Smartertimes.com is, surprisingly, emerging as something of a hard-liner on the question of children's privacy (please see, for instance, the January 3, 2002 edition on "Psychedelic Parenthood," and the March 2, 2002 edition on "Parading Justin," both available at the Smartertimes.com archive page.)
Today's New York Times Book Review carries a review of "Around the House and in the Garden: A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing and Home Improvement." The book is by a divorced mother of two, and the Times reviewer reports that "the liveliest sections of the book deal with the kids, about whom Browning has an unerring gift for capturing revelatory events."
For instance, the Times review summarizes, "And then came their father's wedding, not in itself troubling to the boys. But one of them, by now a teenager, withdrew into a depression once the honeymooners were out of town. Finally, he confessed to his mother: 'It isn't even the wedding . . . I just know they'll have a new baby. I'll be going from your house part time, to his house part time. The baby will be living with him all the time. I'll be nobody's full-time baby.'"
Smartertimes.com is of the perhaps antiquated view that this teenager's "depression" and his confessions to his mother deserve to be kept private. If his mother feels the need to air them in public for the purpose of helping the Scribner publishing house make money and the purpose of supplementing her own income as the editor of House & Garden, that's sad enough. But why should the New York Times cooperate in this? Did the Times contact this teenager independently to find out whether he wanted the details of his "depression" and other "revelatory events" aired in the newspaper's pages? Did the newspaper contact him to verify the facts of the events? Or did the newspaper just take his mother's word for it?
This is made all the more tacky by the fact that the "honeymooners" in question were a columnist for the Times book review and a former regular contributor to the Times magazine. (A matter that the Times review leaves undisclosed.) If the Times treats its own people and their children this shabbily, imagine how little deference the privacy of the rest of us, and our children, can expect.
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