The internet does not have a face. But if it did, I imagine it drools with anticipation when a user begins considering parenthood. It will proceed to unfold reams upon reams of guidance: how to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and raise the optimal child. The user can click and purchase their way through developmental milestones, download the apps, endure the ad tech, scroll social media. The internet—and all the branding—will nod approvingly, certain of their power.
Most parents of the digital age know that this is essentially how the internet operates; we speak of the all-knowing and nonexistent algorithm often and derisively. And yet, when it comes to the early stages of parenthood, we can’t get enough of the internet’s offerings. During my own pregnancy, I, too, happily acquiesced to the pastel chokehold of lactating influencers, Trumpian sleep experts, and, yes, the robotic crib now known in my house as the bad “human blender.”
It’s easy to look back on this period with a mix of humiliation and boredom. But Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, a new book by Amanda Hess, offers a different path to approaching the relationship between modern parenting and technology. In doing so, Hess, with her characteristic incisiveness and the wisdom of a writer who has long been explaining the internet to us, offers her own experience navigating this fraught relationship. The result is part memoir and rigorous reporting, an unexpected blend of piercing analysis and vulnerability.
But as much as Hess, a critic at large for the New York Times, reveals the insidious ways in which fam-tech pulls us further into ourselves, Second Life avoids the unrealistic conclusion that we set fire to the machines. Instead, the book is a gentle revolution, a meditation on how to process our digital behavior—not control it. I caught up with Hess ahead of Second Life’s publication.
You relied on thousands of screenshots, text exchanges, and personal memories to complete this memoir. Did you always know that you wanted to write about being pregnant? What was it like revisiting this digital trail?
At first, I very much did not want to write about being pregnant. But I had this idea, before I became pregnant, that I wanted to write a nonfiction book where technologies function as characters. Like the internet was an antagonist that spoke in many voices. Then when I got pregnant, I had already been thinking about this stuff and started taking screenshots of things.
I didn’t expect that my relationship with technology would deepen in the way that it did. Even after my pregnancy, I was really resistant to writing a book about parenting or, let’s be honest, mothering or motherhood. I didn’t want to write something that could be pigeonholed in that way. But I just kept coming back to the fact that this was the part of my life that I was most troubled by and had the most difficulty understanding and that I needed to work through writing. So that’s what I did.
“I had this fantasy, especially during my pregnancy, that if I consumed enough of this content, I could catch up and be ready to receive my baby after having spent so many years not thinking about having a family.”
One of the most fascinating chapters of Second Life talks about the “freebirth” movement—which pushes childbirth without medical assistance—and the movement as the origin of the birth story as a personal brand. What is it about parenting narratives and birth stories that we have long found appealing?
I think for me, I was turning to the internet to explore a lot of feelings that I felt were not socially acceptable and that I was ashamed of at times. There were things that I didn’t necessarily want to articulate or felt like I couldn’t with my family or friends. And I think that’s something that’s magnified in pregnancy, because often, you don’t want to tell someone for various reasons about your pregnancy, like you’re not prepared to tell your family or your employer or whatever.
But the internet provided this sense of reciprocal interaction where I could work out what it would be like to become a parent and what kind of parent I would be and how I would speak to my children. I think I had this fantasy, especially during my pregnancy, that if I consumed enough of this content, I could catch up after having spent so many years not thinking about having a family and figure it all out and be ready to receive my child and be a competent parent.
It’s a vulnerable time. I also understand why people end up creating these brands around their parenting or their mothering or family. For me, like, I feel so lucky that I have writing. Like, you will tear text out of my cold, dead hands. I’m never going to pivot to video. But for a lot of people, social media is the platform for telling stories about their lives and for negotiating those stories with others and sharing them. This is especially true if you are a parent who is completely consumed in the isolated work of parenting.
Yeah, I really related to your thoughts on how isolating those early days can be. I, too, found that way harder than the physical toll.
Whenever my friends come over, I have this thought in the back of my head: “It’s just as easy for me to clean up for six kids as it is for two.” It would be wonderful to formalize that, for sure.
“I feel so lucky that I have writing. Like, you will tear text out of my cold, dead hands. I’m never going to pivot to video. But for a lot of people, social media is the platform for telling stories about their lives.”
I was struck by the extent to which eugenics plays a role in modern pregnancy and app design. This feels especially horrifying in our current political era and the fascist desire to build out “the West”: Have more babies and get rid of immigrants. It’s like we’re seeing this concept taken to the extreme. Are we living in Grantly Dick-Read’s fantasy society?
Well, he wouldn’t like how many C-sections we’re having. But I remember a moment as I was writing this book and became interested in the technologies that acted as these portals to old ideas, that launders them through new images so that they become somewhat unrecognizable. I found that when you read something from 50 years ago on the same subject, biases are stated so much more plainly; the biases are easier to see because things haven’t been euphemized in that way.
There was a moment when I was writing the book where I felt the need to find something other than eugenics. But genetic testing evokes eugenics, the rejection of technology in birth evokes eugenics in its own way. I came to realize that when you’re talking about birth, and then you intersect that with consumer technologies, which are all about optimization, that’s just what eugenics is. It’s this idea that we can, like, optimize the babies that are born. The thing that interested me the most was that it was coming from all of these sides: a hyper-technological startup that starts to screen embryos for an intense number of traits, among people completely rejecting technology, and attributing a baby’s death during birth as God’s will.
