{"id":686870,"date":"2025-11-13T15:48:46","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T12:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=686870"},"modified":"2025-11-13T15:48:46","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T12:48:46","slug":"is-it-ok-to-show-my-babys-face-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=686870","title":{"rendered":"Is It OK to Show My Baby\u2019s Face Online?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Father Figuring<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Is It OK to Show My Baby\u2019s Face Online?<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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By <\/span>Raven Smith<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

November 13, 2025<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Collage by Vogue<\/em>; Photo: Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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In the heat of midsummer, while I was at the beach, a woman with a private Instagram account sent me a DM that made my brow furrow as deep as a slot machine.<\/p>\n

She accused me of treating my newborn baby like an accessory\u2014a satin clutch at dinner. Admittedly, in the picture the woman was referencing, the baby and I both looked fantastic, her pink-ginger complexion giving Ariel next to me, her Jamaican crab. With my boxers and the baby\u2019s nappy, we looked like a Calvin Klein ad, if they made clothes for infants or cast slightly underweight, considerably under-slept dads-of-one. I just replied \u201cGood one\u201d to the woman and blocked her because I can be petty like that.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d love to say that I swiftly moved on, but obviously it played on my mind\u2026 hence this retelling. As a parent, showing your baby\u2019s face online is a whole thing.<\/p>\n

On Subway Takes<\/em> last weekend, former Grub Street editor Sierra Tishgart bemoaned the \u201cvisually heinous\u201d crime of using emojis over kids\u2019 faces on Instagram, the general consensus being that you are either private (WhatsApp-ing your baby to your mates) or public, the baby\u2019s face front and center. There\u2019s something in the hyper-alertness to \u201cpedophiles that might follow me\u201d that makes the in-between attempts at masking a child\u2019s identity seem more creepy than just not posting at all.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how pertinent it is to talk about my baby\u2019s face, the one I keep photographing and posting with abandon. Some\u2014most!\u2014babies come out of the womb looking like ET, a mess of fragile joints and sinewy limbs, their heads a ball in a sock. But my girl arrived perfectly al dente, all chubby cheeks and cupid lips, her nose pointing ever so lightly north. She is what my grandmother would call \u201cbonny,\u201d if my grandmother weren\u2019t dead. I talk to people about how she\u2019s like a personal HBO, gripping programming made especially for me. She is bewitching, she is lucent; naturally, I\u2019m taking a fuck-ton of pics. (And, to be clear, I would love her if she was a Monet too.)<\/p>\n

As a new parent, you feel compelled not only to say how lovely it is\u2014and it is<\/em>\u2014but to show off the loveliness, too; to parade the sprog through the (digital) streets as townspeople gather for a rare glimpse of perfection. Life pivots to you and the baby. I do miss the days when I could have a gummy multivitamin and two negronis for lunch, but the need to be on call, present and lucid, isn\u2019t the punishment I forecasted. My entire life is this new person, and, like most of us, I am used to sharing great swathes of my life online.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Of course, I worry, with all the sharing, that I\u2019m putting the baby onto something of a lookist path. Nobody batted an eyelid when I started posting pictures of my cat. But that anonymous woman got me thinking about my compulsion to share. Am I guilty of continuing the general narcissism of our age into the next generation? Should I be showing the murkier side of parenthood? The diaper rash; the five hours in the ER when she daredevil-ed herself off a table (she is fine)? Is my baby more or less likely to be a nuclear physicist if I show y\u2019all her features? Can she be an astronaut if\u00a0she\u2019s\u00a0not incognito? Will she be prime\u00a0minister\u00a0if we disregard her appearance in pursuit of a well-rounded personality?<\/p>\n

She\u2019s a bit of a miracle child, the genetic roulette landing on a super relaxed tot, with a takes-it-in-her-stride nature that is something I\u2019m keen to nurture. She sleeps through the night, which is unheard of at four months. She rarely cries for more than six minutes. Are these the qualities I should be showcasing?<\/p>\n

Posting the baby online doesn\u2019t feel so much like a lifestyle flex, an achievement brag, as a continuation of a conversation I\u2019ve been having with my followers since they followed me. They\u2019ve seen my years bored in an office job; the years I sat writing my books alone in Berlin, picking at my face and overthinking; they\u2019ve seen the epoch when I felt like an interloper in more rarefied circles. As a working-class kid, I was desperate for a certain level of materialism, one that meant new school shoes didn\u2019t have to wait until payday and that saw a bedframe underneath my mattress. But for the past six or seven years, my only aspiration has been to have a baby.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Now that the baby is here, I want to bask in her arrival (and continued presence). I\u2019ve never been someone who wanted simply to show off a pretty life; to plonk boastful gains on a grid and sit back while you covet. As a novice in the publishing industry, I was reared on editorial storytelling, of contextualizing what we were putting out, of understanding the power of a personal lens in the public sphere. I\u2019m not above visual consideration, but above all my posts are an extension of my personality, my particular POV, a feeling that the world (and now my kid) is absurd and entertaining and hilarious.<\/p>\n

When I look at my baby, I don\u2019t see the expense of her surrogacy finally paying off. When I look at my baby, I don\u2019t see the chance to flex the lifestyle of gay fatherhood. When I look at my baby, I don\u2019t see an opportunity. When I look at my baby, I don\u2019t see content.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something to be said about exhibiting the life of a Black, gay man who\u2019s unapologetically flourishing; believe it or not, there are still a lot of people who don\u2019t actually want Black and gay people thriving. I flip this coin every day: Am I a show-off or am I a representation of what marginalized identities can achieve? I don\u2019t have an answer, maybe I never will, but in the meantime, look at my beautiful girl!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

Source URL: http:\/\/vogue.com\/article\/father-figuring-is-it-ok-to-show-my-babys-face-online<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Father Figuring Is It OK to Show My Baby\u2019s Face Online? By Raven Smith November 13, 2025 Collage by Vogue; Photo: Getty Images In the heat of midsummer, while I was at the beach, a woman with a private Instagram account sent me a DM that made my brow furrow as deep as a slot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":686871,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-686870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-vogue-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=686870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686870\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/686871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=686870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=686870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=686870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}