“You’re going to blog about me, aren’t you?”

If you haven’t gotten this question from you friends, family, coworkers, or random strangers at Target yet*, it’s just a matter of time. From the moment that I made it known to my friends and family that I had set up my own digital space to tell my stories, people in my life have wondered when, exactly, they would make their grand entrance on my blog and immediately start receiving their residuals.

*Hey, it could happen.

Almost four years into my blogging stint, my friends and family now know that I would never write anything personal or sensitive about them, and even if I did, I would vet the post with them first. None of us lives life in a vacuum, so it’s important for us to exercise discretion when we share our world on our blogs. The truth is that there are other lives in the mix, lives that may or may not appreciate being read about.

Being a parenting blogger, I’ve struggled with the question of boundaries ever since my daughter was born. She’s a toddler now and only associates my blogging habit with me drinking gallons of coffee in one sitting. But I know that, eventually, the day will come when she’ll want to read what I’ve written about her. And since she’s going to hate me anyway when she’s a teenager, I’d rather it be because I wear God-awful jeans that come all the way up to my boobs and not because I shared too much about her on my blog when she was small. The older she gets, the more I try to write in broad strokes about her and avoid the embarrassing, personal stories that aren’t really mine at all to tell.

What about you? What boundaries do you have in place when you write about your family or friends?