Celebrity Privacy Rules You Should Actually Copy

I just spent forty-five minutes frantically deleting old Facebook albums from 2019 while my toddler tried to climb the dishwasher, and let me tell y'all, the panic sweat was real. I was looking at my oldest son's digital footprint, and I realized I had posted literally everything. His blowout in the Target parking lot, his full legal name on a hospital letterboard, a video of him throwing a temper tantrum because his banana broke in half. It's mortifying. I was sitting there jabbing the 'archive' button like my life depended on it when an alert popped up on my phone about the millie bobby brown baby adoption, and it hit me like a ton of bricks: that twenty-one-year-old is already a way smarter mother than I was at twenty-eight.

If you missed it between making endless peanut butter sandwiches and folding the same load of laundry for three business days, the actress and her husband adopted a little girl, but they're flat-out refusing to show her face or tell the public anything about her. People in my mom groups are losing their absolute minds trying to figure out the millie bobby brown baby name, and honestly? Good for her. Bless her heart, she's doing exactly what I wish I had done from day one.

We sold our oldest kids out for likes

I'm just gonna be real with you, my firstborn is basically a cautionary tale of millennial oversharing. When he was born, the culture was all about building your mom-brand online, so we just blindly handed our kids' entire life stories over to Mark Zuckerberg because everybody else was doing it. My grandma used to call me up and ask why I was showing the whole town the baby's bare bottom in the bathtub, and I'd roll my eyes and tell her she just didn't get the internet. Well, joke's on me, because Grandma was totally right.

My doctor, Dr. Sarah down at the local clinic, was casually mentioning at our last checkup that she thinks kids probably shouldn't even have a public online presence until they're in middle school, mostly because their little developing brains literally can't comprehend the concept of thousands of strangers having access to their awkward phases. I don't know the exact science behind it, but she mumbled something about how a child's sense of self gets completely warped when they know they're being performed for an audience, which tracks, considering I can barely handle someone looking at me too long in the checkout line at H-E-B.

It’s wild how we thought we were just making digital scrapbooks, but really we were stripping away their right to tell their own stories when they get older. Instead of making a whole production out of scrubbing your social media and lecturing your relatives about boundaries, just quietly start archiving the embarrassing stuff right now and blame the algorithm when people complain they don't see your kid's face on their feed anymore.

The great internet blackout

By the time my third kid came along, I was basically running a witness protection program out of my living room. If you want to see her face, you've to physically come to my house in rural Texas and drink lukewarm coffee with me. But keeping your kid off the internet also means you've to figure out how to physically shield them from the people in your life who still think a baby is a public photo-op.

This is exactly why I bought the Rainbow Bridge Bamboo Baby Blanket, and it's probably my most-used baby item for reasons the manufacturer never intended. Look, it's beautifully made and the bamboo fabric is softer than my favorite old college t-shirt, but the real selling point for me is that it's massive and opaque. I bought it right before Thanksgiving specifically to throw over the car seat when my mother-in-law whipped out her iPad to FaceTime her entire church group without asking. At 120x120cm, you can completely drape it over a carrier while you're walking through the grocery store, and the dark brown color means nosey strangers can't easily peek through to snap a sneaky picture while you're trying to buy milk in peace. It's breathable enough that the baby doesn't overheat in the Texas humidity, but solid enough to act as a physical privacy curtain.

Splitting the actual work

One thing that really struck me about this whole celebrity baby news cycle is how the husband was photographed wearing the baby carrier while running errands, and they've talked about doing everything fifty-fifty. Which, let's be honest, usually means the mom does eighty percent of the mental load while the dad gets a parade for changing a wet diaper.

My husband is great, but with our first, I was definitely the default parent. If I didn't order the diapers, we didn't have diapers. Now we use a system where he doesn't just execute the task, he owns the whole category, meaning if the baby outgrows her shoes, it's his problem to notice and his problem to fix.

Speaking of shoes, my husband proudly brought home these Baby Sneakers because he thought the little boat shoe design was hilarious. I'll shoot you straight on these: they're just okay. If your kid is actually pulling up on the coffee table and trying to cruise around, the non-slip sole is genuinely helpful on hardwood floors, and they do look adorable in family photos. But if your baby is under six months old and mostly just doing tummy time, they're going to rip these off their feet in the back of the minivan the second you look away. If you've the budget and a specific wedding to go to, grab them, but otherwise, don't stress yourself out trying to keep fancy shoes on an infant who would rather eat their own toes.

Keeping their brains offline

If we're pulling back on sharing our kids with the digital world, we also need to pull back on the digital world sharing itself with our kids. I used to rely way too heavily on flashing, singing plastic toys to keep my oldest distracted so I could pack orders for my Etsy shop. By dinnertime, we were both overstimulated and crying.

Check out our screen-free organic toy collection if you're trying to build a baby registry that doesn't require a Wi-Fi connection or AA batteries.

Now, I just shove my youngest underneath the Nature Play Gym Set when I need twenty minutes to answer customer emails. I love this thing because it doesn't do anything. And I mean that as a massive compliment. There's no Bluetooth speaker, no flashing neon lights, just some smooth beechwood and a few soft, earthy-colored fabric leaves dangling down. Dr. Sarah told me once that babies actually get overwhelmed by high-contrast plastic toys and that natural textures help them figure out depth and grip a lot better, which seems true considering my daughter will happily lay there batting at the little wooden moon for half an hour without getting fussy. It just looks like a normal piece of furniture in my living room instead of a tiny plastic carnival.

The self-love stuff

Millie also mentioned something in an interview about how she stopped making self-deprecating jokes about her body because she couldn't stand the thought of her daughter hearing it and internalizing that kind of toxic self-talk, which makes total sense and we should all probably stop calling our postpartum bellies weird dough pouches right this second, so let's just agree to do that and move on to the hard stuff.

Parenting in the digital age is basically just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping you don't accidentally ruin your kid's life forever. But deciding to keep their face off the internet until they're old enough to actually consent to it? That might be the one thing I know for sure is a good call. Even if it means my grandma has to wait for a printed photo in the mail like it's 1995.

If you're ready to embrace the offline, low-tech baby life, grab a cup of coffee you'll probably have to reheat three times and browse our sustainable, unplugged essentials.

Messy questions about digital parenting

How do I tell my parents to stop posting my baby on Facebook?
Honestly, you can try having a deeply respectful conversation about digital footprints, but I usually just blame internet creepers because it scares the older generation into compliance. I told my dad that facial recognition software is scraping baby photos for AI, and while I've no idea if that's entirely accurate, he hasn't posted a picture of my kids since 2022.

Is it weird to put an emoji over my kid's face in photos?
Yeah, it looks a little bit like a hostage proof-of-life photo, I'm not gonna lie. But do it anyway. If you really want to post that family beach picture, slap a giant sunflower over their face. People who truly know you don't care, and people who judge you for it probably shouldn't be looking at your kids anyway.

Will keeping them offline hurt their social skills?
According to every doctor I've ever cornered with my anxiety, absolutely not. Real social skills are built by aggressively negotiating who gets the blue cup at the dinner table, not by knowing how to pose for an Instagram reel. They'll figure out the internet eventually, there's literally no rush.

What if I already posted my older kid's whole life?
Welcome to the club, grab a nametag. You can't undo the past, but you can quietly go through your old grids and hit 'archive' while you're sitting in the car pickup line. Don't beat yourself up about it—we were basically the guinea pig generation for social media parenting, and now we know better.