Parenting

The saga of Gwyneth, Apple and Instagram is a parenting classic | Joanna Moorhead


The Insta pic shows two faces: a smiling Gwyneth Paltrow, and a girl half of whose face is covered by ski goggles. On the surface of it, innocent enough, but the post has turned out to be incendiary, and Paltrow’s feed is full of comments criticising her parenting. Some complain she’s not listening to her daughter; others seem to suggest that she’s allowing the girl to walk all over her.

The issue is the presence of the girl wearing goggles. She is Paltrow’s daughter, Apple Martin; and though her face isn’t fully visible, it seems she objected to the post, writing a comment (now removed) that read: “Mom we have discussed this. You may not post anything without my consent.”

Apple is 14; in my experience, that’s precisely the moment when daughters decide they no longer want to have their lives curated through their mother’s prism. I know, because I have four daughters – now aged between 17 and 26 – and I’ve been publishing photos of them in the Guardian and other publications, alongside articles I’ve written about parenting, for more than a quarter of a century; certainly a lot longer than social media has been around. There are images of them as small babies, and pictures of them in their school uniforms. Photos of them having fun on day trips and holidays, and specially shot groups that sometimes involved them posing for professional photographers.

Writing about parenting is my job, and editors need photos – so the request for images almost always followed a commission. For a long time, my daughters were fine with it; but then, in their mid-teens, they rebelled. Yes, they knew it helped my work; but no, they were no longer willing to be bit-players in my interpretation of their story. For one thing, they often had very different ideas from me (or my editor) about which pictures they looked best in. For another, they were now curating their own lives, posting their own images online. And these, by the way, were extremely carefully chosen, and posts were actually rather rare – at least in an entirely public domain.

Today I am wary about publishing even an occasional photograph of my girls on Instagram, let alone asking whether they’d appear in a newspaper piece. I totally get where Apple is coming from: there comes a point when you start to be responsible for your own image, and that’s the point she has arrived at. There are all sorts of nuances surrounding what sort of image is OK and what isn’t; it’s about handing over control, just one of the many ways in which we parents have to hand over control to our children. In a digital world, it equates to the moment they start choosing their own clothes, or expressing a preference for which school they’ll go to next.

Parents have always found this handover tough. For one thing, it comes upon us so quickly. One minute they’re photogenic babies in their sun hats on the beach; the next they’re moody teenagers telling us what they will and won’t do. It’s tricky territory; on the one hand they’re still entirely dependent on us, on the other hand they’re flexing their muscles for the independence that is, in the final analysis, the end-goal of parenting.

So I feel for Paltrow too, because it seems to me that being proud of our children is an entirely natural state for parents. Sure, we can’t live through them (and Paltrow, who has a big life of her own, certainly isn’t doing that). But, you know, we’ve given a lot of time to them; and we want to celebrate them, on the happy days, and share the fun. So let’s not be too down on a parent for doing just that. Meanwhile, for Apple I suspect the crux of the issue is not the picture itself, but her relationship with her mother; and the important lesson she’ll have learned from this past week is that there are many arguments it’s better to restrict to the family WhatsApp thread, rather than posting on the world wide web.

Joanna Moorhead writes about parenting and family life





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