why taking photos as you parent is the greatest gift you can give your kids

I’m a weirdo. I went to grad school for photography so I know more about about the discipline than most but I couldn’t care less about cameras, gear or the latest editing software.

Here’s the thing about photography that I can’t get out of my head: the millisecond that my finger hits the shutter, the moment I capture is gone. Dead. Never to come back. It happened and it won’t happen – not exactly like this – ever again.

Parenting a rapidly growing baby was where I first felt moments passing by at a clip. I was taking tons of photos of him but for who? Friends on social media who were polite enough but didn’t really care? Grandparents who cared too much?

What will he need to know about us and his childhood when he is grown? About our moments?

As parents we’re always thinking about what our kids physically need right now and in the future. We pay for travel sports and other camps and opportunities that build their resume, we save money for college, we draft wills.

But its rare – I think – to consider what our kids will need emotionally someday.

My loves, please don’t forget to leave more of you behind. The real you and your real love and your real moments.

Not just filtered selfies. Not just photos in nice clothes and nice smiles. Please leave pictures of the life you are living, photos where you are giving and receiving love, photos that align with the memories your children have while filling in the memories they couldn’t make for themselves.

We’re in a strange place in photo history. Unlike the days when photographers pulled up in horse drawn carts, urging the townspeople to make a singular proof of life, we are inundated with images. Flooded. And because we can make them anytime, easily and instantaneously, we often don’t.

We are aware, as we scroll social media, that most of the images we see are glossy and made to keep a public face, not real or raw or meant to one day become precious like a lock of hair.

The message du jour is that we are enough. But “being enough” in front of a lens isn’t something we are taught to do or validated for doing. We know the performance of taking pictures: we know to smile, adjust the hip, suck in the gut. We know to delete images that reveal perceived imperfections, hoping our flaws disappear with the file.

Better yet, if we’re never in the frame at all, perhaps they’ll never know.

There’s a practice in Japan called kintsugi where gold epoxy is used to mend broken ceramics. The flaws become part of the piece’s history, uniqueness and unfolding beauty. I think its also like this with our laugh lines, the softness of our aging skin, our thinning greying hair, the furrow of our brows when we give “the look” and the squish of our bodies where tear-streaked faces bury themselves to hide their pain from the world.

Often, the self perceived flaws we fear others might see are actually liquid gold.

This is why I do what I do. I see the kintsugi making each family unique, holding our lives together. And this is why I annoy everyone in my own family, taking pictures in moments they find puzzling or when they least want a camera present.

I am asking us, the parents, to get in the picture with our children even when the world is burning and life isn’t going so great, even when irreplaceable people are missing, even while living between worlds and through uncertainty and weight gain and aging. Because we are alive and our story is unfolding and I want them to find you always. Like a gift too large to leave under the tree, let them follow the ribbon you tied through each and every floor of your life together, all the way to the very beginning.

This is why “at home sessions” feel like my truest, deepest purpose: I know that whatever happens next, they will see your love for them as they remember it in all its gorgeous, real and one-of-a-kind imperfection. They will have something affirming to hold as they heal. This work we do together is rarely Insta-worthy but it is wabi sabi and life affirming. Your children will pick up every delicious crumb of yourself that you leave behind.

You don’t have to put anything on social media if you don’t want to, you can keep it in a vault if you need to. Just don’t wait to create more photos where your parenting and personality are centered and learn to make this kind of photography a practice. Photos where we center how we live instead of what we look like. Photos that remind us how we show up for one another.

Are you ready? Click here to get started booking your shoot.

I’m choosing to share photos here that I believe will have immeasurable meaning to the child/ren depicted one day. This display could never be exhaustive but I hope it inspires you to take more, delete less, give yourself grace, decide flaws can be gold and hire and trust professionals to capture the time that you can’t wind backwards and the moments that define our love.

I hope you love yourself hard because you are absolutely and in every way photo worthy.

You do everything else for your children so do this for them too.