Lucy, a sweet-looking toddler with wispy blond hair, needs $450 for head shots because a talent agency is "very interested." Her mother wants you to chip in to "start her on her road to success."

A Washington University student would like some help buying a piano because she can't use the practice rooms on campus. They aren't always open, you see.

There's a local high school student with a 3.67 GPA who wants to take a 10-day trip to Costa Rica during spring break. Her mother would like you pitch in, because her daughter "could really use a trip like this for stress relief."

Or you could throw in a few dollars for a high school rugby team in San Francisco that needs money for a trip to Australia and New Zealand.

These are all public pleas for donations from the crowdfunding site GoFundMe.com, which has collectively raised a billion dollars for a multitude of causes in the past year alone.

Giving has always been a social act, one that binds people together and encourages reciprocity. Now, it's also a social media act.

In one way, it's been a blessing to be able to help people with unexpected funeral or medical expenses, or those dealing with some other crisis or disaster. It's rewarding for the giver to help a friend or stranger during a difficult time.

It's not so rewarding to see people begging for money for boob jobs, lavish birthday parties or vacations.

One mom, and certainly not the only one, posted that she wants to throw her 1-year-old a $1,000 birthday bash; won't you pitch in? (For the record, she surpassed her goal and raised $1,095.)

The number of birthday-related campaigns within the "Celebrations and Special Events" category on GoFundMe has "skyrocketed," according to a site spokesman. There was a 330 percent increase in donation volume for birthday campaigns between 2013 and 2014.

Sites such as GoFundMe have a financial stake in promoting and normalizing this uncouth behavior: They take a 5 percent cut of whatever is raised. There's also a 3 percent fee for their payment processors. Your charity or good will is their for-profit business enterprise. Also, it's "giver beware" in each of these transactions, because there's no oversight to see if the donations go toward their stated purpose.

Offline, if someone asks for money (for anything), and someone else wants to give, it's a private interaction between those two parties.

But when that transaction happens in a public space, it reminds the rest of us that we have to teach our children a value we may have taken for granted: It's not acceptable to ask friends or strangers to pay for your luxuries or to fund your wish list. The sheer volume of such shameless requests -- for things from dream weddings and cosmetic surgery to children's hobbies or sports equipment -- makes me wonder why anyone thinks it's OK.

Has crowdfunding replaced the hustle? Or has it become the new hustle?

The apparent logic is: If someone wants to give, why shouldn't I ask? There's a simple answer: It's greedy and lacking in self-pride. Would you stand on a street corner, holding a sign, asking for spare change for your daughter's cheerleading uniform or your son's football camp? Because it looks just as ridiculous to pass the tin cup on the information superhighway.

You're not asking people to fund a shortfall in your budget. You're asking them to fund a shortfall in your priorities.

No one should feel guilty for declining to donate to another able-bodied person's wish list. The world is full of causes and people with needs more compelling than a birthday trip to Mexico.

In fact, those who succumb to social pressure when they are tagged on Facebook with such ridiculous fundraising requests are enabling a culture of entitlement.

Here's a radical idea: Go fund yourself.

This was Angela Nicole's one chance to get pregnant, and she wasn't hopeful.

She was 40 years old, single, and had spent all her savings trying to conceive.

Angela, who did not want to use her last name, had been trying fertility treatments for more than two years. She had been through five rounds of IVF. In the last one, they weren't able to extract a single egg to fertilize. All in all, she had taken almost 500 shots. She injected the subcutaneous ones into her stomach herself; her father helped her with the intramuscular shots. There were days when she was getting three or four shots a day.

Out of all those attempts, she had a single viable frozen embryo to be implanted.

Her brother, Shawn, who had been supportive through the ups and downs of her treatment, told her that even though the probability was bad, the possibility was there.

"I knew the probability of it working was getting really bad," he said. "Like, extremely bad."

It came down to this one chance.

It worked.

Sophia was born four months ago. Angela's mother was over helping with the newborn when they decided to take a picture to document the journey Angela went through to have her.

She had saved nearly all the syringes and medicine vials from her IVF cycles in a big wicker basket. The day they took the photo, her mother rocked Sophia until she fell asleep, then they laid her gently on a sheet on the ground. Angela arranged the vials and syringes (all fully capped) in a circle around her sleeping baby.

"I wanted her to know how much I really, really wanted her," she said.

She climbed up on a ladder to take the picture. But when she looked down on the image, she thought, Why don't I just do a heart? It was her way of saying to her baby, "Hey, I love you."

She rearranged the needles and took the shot.

Angela, of Troy, Illinois, works as an accountant. She had focused on her career, and in her late 30s, she said she realized time was running out for her to become a mother.

"I waited a long time to find a husband, but I never did," she said. She thought about what it would mean to be a single parent. She loves her own father dearly and thought about what it would mean to have a child who wouldn't have one.

"I knew all the bad," she said. She struggled with all her doubts.

She wanted a baby anyway.

She spent more than $100,000 on the treatments. She had worked since she was 15 years old and saved diligently, never taking exotic vacations or buying fancy cars.

