When Does Taking Photos and Videos of Your Kids Go To Far

With both my parenting hat and professional photographer’s hat on I listened with interest and intrigue to Kim John Payne’s podcast ‘When Does Taking Photos and Videos of Your Kids Go To Far’: #125: When Does Taking Photos and Videos of Your Kids Go To Far « Simplicity Parenting. In case you did not already know, internationally recognised parenting expert Kim John Payne has worked extensively with the North American and UK Waldorf educational movements and has some pretty insightful things to say. Here’s a quick summary of some of the key points he talks about in the podcast:

• Are you part of the ‘parenting paparazzi’?
• Photographing and videoing mix the virtual life with real life.
• Try living in the moment of reverence.
• Allow your child to be creative without pressure of being captured on film/device.
• An older child’s reaction to being photographed by their parents: “Take a video because if you don’t take a photo it didn’t happen”.
• Some things we can do to check in on ourselves before capturing our children on film/device:

1. Be conscious of what we do with our children
2. Ask ourselves: do we actually need 100’s of photos of our children?
3. Limit and rationalise the photograph and video you actually need to take
4. Pretend all the photographs you are going to take are going into a photo album with the aim of provoking memories in ourselves and in our children later on
5. Make photo albums again; real life albums become a treasure of the family
6. “Get over” the constant availability of having a device; become more conscious of the photographs and videos you are taking and make photographs and videos special again
7. Remember the old saying ‘what is rare is precious’ and “make photographs and videos precious again”.