Expecting? Make It Facebook Official

Mark Zuckerberg has never hidden his desire for Facebook to be the place where users share everything. From your favourite sports to the people you admire, your home town to your entire work history, they can all be listed in their special dedicated box on your profile.

The newest addition: a built-in option to tell all your friends (and the world if your privacy settings aren’t set right) that you are expecting a child. But that’s not it. You can also include your due date and include your future offspring’s name.

“We’re always testing new features,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “Facebook started providing the option to add an ‘Expected: Child’ as a way for users to more accurately express their identity.”

The new option can be found by clicking to edit your profile and selecting “Friends and Family” in the left sidebar of the display. Choose to add a family member and you’ll be given the option to add your future progeny. Both parents can do this. Before this, parents-to-be had been able to create profiles for their unborn children using ultrasound screen grabs as the profile picture.

People didn’t need a special built-in option to tell people they were pregnant on Facebook; status updates have been prime territory for big announcements so far and that kind of news has probably received many “likes” around the world.

But pregnancy is a delicate process. Until you have a baby in your arms, something could go wrong. “I announced my pregnancy on my Facebook page at something like 6 weeks, which I now completely regret,” one woman wrote on a BabyCare message board about her miscarriage. “I wasn’t sure how to handle letting people know I’d lost the baby, so I just didn’t post anything specific.” She still receives messages from people who weren’t informed personally that she had lost her baby asking about her pregnancy is going.

We might be very good at sharing happy news through social networks, but we’re not so comfortable opening up big wounds to a loose network of “friends.” When that’s necessary, we become very aware all of a sudden that a lot of mere acquaintances are watching and grief of a lost child is not something to live in public.

If you’re going to use the feature, be sure you’re ready for the ensuing flood of comments, the good and the bad.

Contact the author here: sedera@morningquickie.com