Don't put your daughter on the blog, Mrs Worthington

Slightly terrifying look into life as a toddler social media celebrity:

Scout the City is touted as fashion’s first “kids’ influencer” blog, its heroine a pint-sized social media giant in the age of online celebrity. London—or “Scout,” her public persona—is a “three-year-old tastemaker,” says her site, “currently obsessed with ballet, Cinderella shoes, and playing dress-up.” She’s a totally typical toddler, except that when she wears Cinderella shoes, it’s down the runway at Kids Fashion Week, and when she plays dress-up, it’s for sponsored photo shoots with brands like Stella McCartney. (The ballet is just regular kid ballet.)

I feel guilty enough every time I pop a photo of Hazel on Instagram. I can’t even imagine pushing her into the public eye like this.

It’s slight sobering to think of this in the context of one of the most famous lifestyle/mommy bloggers, Heather Armstrong aka Dooce, quitting the business:

But what makes this livelihood glaringly different are not only the constant creative strains of churning out new and entertaining content—content we cannot delegate to anyone else because our audiences read our stories for our particular voice and perspective—but also the security systems we’ve had to set up as an increasingly more diverse group of people throw rocks at our houses with the intention of causing damage: passersby, rubbernecks, stalkers, even journalists. We have separate security systems for those who take every word and decision we share and deliberately misinterpret it, disfigure it to the point of it being wholly unrecognizable, and then broadcast to us and to their own audiences that they have diagnosed us with a personality disorder.

The long-term impact of exposing your life to the internet are only just becoming apparent to the earliest practitioners of the art. And that’s a lesson the rest of us should learn from.

If you didn’t get the headline allusion: