Los Angeles blogger Rebecca Woolf uses her blog, as a window into her family's life. Naturally, it includes oodles（许多） of pictures of her four children.

 

She says she's probably taken tens of thousands of photos since her oldest child was born. And she remembers the moment when it suddenly clicked -- if you will -- that she was too absorbed in digital documentation.

 

"I remember going to the park at one point, and looking around ... and seeing that everyone was on their phones ... not taking photographs, but just -- they had a device¹ in their hands," she recalls².

 

"I was like, 'Oh, God, wait. Is this what it looks like?' " she says. "Even if it's just a camera, is this how people see me? ... Are [my kids] going to think of me as somebody who was behind a camera?"

 

Today, Woolf still takes plenty of pictures, but she tries to not let the camera get in the middle of a moment, she says.

 

With parents flooding their camera phones with hundreds of photos -- from loose teeth to hissy fits to each step in the potty training process -- how might the ubiquity of photos change childhood memories?

 

Maryanne Garry, a psychology³ professor at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, is trying to figure that out. For years, she's studied the effects of photography on our childhood memories.

 

"I think that the problem is that people are giving away being in the moment," she says.

 

Those parents at the park taking all those photos are actually paying less attention to the moment, she says, because they're focused on the act of taking the photo.

 

"Then they've got a thousand photos, and then they just dump⁴ the photos somewhere and don't really look at them very much, 'cause it's too difficult to tag⁵ them and organize them," she says. "That seems to me to be a kind of loss."

 

Not just a loss for parents, but for their kids as well.

 

"If parents are giving away some of their role as the archivist of the child's memory, then they're giving away some of their role as one of the key people who helps children learn how to talk about their experiences," she says.

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