Call it a YouTube homecoming. A generation of military kids are sharing tearful reunions with long-absent parents as surprise arrivals are videotaped and posted on the Internet or played on cable news for the world to see.

Ronda Kaysen: The videos are tearjerkers -- a 10-year-old girl shrieks in her 4th grade class and leaps into her father's arms, sobbing uncontrollably; an 11-year-old boy is stunned when his father turns up on a football field with 45,000 Jacksonville Jaguar fans looking on. But some wonder if all this public attention to such a private event might be better for curious onlookers than it is for the kids, the New York Times reported in a Sunday feature.

After all, these kids have been separated from their parents for a long time. The 4th grader, Hannah Myers, hadn't seen her father in nearly a year while he was stationed in Iraq. She had spent the year anxious that he might not return at all. Her uncle had been killed in Iraq, and her father had enlisted to finish his tour of duty. Their surprise reunion was played on CNN and included an interview with both Hannah and her dad, Sgt. Joseph Myers.

"Some people think it's totally fine," Lillian Connolly, a mother of four who leads support groups for military families in Brockton, Mass., told the Times. "But I recommend to families not to surprise children. The child has been without a parent for so long. The child can hold anger. You never know how they're going to react."

Connolly, whose husband is on his third deployment to Iraq, thinks doing it in front of the media is especially harsh on kids.

The military thinks it's great PR. It gives the public a peek into the emotional life of military families and creates a warm, fuzzy feeling about a war that doesn't elicit much warmth from the public these days. And many of the kids like it. Hannah still Googles her name to see how many hits she gets and watches the YouTube video.

But who knows how a kid will react to the unexpected arrival of a parent who's been gone for a long time? He might feel angry and abandoned, and if the reunion is public, it doesn't give him the chance to express his true feelings. Or, an adolescent might feel uncomfortable expressing her raw emotions in front of her classmates -- or later feel embarrassed because she did.

Military families are experiencing two long, grueling wars largely alone. Most Americans have no idea what they go through being separated from each other for so long. These videos give us a flash of the toll it takes. They make us all stop and watch and remember. But, at the same time, they paint a rosy picture -- Look! Daddy's back, everything's okay! -- when the story of return is more complicated than a 30-second YouTube video. Parents are sometimes returning for a brief leave, and those euphoric kids will have to go through a wrenching separation in another two weeks. Some parents who've returned have changed from war, and the family faces a long readjustment.

What do you think: Are these videos good for kids or exploiting their emotions to satisfy the public's curiosity?

Ronda Kaysen is a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, BusinessWeek.com, Architectural Record, Huffington Post, New York Observer and AM New York. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.