"Scroll casually through your platform of choice and you’ll see kids. Kids protesting on Pinterest; kids posing on Instagram..."

"... kids socially distanced proms and graduations on Facebook. Kids of people you know I.R.L. and kids of people you don’t. Kids who most likely haven’t given their permission for you and me to see them or who have simply accepted this exposure as part of modern life. Every time we post a picture, we’re telling a story, crafting the myth of our own life. Images of our children become part of that mythology. A shot of kids frolicking on the beach or posing at Disney World tells a story about prosperity, happiness and ease. A photo of well-scrubbed kids on the first day of school says My children are thriving. I’m a good mom.... When my older daughter and blogs were both in their infancy, I posted pictures of my new baby and wrote about new motherhood. I found community and support from other new mothers. But as my daughter got older, as she went from a sleeping, pooping blob to an actual person, and as the world soured on so-called mommy blogging, the sharing got harder to justify. After all, my daughter had never consented to appearing on my blog. How would she feel when she got old enough to Google and discovered her entire life online?"

Writes Jennifer Weiner in "Should Any Parents Be Instagramming Their Kids?/Sure, those of us who do may not all be Myka Stauffers. But we’re all selling some kind of story about ourselves, and using our children to do so" (NYT).

"Mx. Baggs was concerned that autism awareness had become a trendy catchphrase..."

"... 'whether it’s parent groups who throw the word "autism acceptance" around to sound current but don’t actually accept the slightest thing about their autistic children, or whether it’s autistic people who’ve fallen in love with the words and forgotten the meaning.' There were blog posts about hir father’s death, hir cats and the 'snake words' used in the disabilities-services industry that sounded helpful to clients but, Mx. Baggs said, were actually harmful. ('Apologies to actual snakes,' one of these entries noted.).... Mx. Baggs took the name of the ballastexistenz blog from “ballast existence,” a concept employed in Nazi propaganda to justify killing people with disabilities...."

From "Mel Baggs, Blogger on Autism and Disability, Dies at 39/Candid blog posts and a widely viewed short film sought to expand the very definition of what it means to be human" (NYT). Baggs died of "respiratory failure, though numerous health problems may also have played a part."