In October of 2010, a picture sharing application quietly launched in the app store. Its name, a combination of “instant camera” and “telegram”, was Instagram. By December, Instagram had gathered more than one million active daily users.
Before Instagram’s launch, mommy bloggers were launching daily stories paired with dSLR photographed images of their children on Blogspot and Wordpress. Instagram changed everything. Bloggers moved to Instagram to cross-promote their content in order to reach a wider audience. Since bloggers were limited to telling their story with one image and minimal text, they really had to up their game.
Pretty soon, Instagram gave birth to a new generation of mommy bloggers – Instagram moms. Their staged photos of oatmeal in vintage bowls, peter pan collared dresses, saltwater sandaled toddlers, and blinding white walls were everywhere and they all looked the same.
Most of us were photographed by our parents at some point during our lives. It has been a long running joke in our society – a pile of embarrassing photos that will be shown to your future wife or husband. Usually, these photos were of you naked in the bath with your siblings or cousins. Maybe you were caught in the act of something mischievous? Maybe you were outside peeing in a bush? No matter what you did, those photos were private and tucked away into an album or shoebox for you and your family’s enjoyment.
I recently stumbled upon the Instagram of a toddler named K. K is roughly a year and a half years old and her mother posts one or two photos of her each day modeling sponsored outfits. Photos of K can reach upwards of 20k likes depending on the outfit she wears. While K is an adorable baby who I am sure is well cared for, the comments on her photos will give you nightmares.
Some of the comments are innocent, ranging from “what a cutie” to “I want to squeeze her.” Then there are some that should make K’s mother want to hire a bodyguard, move to another planet, and lock K in a tower. Last week, one user commented that he wanted an image of “...K with her face down on a bed” and another requested full nudes. As of the posting of this blog, the comments were still there. The ones that pointed out how awful they were and that K's mother should remove her account were gone.
As parents, we are supposed to protect our children from harm. We don’t let them run in the street or ride their bikes without helmets. We feed them healthy foods and make them brush their teeth at least twice a day. Instagram has turned parenting into an opportunity to exchange our children’s privacy for cash.
But, unlike that embarrassing album our parents are dying to pull out for our future husbands, Instagram is available for everyone: the perverts and the psychos.
Popular bloggers have made careers out of photographing their children's every move. They photograph and share images of them baking, getting ready for school, taking vacations, learning to use the potty, and so much more.
Our children do not have a say in what we share about them online. They don’t get to approve or disapprove of the image or story that goes along with it. This is an important point, especially to mothers like K’s.
When my oldest child was born it was 2003 and blogging was still limited to just Livejournal. Back then it was considered desperate or "thirsty" to have a public LJ. Keeping your posts behind a lock made them feel unattainable, almost like a secret club that other Livejournal users could request to join. It also meant that your content was private and that you were in control of who saw it.
Those days are done.
Mommy bloggers continue to trade their children's privacy for a few clicks, new followers and paid sponsors. And women like K's mother would rather subject their children to the cat calls of the vilest part of our society – the predator than to delete her page and stop sharing.
Our children deserve better. They deserve to decide the narrative of their story. One day these children will be teenagers. We don't know yet to what extent this oversharing will cause our children but I am sure their teenage elves would tell you that they would prefer to not have naked photos of them on Instagram... especially if they could read the comments section.
