Baby avatars, baby updates, kid updates, baby and kid photos on a daily basis and lots more parent updates. If you are on Facebook there is no way to escape them.
While childfree blogs are a place to exchnge with like-minded childfree folk. Facebook – not so much.
Most of us have friends who have kids, some didn’t when they became friends. And some people you meet and you become friends.
Nomally would you get the barrage up kiddy/parent updates (from baby feeding to taking the kids camping – suddenly you are party to all).
Of course you can block people. But many don’t want to block their friends – who can do whatever they like with their Facebook anyway.
What’s your view? How do you deal with it? Does it make it more “in your face?”
Do you ever respond – or share baby or child related stuff?
By the way – a commentator made mention of this in another post…interesting as I had drafted this one at the time. All the more reason to post this one.
Share your thoughts.
The Interests of a Childfree Brit Living in Toronto
About Like It Is
Welcome to Like It Is – the interests of a Brit living in Toronto.This is my take on Childfree living - plus lots of other things I happen to find interesting. It's also a place for childfree people to share and converse. Not childfree? You're welcome to comment, however understand that this isn't the place to inform us about how wonderful parenting is or to wax lyrical about your kids,etc. Browse the Archives to read previous posts. Or browse my tag cloud for childfree articles and more. Check me out on About. Take a minute to read my comments policy. Your comments are a gift - thank you. Connect - share, join in the conversation. Thanks for stopping by.
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I do find it irritating in large quantities (and there is a healthy handful of my friends list who apply), but largely I just skim over it. If it’s REALLY excessive, meaning you post frequently I’m genuinely surprised when an update ISN’T about your kid, I’ll probably hide you from my feed. I could unfriend, I suppose, but I don’t want to incite drama.
Probably due to the fact that I’m only 22 I don’t have many close friends with children. In fact, only 1 person on my friends list has a young child (the others are either parents of my friends [friends who are also around my age], or they are teachers I had in high school with older/adult children). So luckily I don’t get many updates about kids. HOWEVER when the friend that I mentioned had her baby a few months ago that was ALL SHE EVER TALKED ABOUT @_@ I can understand that in a way – a woman’s body does go through a lot of changes during pregnancy and babies go through quite a bit of growing the first few months, but I honestly got sick of it. I don’t share the joy of having a child, because I agree with St. Augustine’s stance on trapping a soul in the prison of the flesh. Furthermore, she could easily have adopted instead of having her own (if she’d done that I would have been super enthusiastic and thrilled for her – I only know 1 person who’s ever adopted children, and IMO it’s much more selfless than breeding your own). People can be so selfish. And though she doesn’t realize it yet (other than the sleepless nights), she’s completely altered her future. Everything will either be cast aside or put on hold. It’s a shame too – she used to want to go into the medical field among other things
As I said before, at age 32 it’s like a nonstop storm of baby photos, toddler photos, teething stories, nursing stories, bedtime tantrums, notes about pregnancy, ultrasound photos for someone’s third child, etc.
Groan.
I am about ready to stop using FB these days to get away from it. I mean, I’m in grad school so some of the folks on my list don’t have kids and I swear these are the only people who have anything interesting to say. I don’t really see posts by 95% those with kids on ANYTHING else anymore.
Yeah, I’m in the grumpy period of STFU…
I have blocked certain people because they didn’t just post baby pics, but graphic things, such as what they were doing with the placenta. TMI! Even if I had a kid!
But I have other friends who still post interesting stuff. I think as long as non kid stuff is sprinkled in with the kid stuff, it really doesn’t bother me. Most of the people I’ve blocked, I would have eventually blocked anyway.
I just hide all the posts from those people, I have quit a few on my facebook that post constant baby updates. There are a few who I don’t hide that actually post non-baby related stuff sometimes too and they are less annoying about it. I recently unhide everyone to see if there was anyone who I’d want on my news feed that hadn’t been there in a while and I ended up hiding all the same people all over again.
I’m at an age (38) when at first I felt too old for Facebook and then, by the time people my own age were doing it, I was glad I had never sipped the kool-aid. I don’t have much curiosity about people I went to high school with and the privacy issues of FB bother me.
I do have a Twitter account, and there’s no real politics to unfollowing someone on Twitter the way there is on Facebook. You just do it. I never feel obliged to follow someone back who follows me, and I can always see a hundred or so postings from anyone before I do follow them–which tells me if all they talk about are their babeez. For a social network, I think it’s remarkably free of BS.
I think that’s normal for a parent to “show off” their kids. Of course, exaggerating is definitely not ok. If until now parents met in parks, now they meet and talk on social sites. Somehow we all need to live together, so if they aren’t pushy, I’ll just let them be.
I couple of moths ago I found a very nice site, it’s about a baby, but most of all it’s about creativity. Hope you all enjoy this: http://milasdaydreams.blogspot.com/
I don’t use facebook, and part of it is this stuff – stupid updates about stupid stuff I (and most other people) don’t care about. It seems that people are emailing less and less, so there are fewer updates in the form of a personal little letter. Everything is a quip on facebook – Farted loudly just now. Saw Jay, liked his hat. My baby farted (here’s a pic). And so on. I feel like an old lady but I miss the phone and regular email – its like no one calls anymore either.
You’re definitely right about that! I rarely get emails from friends anymore, and no one calls me
I’ve never been a big phone talker anyway, but it’s nice to hear someone’s voice once in a while instead of just text messages, status updates, and IMing.
LONG LIVE THE 90′s!!!
