Child Safety in the Blogosphere

Blogging came naturally to me. I have absolutely no idea why. I’m not a professional writer, but I originally started my blog to spark my own creativity. It was a way to keep track of art projects and to have a community out there that supported me through finishing them and the frustration of not finishing them. I have a project tracker on my sidebar that sometimes seems to never move! I had no idea that blogging would become a central feature in my life.

I have recently moved more into the realm of a “Mommy Blogger,” mainly because I am one, and also because my blog don’t seem to have a category that fits me otherwise. I’m beginning to realize this may have a huge downside, though.

About a year ago, I was asked to join a Denver area online mommy blogging group and when I started reading through four years of my blog, I realized that my kids names were mentioned multiple times, information about our neighborhood, a picture of our house (on my houseblog) the name of the kids school—yikes! I never planned on putting that in. It just happened.

So, I painstakingly went in and stripped it all out. My kids became “Missy C” and “Matey Moo”, I made sure our house number never shows and took out any specific geographical information for safety reasons and I went about my life.  This being said, I have never felt unsafe amongst my blog friends or the people who left comments. Maybe because I have always had such a specific audience, I don’t think of crafters or home improvement folks as stalkers, and so far they don’t seem to be.

When I was first started blogging, one craft blogger posted photos of her children naked on her blog. In her defense, they were very arty (she was a photographer) and were featuring some of her clothing items. However, one of the other craft bloggers in our “circle” is a police officer in real life and she went ballistic (no pun intended). She pointed out that that was exactly the kind of thing that child pornographers were looking for. Another hobby photographer friend had her daughter’s photos used on a child pornography site. Obviously, that would be upsetting and a violation.

Dooce, who is kind of a superhero in the Mommy blogging world, wrote a post to address criticism from readers whom felt she were endangering her child by posting photos and writing about her life. So, is she? She’s a far more public figure than I am and some of her comments from people are judgmental and not nice.

So, it’s a dilemma. If you have chosen to blog, you’ve already chosen to make a part of your life public. Some of us who blog would love to achieve and fame and fortune or at least a glimmer of it, and yet that comes with dangers. I think it’s like most technology—you need to be aware of the downside but also embrace its potential.

Photo courtesy of Frequently Wrong But Never In Doubt