What To Do When Someone Posts About Your Kid On Social Media Without Permission: A Mom’s Experience
It was 9:17 on a rainy Sunday, I was stirring pancake batter on the counter, chocolate chips waiting in a bowl next to me, when a Facebook notification popped up from a woman I’d friended after preschool co-op 8 years prior. We hadn’t exchanged a message in half that time, so I opened it curious. It was a screenshot of a post from a local mom group, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up immediately. The post was from a mom complaining about car line at the middle school, how “some rude kid” cut her off that Wednesday afternoon, ignored her honk, and was “too entitled to even say excuse me.” She described the kid: curly blonde hair, that bright neon blue North Face rain jacket everyone’s wearing this year, braces. That’s my 12-year-old daughter, Lila.
No name, but anyone who picks Lila up from school would know exactly who she was talking about. The comments were already piling up: “Kids these days have zero respect,” “The school needs to do something about this,” “Someone should tag her parents.” I wiped pancake batter off my thumb on my sweatpants, my chest feeling tight. I could already type out my response in my head: “That’s my kid, and you don’t know what happened.” I was two clicks away from going to the group and calling her out in front of 1,200 local parents.
Then I remembered what Lila told me that Wednesday after school. She’d come in the car chattering about a little kid who dropped his entire backpack right in the crosswalk. She’d stopped to help him pick up his crayons and worksheets, that’s why she crossed in front of that car. She didn’t even hear the honk, she said.
That stopped me. Instead of typing, I wiped my hands off on a towel and walked upstairs to Lila’s room. Her anime was playing on her laptop, she was sprawled on her bed picking at a bowl of cereal. I knocked even though the door was open, and said, “Something popped up on my Facebook that I want to show you. Can we talk about it?” I didn’t lead with “someone was mean to you online” because I didn’t want to scare her before she even saw it. I showed her the screenshot, and I sat down next to her while she read it. Her face went pink, and she wiped her eye on her sleeve before she said, “That’s not what happened. I told you, I stopped for that little kid.”
I let her talk for 10 minutes. She was upset that people she’d never met were saying mean things about her, that someone would put her out there like that without even asking who she was. Then I asked her what she wanted to do about it. That’s the part I almost messed up: my first instinct was to handle it, to fight her battle for her online immediately. But she’s 12, old enough to have a say in what happens with her identity (even if it wasn’t written out) and her reputation at school.
She said she didn’t want a big fight. She said if I commented on the post, everyone would see it, and then half the school would know about it and people would talk about her for weeks. She just wanted the post taken down. That’s what we agreed on.
I went back downstairs, found the original poster’s profile, and sent her a private message, not a public comment. I didn’t call her names, I didn’t yell. I just wrote: “Hi, I’m the mom of the girl you described in your recent car line post. I wanted to share what actually happened that day: your post went out to a mutual friend who sent it to me. Lila stopped to help a kindergartener pick up a spilled backpack in the crosswalk, that’s why she crossed in front of you. She didn’t hear you honk because she was bending down. Would you be willing to take the post down? It’s really upsetting to my daughter to have people talking about her online without knowing the whole story.”
I didn’t wait around staring at my phone. I went back to making pancakes, added extra chocolate chips for Lila, and called my younger son down for breakfast. Twenty minutes later, she wrote back. She said she’d been late to a doctor’s appointment, was frustrated about sitting in car line for 20 minutes, and just vented without thinking. She said she never thought anyone would connect the description to a specific kid, and she was sorry. She took the post down right away, and even offered to post a correction if we wanted. We said no thanks, we just wanted it gone.
A lot of parenting talk about social media is all about how to keep your kid off it, or how to report people immediately, but this experience taught me a few small, concrete things that other parents can use. First, always talk to your kid first before you respond to anything online about them. It doesn’t matter how mad you are, pausing to hear their side and ask what they want keeps you from making a bad situation worse. I’ve heard too many stories of parents blowing up online only to find out they got the wrong kid, or their kid doesn’t want all that attention. Second, go private first. Public call-outs turn a small frustrating moment into a public spectacle that your kid has to deal with for way longer. Most people who post these venting posts aren’t evil, they’re just having a bad day and didn’t stop to think they’re talking about a real kid with real feelings. Third, let your kid lead the outcome. If my 8-year-old had been in this situation, I’d make more of the choices, but for older kids and preteens, letting them decide how much attention they want gives them practice setting boundaries around their own privacy.
It’s not all fixed. A handful of people saw the post before it came down. Last week, a mom I don’t know gave me a weird look in the grocery store checkout line, and I wondered if she’d seen it. Lila still mentions it sometimes when we talk about why people post things online without thinking. But we have a plan now, if it happens again. We talk first, we decide what she wants, and we go from there. It’s not perfect, but it’s worked for us so far.
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