Certainly I would not want a broad law that says parents can never divulge sensitive information about their child, as normal parenting requires us to do so as good parents — whether it’s to share information or concerns with our child’s doctor(s) or in discussions with our child’s school.

But here we have a young man who is old enough to either consent or not consent to his details being made public for nonessential purposes and he did not want this published. Even if he has a cause of action after the fact, I think he should have had some protection from this disclosure of his sensitive information.

Within families, we could certainly imagine that similar protections against forced revelation might make sense. In fact, we have them in some contexts (spousal evidentiary privilege, for example). But here the issue is different; not whether someone should be protected from making revelations against their will, but whether they can be prevented from making revelations against someone else’s will.

I’ve always felt that these kind of intimate revelations are cruel because they amount to self-aggrandizement or -indulgence at the expense of loved ones’ privacy and dignity. And while we tolerate involuntary embarrassment or exposure when the object is a celebrity who has sought the public spotlight, this rationale obviously does not track where, as here, the person exposed is a minor.

Whether my instincts (obviously not widely shared) about the cruelty of these intimate revelations warrant a rule of law penalizing these kinds of revelations (e.g., a right of privacy in minor children against revelations of confidences by parents) is another matter entirely. I suppose, one could say, this is simply another kind of parental neglect: some parents stuff their kids full of junk food, others are cold and loveless, and still others expose their children’s personal humiliations and struggles for the world in exchange for some literary fame. The law typically allows parents to be awful (within some fairly broad limits) so perhaps this is another area where we do not want the state interfering with family life, however dysfunctional that life may seem

The mother is creating a written and durable record about her child that will follow him and perhaps interfere with his future chances of getting a job, etc.

We spend so much time teaching our kids not to reveal too much about themselves on the internet, and yet this mother revealed personal information that may haunt him forever.

Do we even need to talk about this in the context of any familial or maternal duty? What about the concept of information privacy? If a stranger revealed all of this information about the young man, would that have been acceptable?

If I see something happen, if I experience something, I need nobody’s consent to write about it.

I think David Matthews’s view should be the view of the government, but that doesn’t mean that it was a good idea to publish the book.