The other day, after reading a tweet from Dean Shareski about being upset that Shareski.com (we think it was) was already registered to someone else, we buzzed over to GoDaddy and snagged “tessrichardson.name” and “tuckerrichardson.name” for the next 10 years.

We’re expecting big things, kids.

On some weird level, we feel like this domain-reserving thing is now a part of being parents, of providing as much opportunity as we can for our kids’ futures. And we know that sounds really, really silly to some, but we think we actually mean it. (We don’t think, however, as some are doing, that we would pick a name for our child based on the domain being free…oy.) We wistfully imagine the day that Tess goes for a job interview and maybe gets some minor bump by the fact that she can pull up her own domain and start clicking through the wonderful work she’s created, the ways in which she’s been changing the world, and her vision of what’s to come.

Parents can dream, right? (Is Father’s Day this Sunday, btw?)

But we’ve been wondering how long it’s going to take until the digital footprint is an expectation rather than just an exception. Right now, for many folks, no footprint is a good footprint. But we wonder how long it’s going to take for employers or potential mates or whatever else to wonder “what, no footprint?” when they start looking around for one. As in “haven’t you been participating and doing good work that you want to share?” We tweeted out that same question today during a workshop and got some great responses that were literally all over the timeline. (Read from the bottom up.)

What a headshift this is for many of us, however. When we say to teachers “You want your kids to have a footprint” or “You want to have your own footprint” and suggest they embrace these ideas rather than avoid them, we can feel the discomfort. It goes against our best judgment, which, in this case, isn’t really best at all.

But we’ll just say it one more time for the heck of it. Our kids are going to be Googled over and over, and when they are, we want tessrichardson.name and tuckerrichardson.name to come up at the top of the list. With any luck, whoever is looking will be impressed.