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When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online [theatlantic.com]

Not all kids react poorly to finding out they’ve been living an unwitting life online. Some are thrilled. In fourth grade, Nate searched his name and discovered that he was mentioned in a news article about his third-grade class making a giant burrito. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I was surprised, really surprised.” But he was pleased with his newfound clout. “It made me feel famous … I got to make new friends by saying, ‘Oh, I’m in a newspaper [online],’” he said. Ever since, he has Googled himself every few months, hoping to find things.

Natalie, now 13, said that in fifth grade she and her friends competed with one another over the amount of information about themselves on the internet. “We thought it was so cool that we had pics of ourselves online,” she said. “We would brag like, ‘I have this many pics of myself on the internet.’ You look yourself up, and it’s like, ‘Whoa, it’s you!’ We were all shocked when we realized we were out there. We were like, ‘Whoa, we’re real people.’”

Natalie’s parents are stringent about not posting photos of her to social media, so there are only a handful of photos of her out there, but she yearns for more. “I don’t want to live in a hole and only have two pics of me online. I want to be a person who is a person. I want people to know who I am,” she said.

Cara and other tweens say they hope to lay down ground rules for their parents. Cara wants her mom to tell her the next time she posts about her, and the 11-year-old would like veto power over any photo before it goes up. “My friends will always text or tell me, like, ‘OMG that pic your mom posted of you is so cute,’ and I’ll get really self-conscious,” she said. Hayden, a 10-year-old, said he realized several years ago that his parents used a dedicated hashtag including his name on photos of him. He now monitors the hashtag to make sure they don’t post anything embarrassing.

Once kids have that first moment of realization that their lives are public, there’s no going back. Several teens and tweens told me this was the impetus for wanting to get their own social-media profiles, in an effort to take control of their image. But plenty of other kids become overwhelmed and retreat. Ellen said that anytime someone has a phone out around her now, she’s nervous that her photo could be taken and posted somewhere. “Everyone’s always watching, and nothing is ever forgotten. It’s never gone,” she said.

In order to help kids navigate these waters, more elementary schools are rolling out digital-literacy programs [globaldigitalcitizen.org]. Jane, a 7-year-old, said she learned about her internet presence partly from her school in an online-safety presentation. Her father has also warned her about social media and lets her approve photos before they go up.

Still, Jane—who, like all the other kids in this story, spoke to me with her parents’ permission—worries. She’s too young to navigate the web on her own, but she feels that a lot of what’s out there on the internet about her is beyond her control. “I don’t really like how people know things about me, and I don’t even know them,” she said. “Thousands and millions of things are out there maybe.” Andy, also 7, is always on the lookout for people who might take unflattering photos of him. He once caught his mother taking a photo of him sleeping and, another time, doing a silly dance. He immediately told her not to post it on Facebook, and she obliged. He felt the photos were embarrassing.

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