PARENTING

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Sharing information about your children. Where do you draw the line?

By Amy Landsman

Jocelyn Casser of Cheswolde smiles a little as she puts her hand in her pocket and pulls out the evidence.

Yes, she nearly always carries a camera.

Her cell phone has a camera too, of course.

Like most proud parents, Casser readily admits to taking and sharing lots of photos of her nearly two-year-old son, Ethan. At the same time, she’s very careful about where those photos end up.

“On Facebook, I will only put pictures of Ethan and my family. Other pictures, I put them on Picasa (Google’s photo software). That’s not open to everybody,” she notes as she helps Ethan experiment with a ball of homemade “play dough” at the Owings Mills Jewish Community Center on a recent morning.

The Internet is a great way to share photos with family and friends. But many parents are cautious, and they won’t share with just anyone.

Pikesville mom Gabrielle Burger feels the same way. She’ll post and tag photos of her own son, Riley, on Facebook, but won’t post images of his playmates. “Even if you have a picture that has a side of somebody’s child, we will cut it out,” she says.

The issue was on Burger’s mind as she planned for Riley’s second birthday party.

“I’m not going to post those up for my friends to see them if I don’t have permission from all the people at the party. So I will post pictures of Riley opening presents or Riley with my mother. But group pictures? I will take them (but) absolutely will not post them anywhere.”

Another mom, Jodi Walhberg, of Pikesville, says she doesn’t even have a Facebook account.

“I never post anything; mostly I don’t have time, but also for security reasons,” she says.

Walhberg and her three children, seven-year-old Hannah, four-year-old Eli and Ben, 19 months, use Skype (the online phone service) to keep in touch with the grandparents. In addition, her father-in-law has a password-protected site where he posts photos of the children, and Walhberg says she’s comfortable with that.

Leah Kushner of Pikesville, mom to Sammy, 6, and Abby, 2 1/2, is also careful about photos.

“I upload all my photos on Snapfish (an online photo service) and I only share it with my immediate family,” says Kushner. “I also have changed my settings on Facebook so only my friends can see my information.”

“I have a lot of requests from people, ‘Oh, send pictures.’ Well, if you want to see a picture, I’ll send it as an attachment to an e-mail,” Kushner adds.

While it’s hard for parents of toddlers to imagine their kids as teens, it’s important for them to start thinking now about the long-term impact of their online photos.

“The cute picture of the kid in the bathtub ... it’s cute to family members and maybe to friends. It can be thoroughly embarrassing to teenagers, especially since teenagers live in that (online) world,” points out Howard Reznick, senior manager of prevention education at Jewish Community Services. “Once something is online, it’s forever!”

“The Internet gives us a sense of things being permanent. They may not be in front of our face, but they’re still hanging there,” he adds.

These days, issues surrounding images of your baby start even before birth.

Traditionally, Jewish custom holds that nothing should be purchased or prepared until the baby arrives, so you attract attention from the evil eye.

This doesn’t seem to be an issue these days. Expectant moms happily post their prenatal medical sonogram images and the high resolution 4-D sonograms by the thousands on You Tube, baby blogs, Facebook and other social sites. (Families self-pay for the 4-D sonograms. They’re a commercial product and not part of typical prenatal care.) Of course, many expectant parents these days know well in advance whether they’re having a boy or girl. They have picked out a name and are happy to share it with whoever asks.

But really, notes Rabbi Steven Schwartz of Baltimore’s Beth El Congregation, there’s no religious reason not to share news and images of your pregnancy.

“Most of that stuff is what we would classify as bubbe meise stuff grounded in superstition,” Rabbi Schwartz writes in an e-mail. “Just superstition. That is to say, there is nothing wrong with it.”

For her part, Burger did show her medical sonogram to family and friends as a way of announcing her pregnancy, but didn’t get a 4-D ultrasound. “Friends of mine have had them and they’re a little creepy to me,” she says.

Casser took a similar route, showing the sonogram to a select group, but certainly not posting them online.

“Kinda’ because it’s weird,” she laughs.

Some baby images that used to be acceptable aren’t today; for example, the naked baby shot.

Lakeshia Davis of Pikesville accidentally posted a photo on Shutterfly of her two-year-old daughter Nechamah without her pants on.

“I didn’t mean to post it. My husband was like, ‘You’ve got to take if off immediately.’ So we deleted it, but it was already out there. I was really frustrated by it,” she says.

Most day care or summer camp applications ask parents for their permission to take and post photos of their children for marketing purposes. Burger, who used to direct the Noah’s Ark program at the JCC, says she allowed Riley’s photo to be posted, but says a great many parents don’t allow it.

Today it’s a balancing act: preserving and sharing images of your kids, without potential problems.

“You want to have those memories; you just need to be careful where you’re putting them,” says Burger.

By all means keep your camera and cell phone handy to catch all those great moments. Just make sure you’re careful about where and what you put online.

Of course if you want to save yourself a lot of worry over this issue, you can do things the old fashioned way. Post the photos on your fridge.