It’s Impossible to Keep Your Baby off the Internet
Hours after a baby is born, its internet presence begins — no matter what we try to do to stop it
The day after my wife delivered our first baby, a photographer knocked on the door of our hospital room and offered to take pictures. We were sleep-deprived, dazed from the realization that everything we once considered “normal” had just been smashed with a sledgehammer, and emotionally speaking, we were puddles of liquid. Of course, we let her in.
Later on, when I looked over the terms of service on the photographer’s company-issued iPad, I noticed that one of the default checked boxes authorized it to use the photos in online marketing materials. Without hesitating, I unchecked it and told the photographer I had done so. “Thanks for even looking that closely,” she said. “No one ever does.”
We felt ready to handle issues like this because we had outlined a plan for our baby’s internet presence — an “internet advance directive” if you will. Early in my wife’s pregnancy, amid one of those horrendous, what-has-our-species-become 2020 news days, we concluded that we needed to “protect” our baby from the internet by keeping them off of it completely. Of course, this would mean no posting baby photos on social media. But it also meant no…
