blog about him, his emotions and what is going on in his life. Thankfully this scenario has not happened but I suppose what I should add there is yet...  it must only be a matter of time before some of his friends do find my blog. So I feel grateful that I stumbled upon a post the other day on Honest Mum's blog about over sharing and how it grates on her when bloggers feel the need to share too much.  Some of the comments then started to talk about the impact of sharing too much of your children's lives too and this really got me thinking about the fact that JJ is his own person and it is not for me to share his life online.

I seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking that because they are my children that I have a right to tell their story but actually our story belongs to each of us alone. I never bog about dh nor any tricky or challenging parts of our relationship as that is personal and not for public viewing.  As an adult I make a choice to blog about the difficult parts of my life, such as my miscarriage, troubles with food and childhood shame. Now I am making a choice to no longer blog about many parts of my children's lives.  Yes there will still be photos of them, updates, funny posts and parenting dilemmas but without sharing their personal reactions or anything that would be embarrassing to them if read by a peer.  I find it weird when people mention things to me and I wonder how on earth that know that, let alone one of my kids finding that someone knows something about them and they did not even make the choice to publish it.

Just last week I was writing a blog post about some difficult conversations JJ and I had been having and how they had effected him, when I stopped mid sentence and thought about it. If I was telling his friends this in the playground at school how would he feel?  It was enough for me not to press the publish button and to have an awakening.  In my endeavours to share my parenting difficulties with people and my desire to help others I could of actually been damaging my boy, so this has to stop.  He is far more important to me than anyone else reading my blog.  I can still continue to blog about the troubles of being a Mum but I must just do it from my perspective and not reveal anything too much about JJ and how he deals with things.

My beloved babies

This has been a real learning curve for me in the last week. JJ was just 4 when I started blogging and to be honest it did not matter what I said about him as no-one would have been using it as evidence to hurt him but now at age 8 and completely IT savvy, people could easily be looking for information that could put him in a vulnerable people.  I will not be giving them any ammunition.

How about you?  Was you a bit more prepared than I was when you started blogging and you actually thought these things through?  Or do you need to stop and think too and wonder if you are over sharing about your children and what is going on in their lives?