A sad truth: Christopher Robin hated Winnie the Pooh. OK, not really. But Christopher Robin Milne came to loathe the fictional world that his father, A. A. Milne, based on his son and the boy's teddy bear. When Christopher was in his 20s, he let the original Pooh, and friends, immigrate to America, where they ended up in the New York Public Library, an ocean away from the school where he was taunted over the tales written by his father. "It seemed almost to me," Christopher wrote in his autobiography, "that my father had got to where he had filched from me my good name and left me with the empty fame of being his son." By the end of his life, he had developed an aversion to teddy bears.

Ouch. And that was before blogs, or Facebook. Thanks to three of the hallmarks of our age—oversharing, overparenting, and narcissism—the intimate details of the lives of many little ones, from toddlers to teenagers, have been pasted in public forums by their mothers and fathers. Soiled nappies, tantrums, mental illness, meth. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes comforting; sometimes it touches on something important.

And sometimes it just seems wrong. Some broadcast the exploits of their offspring in a way that violates not just their privacy but their trust. I can't be the only one who is very glad my parents never wrote about my formative years.

The critical question is one of consent: who owns the story of a child? British author Julie Myerson has had to face this question twice, and has been savaged both times for claiming she does. First she wrote a popular column for The Guardian, Living With Teenagers, under a pseudonym but based on her children. Once their identities were uncovered, the teasing began: her son was nicknamed "Mr. Three Hairs" after a piece about her kids sprouting pubic hairs. The column was stopped.

Undeterred, Myerson went on to write a darker, more dramatic and awful book about her teenage son's drug use, Lost Child, just released in the U.S. In it she claims that her son Jake became addicted to skunk, a particularly potent form of marijuana. She was forced to kick him out of the family home when he was only 17, she writes, after he lied, stole, got a girl pregnant (his parents paid for the abortion), and hit his mother so hard that he perforated her eardrum. The subtitle is A Mother's Story.

For this, Myerson has become one of the most vilified women in Britain. Her son says he feels betrayed, and told one reporter he wants to change his last name to Karna, after a Hindu warrior who was rejected by his mother. Although he read the draft and told Myerson he understood why she felt compelled to write it, he claims he consulted lawyers to try to halt publication. He insists his drug use is casual and that his parents are naive.

It's awkward, messy, and ugly.

Myerson is optimistic that what she did will be good for her son—and others, who will learn of the dangers of skunk. She told me it was an intervention, a form of public shaming: "It made him face himself, big time."