When Boston humorist and author Steve Almond unplugged his Baby Daddy blog last month, he posted a goodbye note saying he and his wife had never planned to post beyond their daughter Josie's diaper years. But he also cited a few ethical concerns with writing the blog, which ran on the hip parenting site Babble.com .
For one, Mr. Almond, 41, had grown uncomfortable with the idea that Josie may eventually read the details of her baby life -- even seemingly innocuous goings-on such as explosive feedings and red-lipstick messes. And while he was no stranger to reader vitriol elsewhere in his professional life -- one essay, Blog Love, in his latest book (Not that You Asked):Rants, Exploits and Obsessions skewers, then forgives, the president of the Steve Almond Haters Club - inviting it into his family domain had started to feel masochistic.
"It stopped being so much fun, and nasty people started commenting about our parenting style," he said from Boston. So he and his wife decided to take back their privacy - and Josie's.
"I loved that so many people liked the blog and connected to it," he says. "But we also want the family to have experiences that are inside the family."
It's a dilemma many parent bloggers have begun to confront: Is it ethical to blog about my children? The attendant questions range from issues of safety - whether to use a child's real name or post photos - to more abstract quandaries: At what point does a child's right to privacy kick in? Then there's the biggie: Is blogging making me a worse parent?
"I have pulled out a camera to capture a temper tantrum rather than deal with it straight away," wrote popular Toronto blogger Kelly Graham-Scherer, a.k.a. Don Mills Diva , in a recent post.
The post began as a criticism of New York columnist Lenore Skenazy's decision to send her nine-year-old alone on the subway, suggesting it was more a stunt than a depiction of a naturally occurring parenting choice. But Ms. Graham-Scherer, a film administrator, then questioned whether her own blogging was losing footing on a "slippery slope" toward exhibitionism.
"It was me giving myself a little bit of a reality check," says Ms. Graham-Schere, 38, who started her blog soon after giving birth to connect with other parents.
She has some personal ground rules: She uses her child's real name, Graham, but she's careful to post certain images - such as shots of him in the bath - with innocuous taglines that won't attract creepy voyeurs. She also declines to discuss her and her husband's sex life or squabbles.
Still, she wonders if her motivations have morphed. "Am I mining his life a little bit too much?"
Catherine Connors sees her daughter and her blog Her Bad Mother as intimately intertwined. "In a way I think of her as my property, my work of art," she says from her home in Bowmanville, Ont. "She's a work in progress that I'm involved in. To that extent, I have some licence to be public about having her as my muse."
A recent post about her nearly potty-trained daughter urinating in a cup and carefully emptying it into the toilet was humorous, charming even. But critics and fellow soul-searching parent bloggers have asked: Does Ms. Connors, 37, have the right to share it with a potential audience of millions? And how much family therapy will be in order if her daughter's future schoolmates discover her mom's blogging adventures?
Her concession to privacy is a pseudonym for her daughter. (Ms. Connors uses her real name.) But as "Wonderbaby" has, along with the blog, crossed the two-year mark and the due date of Ms. Connors's second child approaches, she is pondering a change.
"A great part of the power of blogs is their openness and authenticity. I share photos, why not share her name?"
