Fun & Famous

BABY’S MET EEN INSTAGRAMACCOUNT

I have some thoughts on that

I have an opinion. And now people will probably have an opinion about me too, that's fine, but in the context of no opinion = also quite boring, I’ll share what I think. It has to do with Instagram accounts.

I’ve always thought, well how should I tactically describe this, it’s quite special when two people who are super in love and are always sitting on each other's laps tag each other in posts. Like ‘Romantic in Paris with @robindeboer’. You could just say ‘romantic in Paris’, because you could reasonably assume that Robin knows it was romantic there in the city of light. After all, he was there himself. And the chance is also high that Robin is sitting next to the sender at the moment she posts it on her feed. So why mention him? To encourage people to follow your love? Could be. But I find it, well, as I said, quite special.

There’s a couple, I won’t name names but they are quite active on social media, that communicates via Twitter what is being cooked that evening and by whom. No joke. The woman tweets: ‘Landed in London’. The man replies on Twitter: ‘Already? Should I take the chicken breast out of the fridge?’ Uh, sorry folks, but they invented WhatsApp for that. For me, this is instant unfollow material.

‘hey bitches, nice goingz’

Anyway. We come to my ‘point’. Kids and Instagram. Look, for the fact that your daughter has a mobile phone and a real Insta account, I’ll turn a blind eye. Understandable that you are proud, but many of your followers are tagging and mentioning it like it’s a dear delight. Although I wonder if she is happy with that, but that’s beside the point.

But then there are the babies. With their own accounts. With funny texts. And thousands of followers. They are there. Look, I totally understand that you might want to let your close ones see the first bites and steps of your child, but then make that account private. Those poor little ones don’t even know about the existence of a phone (well, that’s not true, they do know) and might have had very different plans for their profiling in the world of social media. Are they now being portrayed a bit cutesy and silly while they are actually much more of the ‘hey bitches, nice goingz’ type? Nothing is more annoying than someone writing texts in your name. Especially when you can’t even talk yet.

But seriously. There will really come a time when your child will use every free nanosecond to check the number of likes on their latest post. Shouldn’t we let them just be babies without every droplet of drool being shared with millions (well, thousands) of onlookers without them knowing? I would fire my mother if she ever publicly shared my phase with jam jar glasses and a fringe from ear to ear with the world. I like to have control over my portrait rights. Or am I just disgustingly old-fashioned now?