When Parents Live-Text the Playdate: Endearing or Annoying?

Here are Jimmy and Bobby making crafts! Here they are decorating cookies! Look, now they’re building a fort!

Why do we do this, and what does it say about modern parenting?

Many moms—and yes, some dads—say they share photos to assure the other parents that their child is safe, happy and active in their care. A few told me they carefully plan and document playdates so they and their child will be accepted by a particular social circle. And some women say the planned activities are part of the broader societal pressure they feel to be the perfect mom, with Instagram-worthy photos to prove it.

“Parents are used to managing, and they manage their kids like they manage their career,” says

George Glass,

a psychiatrist and co-author of “The Overparenting Epidemic: Why Helicopter Parenting Is Bad for Your Kids…and Dangerous for You, Too!”

“Taking so many pictures,” he adds, “is part of the parent’s insecurity—they want you to think your child is having a good time so you’ll think well of them.”

Uninitiated parents, receiving these texts for the first time, might wonder about the etiquette. Do you like or comment on each photo as it arrives? Are you expected to reciprocate with photos when it’s your turn to host the playdate? What will the other mom think if you aren’t baking unicorn cupcakes when her child is at your house?

There are no hard-and-fast rules around how much or how often to share updates. There’s nothing wrong with snapping some pictures, but keeping the texting to a minimum can help the other parents enjoy a bit of free time away from their child. Many moms say they’ll send one or two photos after a playdate or school event.

‘We even got our own snacks’

Rula Abirafeh,

a life coach in Pasadena, Calif., has been both a victim and a perpetrator of the playdate photo dump.

When her 8-year-old daughter switched to a new school last year, Ms. Abirafeh says she felt obligated to build relationships as the new family in school by sending photos during playdates. But she says she struggled with the impulse to send frequent updates.

“The trust is in letting go, and I don’t think we know how to do that anymore,” she says.

It’s not the free-range parenting of decades past. Ms. Abirafeh remembers being dropped off at friends’ houses as a child and rarely seeing the parents around. “We even got our own snacks,” she recalls.

Now, she says, she feels like a failure if she doesn’t have top-shelf snacks and entertainment on hand for her daughter’s playdates. She often makes brownies or cookies or takes her daughter and her friends to a nearby ice cream shop. “They’re Instagram playdates, whether or not they’re posted,” she says.

Paulina Cole,

a mom in St. Louis, says she understands the competitiveness and has even felt it herself, but says that the reason she snaps a lot of playdate pictures is because she wants to capture all the sweet moments of her 8-year-old daughter’s childhood.

She saves all the photos she takes herself or receives from other moms throughout the year. She then prints them and makes them into albums as birthday gifts for her daughter’s closest friends. She expects to make up to six albums a year and to continue the tradition through high school.

She also texts other moms photos during playdates and school events, “but not all the time like a crazy person,” she says.

‘It honestly makes me tired’

When

Laila Marshall,

who runs a birthday party-planning website in Los Angeles, received several photos during a playdate her 5-year-old son was having, she enjoyed the snapshots but had mixed feelings. “It was my time to take a break,” she says.

She resists both the playdate-micromanaging and the photo shoots when playdates happen at her house.

The photo sharing gets trickier as kids get older and more sensitive to how they appear, says

Melissa Gold,

a writer in Delmar, N.Y.

Her 11-year-old daughter already asks to see every photo Ms. Gold snaps of her. Ms. Gold says once kids become sensitive to how they look in photos, they don’t like having photos of themselves shared among parents.

“I think kids should have a right of first refusal, and say if they’d rather it not be sent around to other parents,” she says. “We have had some situations where a parent takes a picture and they think their kid looks cute, but my kid is in a half-blink with a mouth full of food.”

Monica Davis

McDonald, a grant writer in Havertown, Pa., says she’s noticed a big uptick in playdate photos in the past two years, whereas she says no one was sending photos when the oldest of her three children, now 12, was younger.

Since she has been receiving playdate photos involving her two younger kids, ages 10 and 7, she has felt compelled to do the same. “I’m mindful of the fact that other parents probably expect photos,” she says.

She says many parents want to make every moment magical for their child, and so they create special playdates instead of kicking back and letting the kids entertain themselves.

The parents of one of her daughter’s friends recently held a three-hour nighttime playdate with a backyard showing of “Hocus Pocus 2” to celebrate the film’s release.

“That type of magic-making is not my parenting style,” she says. “It honestly makes me tired.”

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Write to Julie Jargon at [email protected]