Lucy, who is from Uganda, has received prenatal care through Kangu.org (Kangu.org)

Here’s an easy way to help an expectant mom halfway around the world and, at the same time, receive expert advice on the best new baby products. This week when you join weeSpring, a Facebook-based platform where parents share recommendations on baby essentials, the company will donate $1 to Kangu.org.

Kangu, a bit like Kickstarter for poor expectant moms, is an organization that crowdfunds prenatal care and childbirth services for women in developing countries. Most of the in-need pregnant women are from Africa, with some from Nepal and India. Kangu has partnered with vetted and approved local maternity clinics and hospitals to give the women access to high-quality services, from prenatal to delivery to postnatal care.

Carloen with her healthy and happy baby. (Kangu.org)

Like Kangu, weeSpring is all about community and helping out each other. Expecting parents can use it to find out what other parents can’t live without (bouncy chair, anyone?) or discover if that $800 stroller is really worth it. New parents can pass along their own been-there, done-that wisdom while continuing to learn from their friends.

WeeSpring co-founder Allyson Downey says Kangu’s mission resonates with “our users because more than anyone else, new and expecting moms understand the quality of prenatal care.”

Downey has written about the value of networking for the Huffington Post. Her company was recently distinguished as one of 11 startups (from nearly 1700 applicants) chosen for this year's NYC program by TechStars, which mentors and helps find funding for promising new launches.

So with a click of the mouse or a tap of the finger, get ready to start sharing and helping in more ways than one.

Angelina Jolie with Vivienne Jolie Pitt. (Photo by Junko Kimura/Getty Images)

“This Back To School contest is the first of several contests Nina Kids will run this fall, including giveaways later in the fall of styles worn by Vivienne Jolie Pitt and other celebrity kids,” said Mary Robertson of Nina Kids.

The contest, which begins this Sunday and runs until August 18, will consist of a digital clue search where Nina Kids will place a hint on its Facebook wall. Each hint will be in the form of a question, riddle or clue. Fans will then have to go to the company website and search for the correct answer (always the name of a Nina Kids shoe). Those that discover the correct response and post their findings first on the Facebook wall will be eligible to win that footwear item.

“Each day we will be selecting two-three winners,” reported Nina Kids' social media wizard Lindsey Ackerman. “On the last day we will be selecting five winners!”

The Nina Kids line is available at Lord & Taylor in New York City, online and at specialty boutiques around the country.

“Nina Kids is a lifestyle brand for girls, providing fashion shoes since the 1980s for school, special occasion, casuals and everything in between,” Ms. Robertson elaborated.

According to Ms. Robertson, this year’s autumn styles include chunky glitter moccasins and sequined ballet flats and sneakers in addition to season-appropriate boots. Perhaps your darling budding fashionista will give little VJP a run for her money….

No, these are not mommy-jackers out to remind us of the labors of parenting. These are parent posters of a different breed, often aiming for the shock-and-laugh effect.

Son: Comment when and where we first met!

Friend: 7^th grade Science

Dad: Nine months before you were born. I brought you on a date and you went home with your mother.

They also seem to have mastered the fine art of embarrassment. Cite: photos of little princess’s head in the potty, or toddler son reading last month's issue of Playboy. While embarrassing perhaps to their subjects, these posts are good for a laugh and make dads not technologically-savvy enough for Facebook look just a little bit better.

Yet, Facebook fathers are not always taken so lightheartedly:

Dad: Just found out McDonalds has a playpen. Put Finn in last night, plan on picking him up Monday.

Mom friend: Please tell me you have Finn with you?

Mom friend: Not funny Steve, is Finn okay?

Necessary, Mom? (From Mommyish.com)

"Mommyjacking: The art of single-handedly ruining your friends' Facebook posts by mentioning your child completely out of the blue and steering the conversation towards parenting."

It's a craze that has swept Facebook–out of nowhere moms (and inevitably dads) will swoop down on your latest status and find a way to turn it around with a quick, often snide remark about parenting.

Sarah: “So tired, been such a long day.”

Mommyjacker: “Try having children, then you’ll know the real meaning of tired!”

Sarah is just one of many falling victim to the increasing cult of Mommyjackers, as more and more users log on to see their personal posts swarmed by unwanted advice and tidbits from their friends with children.

There are different levels of jackers, ranging from the classic mom who truly believes that seeing photos of her ultrasound will make your day to the ones who will gladly trample over your good news with their own:

Kathleen is engaged.

Mommyjacker: “Congrats! Me and Matthew found out we’re having another baby today!”

No Mommies, just no…

Be warned, New York: the next time you log on to tell the world about your good news, bad day or aching back, a mommy may just be lurking nearby ready to hi-jack the hell out of your post.

Image courtesy of Children’s Rights

The youth welfare advocacy and watchdog non-profit Children’s Rights has announced its first annual Spring Young Leaders Event, to take place Thursday June 7 at 49 Grove. Founded by civil and adolescent rights activist Marcia Robinson Lowry, Children’s Rights started as a venture of the New York Civil Liberties Union and then the American Civil Liberties Union, before establishing itself as a self-sufficient nonprofit in 1995. Children’s Rights fights legal suits on behalf of child welfare and foster care initiatives and publishes national policy reports to generate awareness on the injustices many children suffer in the U.S.

This May, for National Foster Care Month, the organization launched Trapped?, an interactive Facebook interface, which charts the saga of “two fictitious brothers who were removed from an abusive home and separated when they were young. Users attempt to navigate tough life choices for one of the brothers, only to be confronted with daunting statistics. With each click, users learn about the grim state of U.S. foster care.”

