A Picture Is Not a Child

TLDR:

I used a photo of my son, with his full understanding and consent, to advocate for another child. He’s autistic, nearly bar mitzvah age, and more aware than most adults give him credit for. The photo showed a valid neurodivergent sensory response, not exploitation. But instead of seeing advocacy, one reader projected harm. They accused me of endangering him. They imagined predators. They forgot that a child’s image is not the child. The real danger isn’t in using your own child’s story with care. The danger is in freezing people into a single moment and calling that protection.

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This is a post about advocacy and parenting. It’s a post about informed consent and the need for educated communication.

Someone saw a post where I was responding to a conversation about a child who didn’t want to attend a religious ceremony. A parent in the thread seemed offended that her son’s invitation had been declined. I was trying to explain why it might not be about her son at all. I used my own child as an example, with his full awareness and consent.

I included a photo of him in a suit, looking visibly uncomfortable. I explained that sometimes, children say no to these events for reasons that have nothing to do with the person inviting them. In my son’s case, the discomfort was a valid neurodivergent sensory response. I wasn’t judging her. I wasn’t shaming her child. I was trying to offer perspective. I was trying to help someone else feel seen.

My son is less than a year away from the age of bar mitzvah. In Jewish tradition, that is the age of moral and religious responsibility. The age when a child becomes an adult in the eyes of the community. And yet, even with his understanding, even with his consent, people accused me of harming him.

They said that by posting that photo, I had endangered him. That I had crossed a moral line. That someone should come to my house and go through my computer. The implication was clear, even if the word was never spoken.

Because I posted a picture of my child while trying to help someone else.

This is what happens when fear overrides logic.

Let me be clear. I don’t post photos of other people’s children. I post my own. And I do it carefully. With purpose. With context. With my child’s understanding and consent.

And yes, I know that children can’t legally consent to everything. But developmental consent is not all or nothing. My son and I have talked. He knows what I do. He knows I help other children. Children who don’t get heard. Who fall through the cracks. He knows I tell parts of his story because it matters. Because other families are desperate to know they aren’t alone. He knows he used to be nonverbal and now he’s thriving. And he knows that sharing his journey helps others.

He gave me permission to share. Not because he’s a prop. Because he understands the stakes.

How dare anyone presume my child is not competent to understand how his image is being used just because of his age. Or because he’s autistic. He understands far too well. Earlier this week, I told him I’d been fat-shamed. He looked at me and said, “What does that matter, Mom? You could be 70 pounds overweight, but you’ve helped more kids than almost anyone I know.”

That is not a child who needs to be shielded from truth. That is a child who sees it.

The problem isn’t his capacity. It’s the assumption that unless a child is shielded from the world, they’re being harmed. But that’s not protection. That’s projection. And while he’s capable of understanding, that doesn’t mean he needs to know every awful thing an adult might do with a photo. He doesn’t need to grow up that fast. He doesn’t need to carry trauma that isn’t his. Especially when it wouldn’t even touch him unless someone went out of their way to show it to him.

I do not believe it is ethical or necessary to tell a child every horrific thing that might happen with a photo. That kind of fear doesn’t belong in their heads. It protects nothing and poisons everything. A child does not need to imagine predators in order to say yes to advocacy. Especially when their image is not their self. A picture doesn’t bleed. A picture doesn’t feel. A picture doesn’t remember.

When I was a kid, we used to ride on the handlebars of bicycles. No helmets. No phones. Just scraped knees and freedom. Now people are scared to let their kids bike around the block. There’s a predator around every corner, but only in our imagination. We’ve traded actual resilience for performative fear. And somehow, using a photo to talk about advocacy feels more dangerous than letting kids disappear into silence.

That’s the same principle behind Permutation City by Greg Egan, where people create digital copies of themselves that believe they’re real. They can suffer in the simulation, but the original person doesn’t carry that suffering. The copy isn’t you. It doesn’t reflect back. It’s just data with a memory of meaning.

A photo of a child is not the child.

