Should You Talk About Your Kids On Your Blog?
Should You Talk About Your Kids On Your Blog?
As a blogger with children, I have to decide how much of my kids I am going to share with you. Some bloggers share everything. They will tell you all about their kid’s days, what they are into, what they like and any issues they might be going through. Other bloggers don’t talk about their children at all. You don’t know their names and you might not even know how old they are. They have chosen to not include their kids in their blog or business.
How do you decide what you should do?
Why you might want to talk about your kids on your blog
If you decide to talk about your kids, there are a few benefits to doing so. In talking about your children can share more of your daily life with your readers. If you talk about parenting and motherhood, sharing a little about your own children can help connect the reader. They can see you as a mother and can relate more to your stories.
Your kids can be more involved in your blog if you allow them to be on there. If you get a product review in the mail, they can help you unbox it or you can blog about their reaction to the product. They will learn what you do for a living and get excited when they see their photo on a post.
Social media is the backbone of a blog. Including your children in your posts can make everything a little more natural. If you spend your Saturday at the fair, you can include photos of your kids enjoying their day. You don’t have to screen them out.
Why you might not want to talk about your kids on your blog
There are plenty of reasons to not talk about your kids on your blog. Privacy is a big deal and putting your kids on your blog is making them more public. People you don’t know will be able to learn about them and their lives. This can be very scary. You never really know who is watching.
As your children get older, this may be a bigger factor. If you are a parent of pre-teens or teenagers, you might want to scale back. They are of the age where they and their peers are online. If you are blogging all about what they do and what they are struggling with, it is possible they or their friends can read what you blogged about. This is so different from when we were that age. My parents would vent to their friends about us but that is as far as things went.
Another reason to not talk about your kids on your blog is because your blog is about you, not them. If you are not blogging about children, you might not want to bring them into your blog. You want your blog to be about the things that are important to you and not about them.
What I Do
When I first started blogging I was more open about my kids. I would have a lot of posts about their daily lives, especially as babies. As they have gotten older I stopped wanting to be as detailed about them and our days. Social media makes it possible to talk a little bit about them without having to share too much. If you follow my blog you will see that I have three boys. I will probably not be sharing their names on the blog but if you follow me on social media, they could come up there. I might mention things they are doing or going through but I also probably won’t tell you a lot of the little details.
I want to be very careful as my boys get older. I don’t want to have them in a situation where someone they know finds posts about them that could embarrass them. The internet will always be around and the posts I write today will still be there when they graduate from high school and go off to college. I also have a child that isn’t a huge fan of getting his photo taken. I try not to push that too much.
As my children move into their pre-teen/teen years, I will be talking to them about how much they want to be on the blog, what that would mean and all of that. I would love to hear what they think and what they assume I am doing with my blog.
As a blogger, what do you do? Not a blogger? Do you share a lot of your kids on social media?