From time to time, I receive emails from friends and family with photos of their children, or links to family websites. They are not interesting in the least, except maybe to immediate family. Why do these "Kodak moments" have to be shared on websites with anyone other than the immediate family? If they were interesting photos...The Louvre, for instance. Or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the Grand Canyon, maybe. But no. Here's Mommy and Junior taking a nap. Here's Mommy and Sissy taking a nap. Here's Daddy and Junior taking a nap. Here's Daddy and Sissy taking a nap. What, no Mommy and Daddy taking a nap?
Why do parents, mothers, think the whole world is interested in seeing their napping pictures? "Look how cute we are!" is what they seem to be saying, but why? It never occured to me to take family nap photos, let alone think of sharing such photos with the world if we had taken such photos.
Here's Sissy in the sand. Here's Junior in the sand. Here's Daddy and Junior in the sand...Ooooh. The Cute Family at the beach. Quick, someone write a book with a Movie of the Week deal.
Then there's The Cute Family and birthday parties. They aren't interesting in real life, why would we care about photos of the parties? Dear Parent, most of us aren't interested.
Then there are the scrapbooks that the Mommy's of The Too Cute Family put together. Dear Parent, when you've seen one photo of your kid, we've seen them all. Twenty shots of the same kid standing on the same steps is a tad repetitive. I'm sure that you are aware of all of the nuances of your children's expressions, but they all look the same to us. Whole scrapbooks are tedious to sit through. We don't care where you got the special blue paper (unless we ask), or the little miniature sports stickers and doo dads. When I see the scrapbooks coming out, I quickly remember a dental appointment.
Not only are photos of other peoples kids boring, but I wonder about the "why" of the whole thing...why does the Too Cute Family (can't blame the kids for what the parents do) want the whole world to see them in the intimate moments of napping? Why do they want us to see the birthday parties, the gifts, every move they make? All kids have a First Day of Kindergarten/Preschool, why are we interested in yours? The only thing that I can think of to say is "That's too cute!"
I'm sure that you take that as a comppliment, Dear Parent. But think for a moment before sending out photos of the family that should stay in the family. What is it that you are saying by sending the photos out to the world? "Look how cute we are"? I take it as a form of showing off. Not an admirable quality. And those of us who do not engage in such showing off wonder what happened to your brain once you became a parent!
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Can I add an afterthought?
Parents: Your friends made friends with *you*. Yet every Christmas card contains a pic of your children and updates on what the kids have been doing all year. If you mention yourselves at all, you call yourselves "Mommy" and "Daddy" and all your listed achievements for the year involve the things you did with your kids.
We. Don't. Care! We want to hear about *you* and we want to see pictures of *you*. You are interesting to us. Unless we agreed to be a godparent, your children are not interesting in the slightest.
Parents can get away doing this to one another because it's a kind of competition. Everyone just has to show off how darling their perfect children are. The other parents don't actually give a crap about the pictures of your darlings, they just use them as an opportunity to spam you with pictures of their own. Both of you have to play the game, which is to say "Oh, how adorable! Did I show you the one of...?", repeat ad nauseum.
Your friends without children, however, don't play that game. If all you ever talk about is your children, they will conclude that you've lost all the other aspects of your personality that made you interesting, and you *will* lose all the friends you have who don't refer to themselves as "Mommy" or "Daddy".
Your other posts have been fun and mosty understandable, but this post is hurtful. I hope none of your friends who send you Christmas letters about their children are reading here.
I love hearing about my friends' families AND about their own lives - there has to be a balance.
Sorry I have to be anonymous, but we are experiencing a cyber stalker at the moment...I haven't been anonymous on previous posts.
Jeezaloo, what vitriol.
Your other posts have been fun and mosty understandable, but this post is hurtful.
Get over it. I deal with breeders constantly, and am damned sick and tired of it. From having to listen to the guy in the next cubicle baby-talk with his two-year-old on the phone, or look at the sprog's spaghetti-covered face in a picture frame every time I have to talk to him about something, to getting those oh-so-cuuuuuute email attachments displaying these little trophy animals dressed up in their Halloween costumes....
Keep it to yourselves, willya? Not everybody obsesses over your little carbon footprints, and some of us would prefer not to hear about them at all.
Here here! Thank you! I agree 100%! I am tired of having to gush over photos of children. And I am tired of hearing about nothing but my friends' kids...Susie did this, Timmy did that, Susie is the brightest in her class, Timmy is the fastest swimmer in his age group. Ad nauseam! I'm a parent, too, and I refuse to get caught up in the online baby "beauty" contests, the one-up-manship games that so many parents play. I want to have conversations about something other than children for the most part. They are very important to me, but they are not my whole life. Keep up the great writing!
"Hurtful"...bahahah. The only thing this post is "hurtful" to is the colossal egos of breeduhs who think that everyone in the world is as enthralled with their little crotchlings as they are.
I am a "breeduh", do NOT share lots of pics of my "carbon footprints" online and do not send out Christmas letters detailing their achievements, but I also do not post unnecessarily hurtful things on the internet.
Non-breeder ugliness aside, I have to disagree as well. I was a non-parent for many, many years before I was a parent and I loved to get updates and pictures of the kids I cared about (who became that way because I cared about their parents). Obviously, people can overdo *anything* annoyingly, but I never had that experience. In fact, I think the online system is a vast improvement, since any recipient can click or not as they choose, sparing any potential awkwardness of having to look over photos while the parent stands there watching.
Anyway, friendship means you care about what's important to your friend. I sure hope you who feel this way don't end up with, say, chronic illness that becomes the major thing going on in your life. Perhaps you'll expect better of your friends than things like, "Gawd, all he talks about anymore is his chemo, it's so damn tedious! What happened to his personality?"
friendship means you care about what's important to your friend.
Sure. But when friends become parents, nothing matters but their pwecious widdle baybees. They won't come over any more because your house isn't "childproof." They can't work late with you on a critical project because they have to pick up Bratney at the day care. Every conversation will eventually turn to graphic and detailed descriptions of the quality and structure of poop. Every visit to their home consists of a frenetic series of twenty-second conversations interrupted by screams, stinky diapers, and demands for Dora the Explorer videos. Every plan for an evening out involves more planning than a major amphibious invastion, and typically gets cut short by reports of misbehavior or restrictions about the babysitter's curfew.
People who make this lifestyle choice should realize going into it that, among the many other sacrifices, they're likely to lose their childfree friends.
Intersting that you'd draw an analogy to a chronic illness. Yeah, I imagine it's quite a bit like that.
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