As parents, it is very much our birthright to capture childhood

As parents, it is very much our birthright to capture childhood.

The classic go-to for documenting is, of course, the baby book.

Some find the fact that Generation Alpha has hyperdocumented childhoods to be alarming and potentially harmful.

But as long as your knee-jerk reaction isn’t to immediately put all these photos and videos online and you can balance being present in the moment, these gigabytes of still and moving images are an unalloyed blessing.

You can sometimes hear my voice in the videos—cheering, negotiating, coaxing, celebrating, and even making a cameo now and then despite my general aversion to being on-camera.

There is separate documentation of my own growth and development alongside theirs.

This record of their childhood is very much a record of my developing motherhood.