I call it the Washington Post rule, but you can substitute the name of your local newspaper. Any name will do.

The point is that you need to learn it and live by it. Once your kids start surfing the Web and sending emails, you need to teach it to them, too.

What is the Washington Post rule? Just this: Do NOT write anything in an email that you don’t want to read on the front page of The Washington Post.

A soccer coach for girls ages six and seven in Scituate, Massachusetts is learning this lesson now, and it’s one he should have known all along. He sent an introductory letter via email to his team’s parents, one he claims he intended to be humorous. Even giving the coach the benefit of the doubt, the problem was that some of these parents didn’t know him at all and thus received his words without any of the context surrounding the coach’s writing. There is now a raging debate in Scituate about whether the coach is an offensive moron or merely misunderstood, camera crews and police are showing up at the little girls’ practices and the coach is a coach no more.

The lesson we can all learn from this debacle—if we don’t know it already—is that in a society where our most popular entertainment is personal confession and where we can instantly connect with millions of people around the globe, communication often feels anonymous. We post something on a blog or other website, hit the ‘send’ button on an email and never worry about it again. It’s quick, it seems fleeting and either we target a specific recipient or, often, we assume that because everyone else sends stuff out into the internet, what we put out there will blend into the sea of anonymity and never have individual repercussions for us.

But none of that is true.

Just because modern communication feels anonymous, that doesn’t mean that it is. When you send an email, you are sending it to people, all of whom will imbue your words with their own, particular contexts. Here is where the coach violated another basic rule of communication: know your audience. You wouldn’t tell that story about the first time you ever got drunk in the same manner to your best friend, your mother and your eight-year-old child, would you? You’d tell it to each of them differently, because the context surrounding your relationship with each of them is different. Well, the same principle applies via email. The soccer coach in our story didn’t even know some of the recipients of his email, so his sarcastic, alleged humor had to stand on its own, and it’s no stretch at all to understand why some parents found it offensive.

Furthering the lesson, emails can be forwarded and thus read by people the writer never intended to view them. They can also be—and who hasn’t done this at least once?—sent to the wrong person by a simple slip of the fingertip. When you send something out there, you have to be certain that you can live with the consequences of an unintended readership; in other words, you need to know that you can cope if what you write ends up on the front page of The Washington Post.

(A parallel lesson is that anything you post on the internet is NOT anonymous. Just ask all those interviewees who lost jobs because their potential bosses read their Facebook pages.)

As parents, we think about how to keep our kids safe as they are introduced to the online world. We know that there are scary people out there, and we need to teach our kids the rules for becoming part of the global community while they explore it. But maybe we parents need to take a few moments every now and then to examine our own communications habits and make sure we are employing sound judgment ourselves. You can skip that self-analysis, of course. Just assume that everyone will take your words as you meant them and that every tap of your keyboard will come out all right.

But then don’t be surprised if one day your bon mots turn around and bite you in the behind.