I second that, I was going to delete my FB altogether, but it is literally the only way to keep/get in touch with some people. I even tried warning people that I never check it and to please write me @ my regular e-mail or call, or even txt, but I’d still get time-sensitive stuff sent to me on FB. It really bugs me! I can’t believe that everyone is busier now than a decade or 2 ago. They need to get their eyes off their phones/PDAs/IPads etc and pay attention to ones they care about. But then I decided “if you can’t beat’em join ‘em”. I rarely update about stupid day-to-day goings on. I’ll “like” an article or something while I’m online and that will get shared on my FB page, which I then hope someone will manage to actually see in their endless scroll of friend updates.
I still use email with several of my Facebook friends… but then I knew many of them first and I still meet with them IRL almost on a weekly basis. I like to share interesting stuff I find on Facebook with my friends and I like seeing the good stuff other people share. It’s sad though that everyone’s so glued to their phone these days that actual conversation is becoming a lost art.
It’s one of the reasons I enjoy organizing dance socials… I actually get people to get together with other people through something shared. Then of course I share that on Facebook
I accept it as part of my life. Most of my close friends from college, my current job and the few high school people I keep in touch with or keep tabs on have children, are pregnant or want children in the near future. The interesting thing about this is those three parts of my life (high school, college and current job) were in different size cities in two different states. I guess I’m just drawn to people who are all about kids, lol.
I think part of friendship is having common interests, but also being supportive of the things you don’t have in common. I expect these friends to be supportive of and interested in my passions and I want to be supportive of theirs, even if that means their lives revolve around children.
I have a friend who started IVF about 2 months ago. She has posted photos of all her drugs, her injections and even her follicle scan… She announced the date of her pregnancy test a week before it happened and then was straight on FB to announce that it was positive. I didn’t reply to any of the posts as I felt it was all far too much. People who fall pregnant naturally normally don’t tell people until they are 3 months gone – she must have been weeks if that! I thought it was all a bit premature and I can see myself “hiding” her posts on FB if she continues in this vain with blow by blow accounts for the next 9 months and it’ll only get worse after that. There is such a thing as too much information and its the only thing she talks about now…
Hiding posts is the easiest way to do it as you don’t unfriend people and they have no idea you can’t see their posts. If you want to check up on them you can always just go to their profile page!
I should say that I perhaps have more of an issue with people who use photos of their kids as their own profile picture. Am I the only person that finds this creepy and weird?
I also tend to hide friends if they post too many boring baby/kiddy updates. Happily most of my friends don’t overdo it and in most cases they post other things as well. The hid button is great.
I just don’t get using photos of kids as a profile picture… no you’re not the only one who finds this odd. I think it’s actually quite risky. I wonder that parents don’t see the implications of posting photos of their kids on Facebook either.
I am quite fortunate in that I don’t get spammed too much – I would say about half of the people on my FB have kids but they are all reasonably sensible and I don’t have to deal with too many repeat postings of crud from them. Admittedly it is sometimes nice to see the odd photos of the sprogs growing up. I do have a rule though; as soon as the profile picture turns into a photo of the kid rather than the poster then it’s normally a sign that all is lost with said friend…
I mostly ignore baby-related banter. Unless my friend sends me something personal. Then I’m likely to actually respond. But otherwise I just pay no attention. Another pet peeve, (apologies if this was mentioned B4, but just stumbled on this post from a childfree site) is when people use their child’s pic as their profile pic. Just saying, I don’t think that’s a good idea at all. Besides it annoys me.
Why, I submit the postings to the STFU Parents blog, of course!
There are three offenses that will automatically make me hide someone from my feed:
(1) Discussion of their baby’s bodily emissions (or their own, for that matter)
(2) Gay-hating
(3) Anything involving “Twilight” books / films
Talking about home birthing or how people shouldn’t vaccinate their kids will often qualify. Tons of my friends have kids, but I don’t have a problem with updates or posts unless they are worthy of the “STFU Parents” blog.
I often post articles relating to parenting and/or childfreedom and have noticed that one of my friends, who recently became a father, started commenting exclusively on such posts. From his comments he sounded like he was taking my posts personally. As if I were posting those articles just to taunt him! I finally called him out because I was sick of his idiotic and narcissistic comments to which he told me to stop “throwing stones at the institution of parenting.” I responded by telling him to get over himself!
I actually don’t mind what people post, and just ignore the things that don’t interest me. I figure it’s quite normal to post about your family( so long as you spare me the placenta and ultra-sounds, which I must say I’ve never had to endure). Some of my friends, and it’s perhaps because they’re teachers, use FB pretty minimally. I’m sure my animal rights postings on FB are met with the same reactions from people who don’t care about the topic, and that’s fine- ignore it, join in, it’s just there for anyone interested, and if you’re not, no problem either.
P.S. I had to laugh at your comment about phones and the lost art of conversation. I do remember a certain party you hosted where all sorts of people kept whipping out their cellphones. Someone there told me this was the new norm, and I just remember feeling unimpressed, and then old.
-AM
I think it’s understandable to post pictures of your kids to a point. Some people are oversharers in general, and FB exacerbates this to a point with people that are already there. I have a tendency not to post much on facebook as a rule, just because the actual important stuff that is going on im my life is no ones damn business, and my good friends already know the important stuff. But, for those sharers, some pictures are fun (first day of school, etc)… and there are close (but far away geographically) friends who I want to know what is going on their lives (which in this case, happens to pretty much be baby time). But you have to draw the line somewhere. For me that is the “potty training” posts. “OMG Junior did his first poopies in the potty” followed by a step by step progress update of types and the results of those attempts three times a day will result in a BIG. FAT. BLOCK from me. And yes, this really did happen. More then once.
I tried FB for about a week a few years ago. I thought it was a big waste of time, just like Betty White said in her hilarious SNL monologue around that time. I am surely not missing anything.