Why I don't want that much attention on my kids' faces

Our children are in our public work. Quite a lot of it, actually.

If you've seen Baby Acrobatics, you've probably seen me moving and playing with them. Miriam and I built it to help parents learn what to do with their babies: how to support a movement, notice what the baby is trying to do, and recognise when they've had enough of our brilliant plan for the afternoon.

So I can't write this as someone whose children never appear online. They do. We show that part of our lives on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook.

We've always obscured their faces. We also keep their names and a lot of other details about their lives private. Someone can learn something from watching us play without needing all of that too.

The ordinary privacy reasons matter to me. I don't want a clear picture of their face copied into places we haven't chosen, or attached to information they never decided to share.

But there's another part of it, and I'd be leaving something out if I pretended there wasn't.

I'm a bit woo-woo. I don't believe every spiritual explanation I come across, and I don't have a settled theory about what happens when a million strangers look at somebody. I do feel that attention matters. The feeling I have about putting my own face into that is different from the feeling I have about putting my children's faces into it.

I wanted to understand how other people, in other times and places, have thought about being seen. What follows is a personal essay about that, with accounts of belief and practice. They don't prove that a photograph carries harmful energy. But they gave me quite a lot to think about.

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A lifetime of being seen, then one upload

Try picturing the people who might have seen your face three hundred years ago: family, neighbours, people at work, a crowd at a market. That could still be a lot of people. We can't put one honest number on it.

But they couldn't all carry away a replayable video of you.

Photography itself came much later. The daguerreotype process was publicly announced in 1839; the Library of Congress describes how its early exposure times made portraits difficult at first. A likeness that once required a sitting, a material object and somewhere to keep it is now something we send between screens almost without thinking. The Library of Congress on early photography

Across my online work, the view counts add up to hundreds of millions. Those are views, not a headcount. Still, I can't picture the audience behind them. I can't know the mood someone is in when a video reaches them, what they bring to it, or where they take it afterwards.

Some people will like what I say. Some will disagree quite strongly. That's part of choosing to speak publicly. I don't think my children need to become recognisable participants in every response to me.

A video view isn't the same experience as meeting someone. Which is exactly what makes the scale strange: a person's face can become familiar to people they will never meet, without the ordinary relationship that used to come with familiarity.

People were arguing about the gaze long before cameras

In a dinner conversation written by the Greek author Plutarch, around the turn of the second century CE, the guests start arguing about the evil eye. Some laugh at the idea. Their host thinks the reports deserve an explanation.

That detail feels familiar already. Even the ancient dinner table didn't have everyone agreeing on the spiritual stuff.

The discussion explores whether envy could make a person's gaze harmful. Then another speaker complicates it: what about reports of harm from people who love a child? He mentions mothers said to keep children from certain relatives' gaze. If envy explains everything, he asks, how would that fit? Plutarch's discussion, in a university-hosted selection

What interests me is the question beneath it. People were already wondering whether being admired, noticed or intensely looked at was always a neutral experience.

Beliefs described as the evil eye connect harm with a gaze, often through envy, although the explanations differ. The word “evil” can make it sound as if the person must be deliberately plotting something. Plutarch's conversation was already less tidy than that.

A prayer, a picture and a wish to protect a child

In Sahih al-Bukhari, a ninth-century collection of reports about Muhammad, one account describes him asking for God's protection for al-Hasan and al-Husayn. The prayer includes protection from a harmful eye. It is a small, recognisable scene within a religious tradition: an adult seeking protection for children he loves. The report, Bukhari 3371

The response in that account is prayer.

Pictures themselves could also be understood as protective. Writing about Byzantine Egypt, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Edmund C. Ryder describes Christian images used on clothing and other objects. Scenes from Joseph's life appeared on child-sized garments; the story of a child surviving danger through God's help made that imagery particularly appropriate. The Met on protective imagery

I find that quite tender. A child wearing a story about another child getting through something difficult.

Sometimes the image was where people placed their hope of protection.

Being seen can also be a blessing

In Hindu worship, darshan involves seeing a deity and being seen in return. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art describes the practice through the goddess Minakshi's temple traditions in Tamil Nadu: a consecrated image's eyes are symbolically opened, and the exchange of sight is understood to confer a blessing. The museum's account of darshan

This is devotional seeing, with its own setting and meaning.

What catches my attention is that looking can be understood as a relationship. Someone is seeing; someone is being seen; the circumstances matter. That makes a rather different starting point from treating every pair of eyes as another unit of reach.

I like being seen by people who care about me. I want my children to have that too. My discomfort is with the enormous audience whose relationship to them is simply that a screen presented their face.

A photograph can belong within relationships

One family story stayed with me. In an account published by the Aṟa Irititja archive, Marcia Reid and her extended family at Docker River describe showing a baby photographs of grandparents, helping the child learn who the family is. The account is dated 4 November 2013. Read the family's account

They wanted those pictures. The pictures helped keep a family connected.

Aṟa Irititja was developed at the request of Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara communities in Central Australia. It brings photographs, recordings and documents back into a setting designed for the communities using them, with controls for private or sensitive material. The archive's community approach and its software history explain that work.

There are also circumstances in which showing a picture can be deeply unwelcome. AIATSIS warns that images or recordings of deceased people may cause distress or conflict with cultural prohibitions in some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Different families and communities have different protocols. AIATSIS's sensitivity notice

Elsewhere, the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office describes photographs and recordings of ceremonies circulating without permission and taking sacred practices out of their intended context. Its explanation includes the belief that ceremonies need to be properly performed and protected to bring their intended benefits. The office is describing its own community's concerns about sacred practice and cultural authority. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office

Keeping family pictures and deciding who may see them can be part of the same care. These communities' practices have their own histories and purposes. The question they prompt for me is about ours: where do we want a family picture to belong, and who gets to decide when it leaves?

What I mean when I say energy

I don't have a diagram of how somebody's thoughts might travel through a photo. I don't know whether there is a shared consciousness, or some kind of resonance, involved in being seen by that many people. I'm open to there being more to it than I understand.

“Energy” is the word I reach for when I'm trying to describe why the same amount of attention can feel so different depending on where it comes from. A room full of people who care about you. A room full of people waiting for you to get something wrong. I experience those very differently.

That helps explain why I don't automatically want more attention just because more is available. Whether there is something beyond that feeling, some collective consciousness or higher resonance, is a question I can leave open. I don't have to settle it before deciding how much of my children's lives to make public.

If somebody is angry about something I've said, they are allowed to be angry. I don't assume every critical comment carries a curse. I would simply rather give that attention fewer personal things to gather around.

The boundary we actually keep

Making Baby Acrobatics means making choices about what other people get to see of our family. I want the demonstrations to be useful. I also want my children to have lives that don't belong to the audience watching them.

Keeping their faces, names and other life details private is part of how we do that. It fits the practical reasons for privacy, and it sits comfortably with this less easily explained part of how I feel about attention.

Our face-covering tool helps us change the picture we publish. It doesn't manage other people's intentions or offer spiritual protection. And covering a face doesn't make a child anonymous. There are still voices, surroundings and other clues to think about, alongside the details we deliberately keep to ourselves.

We can keep clear family pictures privately and share them with people we choose. We can ask relatives not to repost them. We can show an exercise without making our child's face its public identifier.

If you feel similarly, you don't owe everybody a complete spiritual explanation. “We're keeping their faces out of public posts. Please ask us before sharing pictures of them” is a perfectly usable boundary.

I want my children to have people who know them, love them and are delighted to see their faces. I also want to leave them some say in how far those faces travel. The internet can have the exercise. It doesn't need every part of the afternoon.