TikTok stars Matt and Abby Howard changed their minds about showing their sons’ faces online.
“Initially, we did have our firstborn’s face online because we were like, ‘We’re going to continue doing everything we’ve been doing. We’ve been vlogging our life, we have a kid now [and] we’re still vlogging our life,’” Matt, 27, said on the Sunday, July 27, episode of the “Two Parents & A Podcast.”
He continued, “Then, we were thinking, ‘OK, there’s digital footprints here,’ and all these things that we’re still learning.”
As a result, Matt and Abby, 26, decided to stop showing their kids’ faces in their social media videos. The “Unplanned” podcast hosts, who have been married since July 2019, welcomed sons Griffin and August in July 2022 and August 2023, respectively.
“It’s crazy because we are truly in the wild west,” Matt said. “Someone’s going to [f***] up there. There already have been parents [who] have effed up online, and, like, hurt their kids. So, we’re learning, like, ‘Don’t do that, Good.’ We don’t want to be one of those people that accidentally [post our children]. We want the best for our kids.”
Abby, for her part, explained that their reasoning is out of an “abundance of protection.”
“It might be an overreaction, who knows down the line, but we’d rather be safe than sorry,” she added. “I think the other thing is that we chose for our lives to be public-facing [and] we want to give [our sons] the autonomy to make that choice for themselves if they want to down the line.”
Until their children are old enough to make the decision for themselves, Matt and Abby continue to share family updates — just with certain boundaries in place.
“We talk about them, we share them — just not their faces,” Abby said. “We don’t want them to be a central part of our content or to be recognizable individually. Who knows what it will look like down the line. … We view protecting our kids very seriously.”
Abby further stressed that she and Matt don’t “want to put [themselves] on some moral high ground” for their decision to keep their kids out of the limelight, contrasting other family influencers’ personal parenting choices.
“There’s no right or wrong around things,” Abby said. “Every parent has to make the decisions for their own kids, and this is where we’re at right now.”
Matt and Abby are also aware that their parenting mindsets could possibly shift in the future, if they decide to have a third child.
“For me, it goes along with Abby’s idea of sitting on content longer, sitting on footage longer and waiting to evaluate, ‘OK, what is the right decision here?’” Matt said of how their journey could change. “Something we have done with our own podcast is be very vulnerable with the internet, with the world [and] sharing everything that’s going on in our life. … Just having wisdom and discretion, like, ‘Let’s sit on this [and] let’s have some privacy here’ is probably one of the best things you can do.”
