Sorry, stop posing Kids' Photos online

Frankly, naked babies shouldn’t be a big deal. If you don’t have naked baby pictures of your kids in the kitchen sink then you aren’t human. BUT….the world has changed. If you compare posting your children’s photos online with whipping out a wallet photo of your toddler daughter in the bathtub to your dinner party guests, I will have a bird.

This is because people just love to post images of their partially or completely naked toddlers and preschoolers online: in bathtubs, those inner tube swimming pools, on beaches or wherever.

Awww, ain’t they purty little young’uns! Well, here’re the problems:

• One particular image snatches the attention of a roaming pedophile, and he becomes hell-bent on getting his hands on that child—who’s yours.
• Years after the image goes up, your child is suddenly being ridiculed in school over it.
• Your child, when older, feels humiliated over the scads of revealing or even gross images (fingers shiny from a thick coat of saliva because they’re halfway in the toddler’s mouth; food smeared all over the mouth; slimy drool hanging from the mouth—yes some parents think this is adorable).

It’s not only not safe to become a post-a-holic of your child’s images, but it’s not smart. Isn’t the whipping out of the print photo at the dinner party or at the workplace break room enough? Must the images go online, where they’ll stay forever, for the entire planet to see?

Many parents don’t bother with Facebook’s privacy settings. And why? Hell if I know. These same parents would never run up to every single person at the grocery store and shove in their face the latest photo of little Mikey in the bathtub. So why share it with the whole world including Mikey’s future classmates?

Would you ever approach the seedy looking man on the street corner and show him a photo of half-naked little Maddelynn on the beach? I didn’t think so. Yet pedophiles really DO peruse Facebook for revealing images, and depending on what else you have up there including the image’s GPS data, the perv can get your home address.

• Learn Facebook’s privacy settings and set them at their highest.
• Find out whom your “sharing” images with. Do all of these people meet your approval? Do you know whomthey’re sharing them with?
• It’s not a crime to build old-fashioned photo albums—stored safely on a living room shelf that only visitors to your house can view.

When in doubt, don’t post it. Once it’s up, it’s there forever.