Airing the Parental Dirty Laundry

If you blog, you presumably want readers. And one way to do that is with a snappy headline. One could borrow from supermarket tabloids and go with something sensational and completely fake — "Sarah Palin Gives Birth To Three Headed Alien" — that would do it. But if you blog about family matters, the truth can work just as well.

For example: this post on Yahoo! Shine.

My son is home!!! And I am really mad at his father.

The title got me to click and see what the heck was going on.

The first sentence was a grabber:

I recently wrote a blog about how I hate it when my son goes to his father's for Christmas.

Then it got better:

So many of you left very nice comments about my tough time while he is gone. There were a few that said I was being petty. Let me Go deeper into this……..

I started to feel like a voyeur. This was pretty personal stuff. But it's not like I'm looking in the author's window. I'm reading something she posted on the Internet.

I'm not sure what the initial post was about, but this one tells the tale of a father who brought his son home after Christmas with an injured thumb. The mother was mad because the kid should have gone to the emergency room, and thinks that dad was too cheap to pay the doctor’s fee. The injury is described in "ER"-level detail: "When I picked him up, it was black and purple and he could not bend it. We went immediately to the ER. After 2 shots of pain killer, they drilled 2 holes in the nail to relieve the pressure." Presumably the couple is divorced and the boy was spending the holidays with his father, although the post doesn't say that explicitly.

So here's my question. Is this fair to the kid, the father, and everyone else involved? Most of us who blog, whether for pay or play, reveal certain details. But it's one thing to talk about a goofy thing your three year old told you. It's another thing to reveal personal details like the ones on this particular Shine post.

It could be a generational thing. I'm selective about what I share with the world, and I think most folks are. Other people don't mind putting it all out there. (That's why Facebook is so successful.) In this case, I imagine that posting these personal details is therapeutic for the author. It is also interesting to other people; the post has over 100 comments. But if I'm the father, I'd be irritated.

Of course, if I'm the father and I really didn't take my son to the emergency room because I didn't want to spend seventy-five dollars, I'm also a major jerk. Part of the problem, of course, is that we don't know what the father did or didn't do. It's possible that he weighed in with a comment; I haven't read them all. Still, judgments will be made – by me, the commenters on Shine, and commenters here. That's the nature of blogs. Once it's out there, it's out there. But is there a line that we shouldn't cross when kids and/or our significant others are involved? Can there be such a thing as too much sharing online?

Source: Yahoo Shine

Image (which is completely unrelated to this topic): sas.org.uk