There is a woman in my area who has a young daughter who has been fighting cancer for over 7 years now. This poor girl is frail and barely hanging on and has undergone endless operations and cancer therapies. Over the years it’s unfortunately been a slow downward spiral and the girl may die shortly, but then again most people thought she was going to die some time ago.
The mother is constantly posting pics of the poor child in her bed with tubes hooked up everywhere. Every new operation she’s immediately posting multiple graphic pics of the child’s new stitches and scars and writing how brave her girl is and how she doesn’t want her little angel to die. This poor child looks like a patchwork doll. This has been going on for years now. Each post gets a new raft of “poor, brave baby” responses.
I want to be as sympathetic as possible but this is getting to the point you want to tell the mother to leave the kid alone. The child has zero privacy. I get that it may theraputic for the mother to do this but it seems to me to rob the child of all dignity in her most vulnerable state.
I could block or unfriend her but then it’s like you’re shunning not just the mom but the kid too. I want her to stop exploiting this poor kid for whatever sympathy and attention she’s getting for these posts.
I doubt the pictures look at all the same to her. She sees her little girl being brave and wants to share it. When I look back at lictures of my son as a (perfectly healthy) newborn, he looks entirely different thatln in my memories of those same photos, when he seemed to glow with a sort of angelic aura and was clearly the most beautiful baby ever born. She truly doesn’t see what you see there. Just count your blesssings and hold your oen kids close.
Posting about your kids is what people do on Facebook. I can’t imagine how hard it must be not to have science projects and soccer matches and normal kid milestones to post about.
If it bothers you that much, I’d assume the updates are primarily to keep family members updated.
Poor kid is too young, too sick and soon will be too dead to care about her privacy.
I have been a caregiver to a dying loved one and it’s very hard on families, more so mayhaps than for the ill person. You see death coming and yet you deny and it keep soldiering on day after day.
And I was with peoples who lived a full and happy life. Cannot even begin to imagine how it must feel to be at the deathside of one who never had a chance to do so.
Even looking at pictures of people’s healthy and happy children gets overly tiresome. And then, if y ou don’t gush over them, somebody asks you why you didn’t comment, assumes youu didn’t see them, and sends them again.
Something that I really wish facebook would bring back was “See less from this person”, it was a nice middle ground. For various reason I have a handful of people that I’ve unfollowed. Two of my IRL friends had second kids that I only knew about because I happened to see them in real life. “See less from this person”, used some kind of algorithms to try and show you only ‘important’ posts from that person such as having a baby or a birthday and keep all the other stuff at a dull roar. It’s nice because you didn’t have to see 30 posts a day about how horrible a politician is whatever pyramid scheme they’re into this week, OTOH, if they have a baby or their mother passes away, you’re not totally blind sided the next time you bump into them.
What about these posts make you so upset? Does it force you to deal with your own morality or the thought of your own kids or loved ones being sick or dying? Is it too emotionally draining to see a little child in such a horrible situation? I can’t imagine having a child die, let alone dying for seven years, never knowing if this picture will be the last one you ever take of your child. Seeing that child with tubes and such sticking out of her.
To be honest the way you present your post seems a bit like you want to quote scrooge and tell the mother if her child is going to die it had better do it and decrease the surplus population of pictures you have to scroll through on Facebook. I mean how hard is it to just scroll past a picture.
Also, out of all the possible motivations for posting these pictures, a personal desire for “attention and sympathy” is the least charitable out of about a half dozen that are at least as likely. It’s totally unfair to assume she is looking for some sort of gratification, based only on a passing acquaintance.
When my daughter was born extremely prematurely, it was before my Facebook days, but I was posting here a lot, and would sometimes link to photo albums. I would include a warning that there was a very, very tiny baby with lots of medical equipment, so people could choose to avoid it, but honestly I really did want people to see her.
More than anything, when your child is sick and at risk of death, what you crave is normalcy. But that’s not really part of your life. What I wanted more than anything was someone to say, “What a cute baby!” or “She’s sure growing fast!” I couldn’t avoid the medical equipment, because that was keeping her alive. But I wanted people to gush over my baby like they gush over all the other babies. Because she was [del] sick maybe going to die such a fighter [/del] my baby. Part of being human is wanting your community to accept your crotchspawn. It’s a fundamental human need.
I guess what I’m saying is that she may not be trolling for sympathy, exactly. She might just want people to acknowledge her kid’s pictures like everyone else gets their kid’s pictures acknowledged.
She may also be also genuinely proud of the girl. No sophistry, no pretending or lying to herself. I’m legit proud of my son when he manages a routine blooddraw, for God’s sake. It’s pretty normal. And, again, she surely doesn’t see her daughter as looking horrible. She sees the bravery and the strength.
The core issue here for me is the dignity of the child. This little girl is now around 12. If it was a newborn or a toddler I would be less concerned but at 12 a child should have some degree of agency about their own right to privacy and not be subject to this sort of exposure and (IMO) borderline personal invasion.
Just because the kid is sick doesn’t mean she has to give up basic human dignities and a right to privacy. Pics where the hospital gown is pushed out of the way so the mother can show the fresh operation scars are par for the course. Do you know any healthy 12 year girl would be onboard with that kind of public exposure?
The kid is so weak and suffered so much surgical trauma she’s helpless and (IMO) she’s being used for attention by her mother. It’s just wrong.
This woman has almost certainly spent the last seven years putting her daughter’s well-being ahead of everything: her marriage, her career, her passions and interests, her other children, her friends and family. Everything she might have been, everything she might have done has been put aside, probably irrevocably. She’s almost certainly had to make sacrifices and compromises and decisions that are unimaginable to people that haven’t been through this. For someone else, a friend of a friend, to decide that HE is the one that really cares about the daughter and that she’s motivated by a thoughtless need for personal gratification seems almost solipsitic in its hubris.
Whatever the mother’s sacrifices it does not entitle her to use her sick daughter as a Facebook hand puppet. The focus here should be on the dignity and right to privacy of the child.
It’s still a option, just not an obvious one; I just did it for a friend who has regular spamming binges. Go to the little chevron thingy in the corner of the post, choose ‘Hide post’, and it should then give you an option of ‘See fewer posts from [Friend]’.
It seems to wear off after a while, or after you show an interest in something they post, mind.
How do you know that the daughter doesn’t actively participate? I mean, this is not a girl who has ever had any opportunity to develop modesty or a sense of privacy about her body. You’re the one who is projecting a lack of dignity onto the girl’s situation: perhaps you’d feel like you lost your dignity if your destroyed body were so displayed. But I have no idea if that’s how this girl feels–I can imagine she might feel as you think she does, but I can also imagine she feels proud of herself for having come so far.
You could be right. But you don’t seem close enough to the people involved to really know, and after all these years, surely the mother and child deserve the benefit of the doubt. That’s what those sacrifices earn her: anyone who’d give so much for their kid doesn’t deserve to have strangers on the fringes decide that shes’ selfishly exploiting her daughter’s pain for her own emotional gratification.
If people that know her daughter have concrete reasons to believe the girl feels a loss of dignity and privacy want to intervene, more power to them, but that’s not any of us.
For families in this sort of situation, it can be an enormous help. Everyone associated wants to know what’s going on, and it’s so much easier to update cousins and people at church with just one post, rather than either field a hundred phone calls or simply drift away from vital support because you can’t keep them in the loop, and once they are out of the loop it’s too much work to bring them back in.