You want to talk about harm? Let’s talk about AI-generated kids. Do you know where those faces come from? They come from stock photos. Old family albums. School flyers. Medical campaigns. Thousands of real children whose faces were scraped, blended, abstracted into a digital average. A hundred eyes. Fifty mouths. Thirty skin tones. A giant raspberry of borrowed childhoods. And the truth is, we don’t know how many of those kids, if any, gave consent. Maybe a few did. Maybe none. That uncertainty is the ethical problem. There is no relationship, no context, no ability to ask or explain. Just data, detached from its source, sold and reassembled into something new.

And what about the children in stock photos? The ones whose parents signed a release for a classroom handout or a photo shoot for a few dollars? The ones whose images were sold into commercial libraries before they were old enough to understand what that meant? They had no idea they might end up on mental health brochures, government ads, or inside an AI training set. They didn’t get to choose how long their faces would circulate. Their consent was one-time. Their exposure was permanent. Nobody is outraged on their behalf. Nobody is demanding their photos be removed from databases or scrubbed from machine learning models.

But a parent using a photo of their own child, with care and shared purpose, is somehow the threat?

And there’s the thing. Just like the Copies in Permutation City, those images are immortal. Every single one of them. Frozen in time. Unchanging. Meanwhile, the real child keeps growing. Learning. Becoming someone else entirely. The image stays locked in a moment that no longer exists, while the person it came from continues to evolve. That gap between who they were and who they become is where the real ethical discomfort lives. Because the image is no longer about the child. It becomes something else entirely.

And how many of you have taken pictures of your own children at a birthday party or a playground and accidentally captured other kids in the background? Did you ask every parent in the frame for permission? What about at Chuck E. Cheese? Or an amusement park? Or in the stands at a football game, where one zoomed-in image could be scraped and copied forever without anyone knowing? This is the digital world we live in. These things happen every day. And yet somehow, the outrage is saved for a parent who dares to use a photo of their own child with intention and care.

You want to talk ethics? Let’s talk My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. Asher paints his mother crucified to a window. He didn’t ask. He didn’t get permission. But he painted her truth as he saw it. And people were furious. They said he betrayed her. But did she feel that painting? Did she suffer more because it existed? Or was it the image alone that carried the pain?

Maybe his mother moved on. Maybe she healed. Maybe she changed. But you’d never know that from the painting. You’d only see the moment she was pinned in place.

And Asher? He remained exiled from his faith for at least two more books. One image. One act of truth-telling. And they never forgave him for it.

That’s the danger in mistaking an image for a person. The person moves. The image doesn’t.

I am not painting my child in pain. I am showing him in transformation.

I’m not using him to sell hot dogs or vacations. I’m using the light he already shines to help others see what is possible.

And I will not apologize for that.

Because here’s the truth:

I’m not some random parent posting cute milestones. I’m an autistic adult. I have ADHD. I have a PDA profile. So does my son.

I’m trying to reach those families. The ones who are told their kids are too verbal for help, or not verbal enough to be understood. The ones whose children scream at the sound of a toilet flush, or who speak in full scripts but can’t answer a question. The ones who are brilliant and overwhelmed at the same time. The ones who have been misunderstood, punished, excluded, or erased.

So am I.

My son is AuDHD. He was nonverbal for years. He used gestalt language—long, echolalic chunks of memorized speech. He used scripts, borrowed phrases, song lyrics. And like so many PDA kids, he resisted traditional therapy models that tried to break everything down into parts. He needed autonomy. He needed trust. He needed me to listen instead of correct. So I did.

Now he’s fully conversational. Not because we trained him to be neurotypical, but because we gave him support, context, tools, and space. And yes, he still stims. Still struggles. Still has sensory needs. But he’s thriving. And every time I tell that story, another parent messages me to say they feel less alone.

That is why I post.

I’m trying to reach the other PDA parents. The ones in the weeds. The ones who can’t take their kids to the store. The ones who’ve been kicked out of schools, clinics, playgroups. The ones who are told their child’s behavior is too complex to help. I’m trying to reach the professionals who are open to learning. The ones who are finally realizing that behavior is not the full story, and access comes first.

This is advocacy. This is access. This is what it looks like when you break generational silence and replace it with story.

So when someone tries to shame me for using an image of my own child to tell the truth?

No. I will not stop.

Not when other children still need to be seen.