Protecting Our Children's Privacy

Many mothers in reunion - and adoptive mothers - blog incessantly and unabashedly and even proudly about their lives, including every nuance of thought about and interactions with their children. After all a blog is a journal, isn't it? A place for stream of consciousness? A diary?

And yet - it is public.

Lisa Belkind, writing for the NY Times Blog, MotherLode asks:

At what point do parents lose their right to their children’s tales? When do things stop being something that happened to “me” and start being something that happened to “them,” and therefore not “mine” to tell?....

In this wireless, confessional era, what was once a question for parents talking over the backyard fence, or writers deciding whether to publish between hard covers, is now a question for every one of us with a keyboard.

Anita Tedaldi, who recently wrote in the Times about terminating the adoption of her very young adopted son, had apparently written earlier using the actual name of the child she adopted - something she now regrets.

She also may regret having:

written a column three years ago condemning a Dutch couple for terminating an adoption, or rapturously described her life as an adoptive mother in ways that she now says were “naïve and full of denial.”

As if all of this blogging about kids and using their names or even initials or pseudonyms is not bad enough - because blogs CAN be taken down - what about people that publish books using the names of kids they adopted, nearly adopted and didn;t, or whatever...and are painfully "honest" in revealing more than anyone needs to know about their inner, darkest thoughts.

Such is the case with a very disturbing book entitled The Brotherhood of Joseph which I will be submitting a full review of shortly. A book, unlike a blog and even some adoptions, is forever.

Watch what you say, lest your words come back to haunt you...and worse, hurt the ones you love the most.