As I explained in my last post here on May 10, I curtailed most of my social media activity to my Facebook account over the past few weeks. At the time, I realized I was closing in on 10,000 Twitter posts on my @bktandem account and I wanted to make sure I used that milestone tweet to announce the birth of my first child.
Well, I’ve written this advance, but I will be making this post visible to the public as soon as my wife and I are on our way to the hospital to bring our son or daughter (it’s going to be a surprise) into the world. That means this post will probably generate tweet No. 9,998, giving me one more to burn before the birth announcement in my 10,000th tweet.
Anyway, I have to be honest…I’m nervous about being a parent. For the first time in 41 years, I’m going to be responsible for another the welfare and protection of a human being. I know millions of people do it all the time, but I really never saw myself as one of them. But I have a wonderful wife and feel that I will be up to the challenge…it’s just weird. Everything is going to change over the next few hours…and that is good. But there’s still anxiety…about my role as my wife’s labor coach…about the well-being of my wife and child…about my decisions as father during these early years…and so much more. Like computer software I experience for the first time, I guess I’ll just have to work with it until I figure it out…at least to the point I’m effective with it.
The other thing I wanted to mention here is the social media policy I have planned for my child’s early years. Basically, except for when there are milestone occasions or other gatherings of family and friends, I won’t be posting a lot of photos of my kid online…and even then, it will likely only be on Facebook shared with family and close friends. But I can’t see my wife and I putting any random, semi-private photos of our kids online for anyone outside our families to see…and even those will likely be rare. And we likely won’t be doing many “hey, guess what my kid did today” posts, if at all. You know…didn’t our parents embarrass us enough with baby photos and silly stories about our early years? Well, why are we now as parents putting all that crap online so when our kids are old enough to venture into social networking, they have access to it. Talk about embarrassing…I’m just not inclined to do that to my kid. We’ll take photos documenting our child’s growth, but we’ll put them on an external hard drive or private online galleries, and let him or her decide what he or she wants to do with them when old enough to join social networks.
People have assumed that because of my social media activity level, I would be sharing everything my kid does on Twitter, etc. Well, I have made a choice to share my life on social media. It’s only fair that I give my child that same choice.
Brian Kelley 