In 2020, when Roan Libby is a 14-year-old struggling to fit in, let's hope none of his peers stumble on the Twitter account his parents made for him.
On Jan. 7, they tweeted this: Poop! I stepped in poop! Poop, poop, poop! gross! Stinky! My boots are sleeping outside tonight!
Roan is just four years old now, talking a mile a minute. His web-loving parents in Vancouver created the online presence for him (@roans4) last year, to log both his amusing comments and things they imagine he's thinking. The feed includes dozens of tweets about bodily functions, temporary tattoos and Roan's love of Spider-Man.
"Roan's all about superheroes and Scooby Doo and running around in his jammies. He's still maintaining his child-like innocence so it's fun to portray that sometimes," says Christopher Libby, his father.
The latest generation of on-the-go working parents have less time for videotaping and scrapbooking their children's lives, so, with a willingness to share their child's cuteness with more than just their immediate families, they've turned to Twitter. All they need is a computer or smartphone to compose a tweet every time their young one prattles on about how puppies freak them out or how their little sister rides in the baby swing. And in doing so they create an instant archive - easily keeping far-flung relatives, friends and sometimes strangers abreast of what's happening in their kid's world.
Mr. Libby, managing director of Vancouver Opera, has every intention of showing the digital log of Roanisms to his son when he's older.
"I fully try to embarrass my children as much as my parents embarrassed me. If this tool allows that I will definitely take advantage of it," he says with a chuckle.
Matt Faris of Tampa, Fla., wasted no time creating an account for his daughter Ella: She had a home on the Internet while she was still in utero. Ella, now six months old, has more than 200 tweets on her account @astird09, many of them written by Mr. Faris to communicate news to his family.
"Especially when we were getting into the last couple of weeks of pregnancy, my parents and brothers were calling every day asking for updates," he says. "And when we went into labour, I started tweeting every few minutes with updates so I didn't have to call them."
Since Ella was born, the account has become a log of things Mr. Faris imagines his daughter is saying.
Before a holiday shopping expedition, he tweeted on her behalf: WTH? You're taking me into walmart a week before Christmas? Are you insane?
And from a restaurant: Server at tijuana flats, "do you want crayons for her?" yes please, those sound tasty.
Alyson Schafer, a Toronto-based parenting expert and author of Honey, I Wrecked the Kids, welcomes the phenomenon of parents communicating on their children's behalf through Twitter.
"We're not hiding behind our crackberrys and computers," she says. "These are valid ways of reaching out."
For some parents, maintaining kid accounts has a value beyond communication and documentation: It provides comic relief.
Mr. Libby says he takes great pleasure in updating Roan's feed because it's an entertaining diversion from all the blogs and Twitter feeds he has to post for his job.
"The voice is supposed to be his, but there's a bit of adult snarkiness that creeps in," he says.
The tweet oh, yeah, and just so you know, you're not fooling anybody by calling Ovaltine "chocolate milk"!, for example, was not verbatim.
Rob Cottingham, principal of Vancouver-based Social Signal, a social media marketing group, equates the trend of parents tweeting their kids' musings to pulling out snapshots of them at the grocery store checkout line.
"You can draw a straight line between that and what we're doing on Twitter and the show Kids Say the Darndest Things," he explains. "I think it's just sharing the moment."
Mr. Cottingham and his wife set up Twitter accounts for their six-year-old daughter and three-year-old son, too, but they've protected the tweets so only approved family members and friends can see them.
"We don't want to be making presumptuous decisions about our kids' privacy," he says. "I'd like to face my daughter in 10 years and say, 'That tweet about your leaky diaper was read by a half dozen people, it wasn't read by Obama's transition team.'"
Brian Donohue, a reporter who lives in Red Bank, N.J., believes his daughter Aurora will thank him for starting a Twitter account for her when she was 2. The equivalent from his childhood is a cassette tape of him prattling about a Sesame Street episode at the dinner table - and he still enjoys listening to it.
Aurora's tweets (@rorystories) run the gamut from fanciful musings (Dadda, you can take the car into the sky like a hot air balloon. It would be a balloon car) to the kind of matter-of-fact logic that could only come from a toddler's brain (q:"what's your stuffed giraffe's name?' a: "uh. Horsey Cheese Popcorn. Because he has a long neck.")
They've managed to attract 17 followers. Some are strangers who appear to be reading for amusement.
"The things a two-year-old says on any given day are infinitesimally more entertaining than 99 per cent of what you see on Twitter," Mr. Donohue says.
The tweets are accompanied by countless photographs and videos Mr. Donohue and his wife have of Aurora, as well as a blog he created for her. For him, Twitter is a simply a supplement to other forms of documentation.
"It's better to have too many records of their childhood than too little," he says. "I wish someone had done this with things I'd said."
Editor's note: Matt Faris was incorrectly identified in the original version of this story. This version has been corrected.