Related to the issue of creating a record of a child’s thoughts and opinions against their will (the turnitin.com issue I raised earlier) is the issue of whether it is appropriate for parents to reveal their children’s private issues without the child’s consent.
The editors of The New York Times point us to a debate about children’s privacy triggered by a parent’s memoir of her son’s struggles with addiction and the son’s condemnation of the book:
An article published in The Times on Monday discussed the controversy over “The Lost Child,” a memoir by a British writer, Julie Myerson, who chronicled her son’s drug addiction. After Ms. Myerson’s son, now 20, condemned the book, which was published in the United States this week, debate flared in Britain over whether it was proper for the author to expose her son’s troubles and over what the boundaries should be in memoir writing. Is it inappropriate and even harmful to expose the private lives of minor children, in particular? What privacy lines should be observed, if any, in writing about family members and others?
- Alison Gopnik, psychology professor, U.C. Berkeley
- David Matthews, author, “Ace of Spades”
- Melanie Gideon, author, “The Slippery Year”
- Michael Greenberg author, “Hurry Down Sunshine”