Should my children have blog aliases?

Since I started this blog back in early 2011, the blogging world has grown massively and my perceptions have inevitably changed. My husband and I were pondering an online business idea and we discovered that having a blog associated with the business would help raise our profile. This in turn led to me quite literally stumbling across the world of ‘mummy bloggers’ where I decided I wanted to join in and create a blog. Back then to get involved you had to apply to join British Mummy Bloggers which is now known as Britmums and once you had been accepted as a member, you could then chat in forums and start to meet other bloggers.

A lot of bloggers including myself decided on incorporating ‘mummy’ in their blog name as it was apparently deemed better to appear in search engines. Although I don’t hate my blog name, I know that it would certainly not be something I would choose today! It wouldn’t have mummy or beasties now. To think that I spent many a night thinking about the name I would end up with and this was the end product? It could have been worse but it most certainly could have been better. Hindsight however, it a wonderful thing.

I had been made aware that it was probably a good idea for safety and privacy reasons to not disclose the names of my children for the whole of the internet to see. A fair few of my blogging friends also took the same stance at the time and it was something that I felt strongly about when it was all new. I decided on using a blog alias for my son instead of his given name and so this set the precedent .

When I was thinking up a name, Beastie seemed particularly apt as my son at the time was often called Beastie due to some beastly behaviour, however he was a very cute one at that. So the blog was born and with it my children’s nicknames until this day. Of course when I started I only had the one child and when my second son was born his name automatically became Baby Beastie. It’s the kind of unimaginative name that a clearly sleep deprived person would choose as it was a rather obvious choice and didn’t require much thinking about at all.

For the past four years I’ve been referring to my sons with these nicknames, however more recently I’ve been veering away from them by simply using ‘eldest and youngest son’. I just feel I’ve outgrown these names and my eldest son most certainly has. I appreciate I’m stuck with the blog name but do they need to be stuck with these names?

Last week I asked fellow bloggers on Facebook about what their thoughts were on the subject and was interested to see how many keep names private. Lots were happy to call their children by their actual names and similarly lots were still wanting to err on the side of caution and not give out their names, worrying about their kids safety with regards to internet predators and leaving footprints of their lives for people to google. Many were worried about the effect this may have on their children when attending school and beyond. Bloggers even spoke of our children’s future employers googling them to find blog posts about them. I must say that I can’t say this would be a concern for me as nothing could be deemed detrimental towards my children. No controversy here and I can’t think why there would be.

Since before my daughter was born a month ago, I’d been considering what I would call her and after a lot of thought, I knew that it wouldn’t include Beastie in it and it made me really ponder whether I should scrap the names altogether? I’m still on the fence with this after originally drafting this post a few days ago but I’m hoping I’ll naturally come to a decision about it as the blog evolves.