What do you recommend for folks who want to maintain some level of vigilance against the darker, mega marketing schemes of this tech?
The technology that I use that is the best is an audio baby monitor, because it only does what it says it’s going to do. For instance, it only tells me if my kids are yelling.
My kids are older now, but there are times when they’re in their bedroom together, and I can hear something is happening. And I feel this desire to be able to look in there [via video]. But maybe that’s not the healthiest choice for me, because I’ll end up looking at it all the time. It’s important for me to interrogate my desires. So I love technologies that just do one thing and they don’t have upload functions or anything. I also think that once you scratch beyond the surface and examine the products that are sold as helpful to parents, you start to notice that these services aren’t helpful at all.
The chapter with the crib product Snoo is a great example of this. I got one, too, but ultimately, it didn’t work for us. I have also found that when it does work, it’s almost a bragging right. “Oh, my kid is a Snoo Baby and yours is not.” What’s going on here?
Right. There’s a marketing material line about the four-month sleep regression, where it claims that it’s very rare for new babies to have a sleep regression. But what is that even based on? That makes no sense. That’s an absurd claim. But if you are a new parent, then you think, “Okay, well, what’s wrong with my baby?” Or specifically: “What is wrong with the way that I’m soothing my baby?” That’s going to happen to parents regardless of the crib that they put their kids in.
But for me, the Snoo added these absurd additional steps to the soothing that I felt the need to master to unlock these promised hours of sleep. They use language like “Snoo Babies” and “Snoo Graduates.” But if you find that you can’t control your child’s sleep with this device and end up with a Snoo Dropout, it gives you something to project your frustrations on. When I would be troubleshooting the Snoo, putting its legs up and stuff, I would scream at it as if it were my servant or something.
Well, yeah, we spent a lot of money on this device!
That also meant, for me, that even though I don’t necessarily recommend the Snoo to other people, but because I spent money on it, I wanted my friends to use my Snoo so I could believe I got my money’s worth.
Totally. Yeah, we had only rented ours and I’m so glad. My husband hated it, called it a “human blender.” But I can’t help but identify some small level of shame that it didn’t work out for us.
The devices introduce so much doubt in your relationship with your child. Maybe you have friends who had a really good experience with this technology. But maybe that’s just the way their baby sleeps! Or that’s the way they would have learned to sleep wherever they put their baby.
You write about how millennial parenting culture emphasizes the individual, the private family. How can we be more intentional in seeking—and offering—support?
For me, the thing that’s been helpful is becoming involved with mutual aid groups in my neighborhood. There are so many parenting groups and WhatsApp chains that are very materialistic and end up being what gadget you recommend or don’t. But mutual aid groups are helpful because they’re not about my needs. It’s been helpful to put just a little more time and research into what I can do for the community. What’s that Marxist phrase? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
“One of the things that’s most insidious about parenting advice is the way that it instructs people to focus more on themselves, as opposed to their communities. Wider resources are necessary.”
I can’t help but see our reliance on these apps as a small extension of the political failure to support families: paid time leave, affordable child care, etc.
One of the things I wanted to avoid with this book was making it seem like if we got rid of all technologies, then everything would be fine. One of the things that’s most insidious about parenting advice is the way that it instructs people to focus more on themselves, as opposed to their communities. Wider resources are necessary. This is a situation that compounds on itself, where the fewer social resources we have, the more we have to invest in our own kids. I strongly reject the idea, which I think is fashionable among a lot of parenting influencers, to suggest that their work of ministering to people over Instagram is political in some way.
A bit of an aside, but one of the most engaging newsletters I’ve written for Mother Jones posed a question to readers about whether or not I should have a second kid. I was mostly joking, but the question triggered a flood of strong responses, many of them angry. Some were infuriated that I would even consider a second child when I already have one. I wanted to know: What was so triggering about this premise?
There’s this idea that we own our kids, that they’re an accessory or piece of property, or that having children is some kind of selfish pursuit. And there are so many ways in which our culture encourages us to display our children. So I completely understand when people who don’t have kids like that, [this display] is all they see. Of course, there are also people who delight in kids and helping families; I don’t want to discount that at all, and it’s one of the reasons I love living in New York.
But there are also people who believe that kids are just an extension of their parents, and therefore, they are the sole responsibility of those parents. That there is no communal responsibility for kids or anyone else. So if you have kids, you’re just making their lives more annoying. And yes, kids can be annoying, but actually, human beings can be very annoying. I think a lot of our technologies work to insulate us from the petty annoyances of other people; that’s part of the reason why they’re so seductive.
It’s true that people and kids can be annoying. But this is something we have to get past in order to live a better life and live in a true society. I hope we can live in a society and understand the importance of connecting the needs of parents to every other person’s needs. Because it’s not just parents who need caretaking assistance at some point in their lives. It’s not just parents who need an accessible way to get to the subway. The more we can connect parenting to other political needs and movements, the more we can have a coalition.