"I spent my money on what I really wanted," she said.

The fertility clinic where she did the IVF, the Sher Fertility Institute, contacted her a few months ago to follow up on her pregnancy. She shared the photo she had taken of Sophia surrounded by the remnants of her treatment.

They asked if they could post it on their Facebook page, and she agreed.

The image has now been viewed more than 2 million times, shared and liked and commented upon thousands of times around the world. At a time when more and more women are waiting to have children and relying on fertility treatments to have a baby, the photo touched a nerve.

Shawn, who has worked as a photographer for years, says that people identified with the message in the image -- that the photograph is interesting, but the story behind it even more so. All of those needles could have been for nothing. It came down to one chance.

Even after she got pregnant, Angela needed shots to maintain the pregnancy. She started bleeding at six weeks and thought she had lost the baby. Her blood pressure spiked near the end of her pregnancy, and she had to be induced.

"People who go through (IVF) tend to keep it to themselves," her brother said.

The experience was difficult and emotional, but this photo showcases the miracle.

"It's worth all the needles and the stress and the waiting and the ups and downs," she said. She thinks her photo of Sophia spread so far because it got to the heart of the reason people try over and over again.

People ask why she didn't adopt. She says it was one of the options she considered, but as a single woman in her 40s, it would have been nearly impossible to adopt a newborn. She wanted the entire experience from the very beginning.

Even now, when someone refers to her as a "mom," she says she's taken aback for a moment.

"Wait. What? I'm someone's mom?"

It was a dream for so long, finally realized.

There's an unexpected antidote to the social media stress that has become a part of growing up today.

When 13-year-olds believed that their parents were closely monitoring their social media, they were less distressed by online conflicts with their peers, according to a new study.

CNN commissioned the study to explore how 13-year-olds use social media and how it affects them. Researchers captured and analyzed the content of more than 150,000 social media posts made by more than 200 8th-grade students around the country. They started collecting the data last September and followed the group through the spring. The data included posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but not the students' private messages.

Along with tracking their posts, the researchers surveyed the children about how often they felt depressed, anxious or alienated; they also surveyed their parents. The results were published in an hour-long special on "Anderson Cooper 360."

Even if many parents remember the rough-and-tumble years of middle school -- the social insecurity of trying to find where one fits in -- earlier generations weren't subjected to a 24/7, real-time ticker that broadcast our social status to our peers. That's part of what social media becomes for many young people: a way to gauge popularity and self-worth in a very public way.

Thirteen-year-olds don't perceive a difference between their social lives in person and online. For them, social media is just as real a way to hang out, stay in touch and socialize.

"For young people, this is a big part of their social life," said researcher Marion Underwood, a clinical child psychologist and dean of graduate studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Some of what the researchers documented shouldn't surprise us. There was a fair amount of social aggression, vulgarity and bullying. But there was also a lot of positivity, validation and support from friends through social media. There are aspects of sharing and interacting on social media that make teens feel good, said Underwood.

A teen's perception of how closely their parents kept an eye on their social media accounts correlated to how distressed they felt by online conflict: the more monitoring, the less stress, the study found. Parents, however, tended to overestimate how well they kept tabs on their children. They also underestimated the troubles their children were experiencing online, compared to what the teens themselves reported.

The biggest source of the 13-year-olds' online stress is their friends -- not rivals or strangers. There are passive-aggressive, underhanded techniques of excluding or attacking a peer: A teen won't tag someone in a group photo on Instagram, or will make a derisive remark on Twitter without naming the other person, although everyone knows who the intended target is.

Parents said that trying to stay on top of their kids' social media was like trying to keep up with a runaway train. Plus, it seemed like much of the problematic interaction would happen in private messages or on anonymous sites, like ask.fm, or on hard-to-track apps like Snapchat.

But it appears that just the effort matters.

Co-researcher Robert Faris, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California-Davis, said it may not be the monitoring itself that reduces kids' levels of emotional distress. It could be that those parents were more likely to have positive relationships with their children and more likely to be talking to their children about their interactions online.

"I sympathize with parents today, for sure," Faris said. "I was overwhelmed, and I was getting paid to analyze this stuff."

Underwood offered specific suggestions for navigating your children's digital world:

-- Get phones out of their bedrooms at night. "If you don't do anything else," she said, "do this."

-- Don't try to read every word of what your child posts or rely on snooping software. Tech-savvy teens find ways around it, plus parents may not understand the subtle language used to exclude or belittle a person. Be aware that what they post to their friends is often highly curated and doesn't tell the whole story of what may be going on in their lives.

-- Create your own social media accounts and use them so you can experience how it feels. Follow your children's accounts.

-- Talk to young children about how to use social media, what your expectations and boundaries are and ask them what they want to get out of it.

-- Set limits. For instance, no one should be using a device at the dinner table.

-- Turn off the geo-locators on your children's posts. They allow any of your child's followers to know exactly where your child is or was.

You don't have to be perfect -- just present.