Quick pause on everything I wanted to write about this week to dissect my intense horror / fear at a website I discovered today called SingleBabies.com.
What is it?
Some enterprising mom and dad in New Zealand who videotaped their innocent 13-month-old infant Corey dancing to Beyonce’s never-endingly popular tune Single Ladies. They threw it up on YouTube and baby Corey has reached Will Ferrell-style fame. Call me old fashion, but I think infants developing their core cognitive skills at that sensitive age should be exposed to stuff more like Mozart than MTV. Nevertheless, I’d say “cute”…until I realized Corey parents created the aforementioned website / landing page, turned off YouTube’s embedding so that anyone who sees the video must click through to them, thrown up a Copyright on the video, and a pop up click through banner. Then on their actual website they’re selling ad space, SingleBaby dancing T-shirts, and asking for donations. They’re also on Twitter (duh) and boast the fact that they’ve been featured on CNN.com, MSN, MyFox.com etc.
Sure…I’m sure all the money they make is going to baby Corey’s “college fund.” Well, sad news, but when Corey realizes his parents plastered his diaper shaking ass all over the net for sport, as a teenager, he’ll likely run away from home or off-himself, making those college savings a moot point. This is assuming he’ll even make it to teenage hood after surviving the ruthless teasing he’ll receive from peers in grades 2 through 6.
The fame of Dooce and other parent bloggers remains something I truly don’t understand. Sure, parents need to bond in some sort of internet forum and the stress of being a parent, I imagine, unrelentingly sucks. But chances are you chose to get knocked up and have a “family,” so maybe to try to deal with issues that arise within the family, or extended family, or friends, and neighbors…just not with the entire nation for profit. Because parent bloggers, do this simple visualization exercise with me:
1. Imagine how much the average teen loathes their parents and finds them “moronically embarrassing” for just doing stuff like, waving when you pick them up from school.
2. Now imagine that kind of powerful teen angst amplified by 100,000 when your kid realizes you blogged about how much “their diaper smelled fouler than a barnyard animal’s compost heap” and you got “no sleep because baby XXX had the runs again.”
How do parents think this is a good idea? And why don’t they respect their child’s privacy? My take is that if your kid is not old enough to make an informed decision about whether he/she wants their image used for profit on the internet or TV or elsewhere, telling you ‘yes’ or ‘no’ after being informed about the potential lifelong consequences, you assume NO.
The worst news of all, baby Corey’s “success” has spurred hundreds of knock off videos of parents trying to get their babies to dance to Beyonce. This child clearly doesn’t want to dance, but mom won’t let it go. For me, it’s all not so adorable anymore.
September 30th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I’m all for capturing the precious moments of your offspring and even posting them on your own blog or on Facebook, YouTube etc if they are as ah-mah-zing as the origional baby dancing to Single Ladies… However, there is a point at which it is going a lil overboard. And the knock off babies… Seriously people, you may think that your child is the be all and end all of tallent but the changes are that they’re just ordinary!