Quite the social pack has already formed a host committee to support the spring event that will benefit Children’s Rights various efforts. The evening will commence at 7.30p.m. with a VIP cocktail and continue into the night with dancing and a special silent auction.

Tables for the benefit are $500 and include an open bar, while individual tickets start at $50. For more information email Walter Illy.

Neil Hughes and Peter Davies as seen in Seven Plus 7.

A friend of mine has a two-year-old daughter named Rose who I’ve never met. But I know what she looks like, what her mannerisms are and on any given day, a few things she did last week. And not because I talk to her father. I know this because Rose, who is not yet able to read or write (even the most ambitious of New York kids can’t achieve literacy at 18 months) has a blog.

It’s unclear right now how long Rose’s parents intend to keep up the blog, which publicly documents Rose’s activities and development. Or how Rose, when she becomes old enough to realize that the blog exists, will react to it. After all, she’s not the only two-year-old with an Internet presence in New York. There are plenty of adorable camera-ready toddlers with Twitter accounts, YouTube videos, Facebook accounts and Tumblr blogs. The proliferation of technology would seem to suggest that constructing a comprehensive presence on the Internet may now be as commonplace a childhood ritual as notching the door every time junior grows an inch.

But it’s not without precedent. In perusing Rose’s blog I was reminded of the 1964 documentary Seven Up!, wherein director Paul Almond and his assistant, Michael Apted, selected fourteen children from various backgrounds and economic environments in the UK and filmed them talking about their lives, their personal preferences and their dreams for the future. In 1970, Apted took over the project, filming the children at age 14 for a new film, 7 Plus Seven. Apted has directed a new installment (the third was titled, fittingly, 21 Up) every seven years, with a few participants dropping out along the way, some because they were uncomfortable watching their lives play out in public. In May, the newest of the series, 56 Up, is scheduled to debut.

Almond, Apted, and fellow researcher Gordon McDougall originally selected the participants to showcase a wide swath of socioeconomic backgrounds with the hypothesis that one’s background could ultimately be a major determining factor in the children’s success or failure. English class structure is, of course, a bit more rigid than in America, so in theory we might reject that premise altogether, but as Apted follows the lively, energetic kids into their sometimes desultory and frustrating forays into middle age, it’s clear that a few of children had some advantages.

Take, for example, three boys from the same prestigious prep school: A young Andrew Brackfield, who reported at the age of 7 that he enjoyed reading the Financial Times, went to Cambridge and became a solicitor. Charles Furneaux is a successful journalist who did post-grad work at Oxford. And John Brisby (Oxford, natch) runs a Bulgarian charity.

Others didn’t fare as well—the women, in particular. Three working class girls from London (Sue, Jackie and Lynn) cycled through various jobs, divorces and missed the train to Oxford and Cambridge.

But all were, in ways both overt and subtle, affected by the films themselves. “Every seven years a little pill of poison gets injected,” says Brisby wryly after a few rounds of filming. Nick Hitchon’s marriage fell apart after his then-wife was upset by negative commentary about their relationship in 28 Up (“People saw the film and said, ‘This marriage isn’t going to work’” said Hitchon).  Feedback from the show began to shape how the participants behaved on camera, as they became more aware of how far reaching its influence was. The subjects became more self-aware, more considered in their speech.

In fact, it’s probably fair to say that the participants were experiencing the predictable after-effects of what may quite possibly be the world’s longest reality show.

It’s a bit too early to tell whether modern technology may have the same effect on this generation of toddlers, who will one day grow up to be 56-year-olds themselves, whose lives will have been documented far more continuously and comprehensively than a few hours of being interviewed every seven years. Apted’s conceit won’t be a new one by then, and we’ll have a large body of documentary work—both intentional and unintentional—that voluntarily chronicles the development of children from a variety of backgrounds, in both professional and amateur formats. (For the former, the 2010 film Babies comes to mind.)

And by then, living in public may not be as much of a challenge.

Reality TV seems commonplace, even normal. (Some of the participants actually seem like normal, sane people these days. The Bachelorette even recently featured an investment banker from New York—a species of contestant you’d think would be allergic to Klieg lights.)

But even more significant, Kids These Days are perfectly capable of documenting themselves—and more than willing to do so.  By the time Rose is ten, she’ll probably be updating her own Facebook page. And her Twitter, and her Tumblr, and a myriad of other web services that allow her to project the daily rituals of her existence to anyone with wifi connection. The Way We Live Now will have never been so minutely chronicled.

For this generation, individual narratives will be shaped as much by the participants as the observers. Rose will be her own Michael Apted, choosing to reveal her preferences, her socioeconomic status and the arc of her life and career in carefully chosen increments. The experience will be less a poison pill than a tiny periodic inoculation—a minute dose of arsenic to build up an immunity.

That is not to say that it’s a bad thing. If self-documentation leads to more self-awareness and studied examination of how other people view you, for better or worse, it facilitates introspection in a culture than doesn’t necessarily reward it.

Which is why when, a couple of weeks ago, a friend showed me a Twitter handle he’d reserved for a colleague’s baby girl and asked if I thought it was weird or inappropriate to offer the handle as a congratulatory baby gift, I thought about Rose and said, “No, no, I think it’s fine. Cute, even.” We wouldn’t want the new baby to be without a Twitter account.  Documentation of baby’s steps – and baby steps generally – start early now.

And better to grab the handle—before someone else takes it.