There’s More to Life than Likes

I was about to leave my office when I decided to check my email one last time, trying to free up those few moments later in the day for my family.

Am I ever glad I did.

In my email was a message from a family site that I enjoy going to, sharing a couple of new videos they had come out with. One of them caused me to stop and literally say a brief prayer about my own life and parenting.

Here it is (don’t worry, it’s less than a minute long).

(Video not playing? Click here.)

Parents, I want to ask: are we making the life of our families and our children more about how many likes we can garner on social media?

For too many of us, we think that the world needs to know everything our children are doing, and then we somehow don’t feel validated if that post doesn’t receive a significant amount of social media interaction.

All the while, we are setting up our family as more of a reality show, just without the Hollywood budget. Is this really what we want?

Now, before giving some suggestions, let me state this disclaimer. I am not saying that we should never post any pictures or anything else about our family. After all, that is one of the great uses of social media. I love seeing children of my friends as they grow up, and I like knowing various things about those I cannot physically be near due to geography. But do we feel the need to update all the time?

We need to be teaching our children that there is more to life than likes. And some of us adults need to learn that lesson ourselves.

So, how can we do that? Here are a few suggestions.

1. Don’t Post Something from Every Event. They call them “family” outings, so why not keep a few of your outings just for your family?

2. Forget Instagram-worthy Pictures. One of my favorite things about the video above is the dad trying to get the boy to get more excited. Some people are more concerned with how a picture will look to others than about simply enjoying the memory.

3. (Gulp) Don’t Take Pictures. Trust me, I like them, too. But it is nice, every so often, to just go somewhere and not worry about thinking you need a camera or cell phone to remember the experience. Spend the time talking and enjoying, instead of posing.

4. When You Do Post, Forget the Likes. Just because you’re “perfect” zoo picture did not garner tons of likes on Facebook or Instagram, you still (hopefully) have a memory that is far more important than how many other people interact with that one photo.

Take–and post–some pictures, but let’s do our best to spend more of our energy making memories instead of searching for the most social-media-ready pictures.

We are living in a time when social media interaction–or lack of it–has literally been linked to anxiety and depression among young people. But I wonder if the same is true of some of us adults, too. Are we spending more time thinking about how that picture of our children will look to others on Facebook, or are we actually enjoying our children?

In the end, I think we know which one matters more. Now it’s time we lived like it.

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Photo background credit: Sean MacEntee on Creative Commons