My 7-year-old took pictures of my naked 3-year-old and almost put them on Facebook. How do I explain this is a bad idea?
You say something accurate and honest, but necessarily infantilizing. You say, “We call our private parts ‘private’ for a reason. And even though Facebook looks like another game on my phone, it’s actually a kind of public place: Lots of people, even strangers, can see what we post there. So when you post a naked picture of your [brother/sister], it’s like walking up and down [crowded street in your town] showing that picture to everyone who walks by. It’s sharing something private in public. And it’s inappropriate.”
Then you exhale deeply, pour the kid a glass of juice or let them settle in with a popsicle, and continue: “There was once an oral surgeon named Lytle S. Adams. He lived a long time ago, when America was fighting a war against Japan. Japan had attacked a military base in Hawaii, and—the day that happened—Adams was on vacation at Carlsbad Caverns. That’s a system of caves in New Mexico, where thousands and thousands of bats live. Adams was very impressed with the bats, and he came up with an idea: a swarm of weaponized bats, with miniature incendiary bombs strapped to their bodies—bats that would be dropped over Japanese cities to streak through the air, scatter far and wide, and then explode, sparking thousands of little fires all over the place, burning down buildings and frightening everyone.
“Adams was friendly with Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s wife, and he used his connections to send a brief to the president; the president gave it to a military commander with a note that said, ‘This man is not a nut.’ And so, by 1943, there was a top secret bat-bomb project up and running in several states, eventually called Project X-Ray.
“Adams and his team drove thousands of miles, visiting caves to trap and assess the viability of various bat species. They painstakingly engineered tiny bombs, weighing 28 grams or less, and developed techniques for clipping them to loose skin that puckers off a bat’s chest. They devised ways to release armed battalions from a B-25—180 bats at a time—in a sealed container specially made at a factory reportedly owned by Bing Crosby. It was a kind of metabomb that would—once it reached a survivable altitude for bats—deploy a parachute and spring open, releasing the bats and somehow also pulling the pins on their time-delayed, exploding payloads. The military threw $2 million at the idea and ran 30 separate demonstrations. More than 6,000 bats were drafted.
“But as an article in Air Force Magazine notes, ‘There were many complications.’ For one thing, the bats had to be squashed into ice cube trays and refrigerated to trigger hibernation so they could be more easily handled by the men and women clipping bombs to their chests. And many of the animals, once the giant metabomb popped open, simply never woke up. Or the clips ripped out of their skin. Or the bombs didn’t trigger. Great numbers of insubordinate bats simply ‘refused to cooperate and plummeted to earth.’ Once, a rogue flock of bat conscripts escaped through an open door wearing live explosives. They set fire to a brand-new military hangar, destroying it, and burned out a commanding officer’s car.”
Pause a second. Let the story sink in. Then say, “I know it’s confusing that I’m telling you about bat-bombs, honey, but here’s my point: Bats are just little animals, right? And they shouldn’t be given powerful bombs—it’s just too dangerous! Well, a phone is powerful too; you can do a lot of damage with it. And so it was foolish of me to let you have mine and to let you almost post things to Facebook. I don’t know what I was thinking, honestly. You’re only 7 years old, after all. It’s my fault—not yours. How’s your popsicle? I love you.”
