Amanda Hess on the extremely-online parent
The writer discusses her new memoir, which explores pregnancy and parenting in the digital age.
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In her 2023 My Internet questionnaire, New York Times culture writer Amanda Hess said that the research for her memoir about new motherhood and technology had turned her social media feed into “a kaleidoscope of maternal anxiety and control.” That book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, will finally be born on May 6.
The memoir begins during Hess’s first pregnancy, when an ultrasound detects an abnormality in her baby, who was eventually diagnosed with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome. Hess turned to the internet for answers, and found herself hooked to its intravenous drip of tips, warnings, and product recommendations, out of which she had fashioned a makeshift sense of control.
It was only upon reflection that Hess realized the complicated role technology plays not just during pregnancy but throughout parenthood, and how period-tracking apps and live-streaming baby monitors can descend into conflict and conspiracy. In this conversation, we talk about how digital and internet literacy did (and didn’t) prepare her for parenthood, the child vs. child-free debate, and how she thinks about children using social media.
You’ve spent your career writing about tech and digital culture. How do you feel that changed your perspective as motherhood approached and in those early stages?
I actually think there are some ways in which my internet activity shielded me from thinking about parenting [pre-pregnancy], [with] my own choices and my interests and then the way those are compounded algorithmically. All of the content that I saw once I became pregnant were things that I had just never seen before, and that remains true as a parent. And so I think there's a way in which the internet intensified that feeling of surprise. Not since puberty had I had this experience where I was so vulnerable to suggestion about how I was supposed to fashion myself as a pregnant person or as a parent and my own tendency to analyze the internet didn't protect me from that. Then later, of course, as I started to see this as not just a personal experience but perhaps a subject for writing, that's when I started to use those kind of faculties. Writing the book clarified so much for me that was at the time just very confusing.
Motherhood occupies a very rich, often maligned, corner of the internet. But I know you’ve spoken about how your own pregnancy gave you empathy for where those women were coming from. I’d love to hear more about that—did you have your mind changed about anything?
The content of medical moms. My first son was born with a rare genetic condition and so as he was diagnosed during my pregnancy, and then as I was starting to raise him after he was born, I was very much served hospital content on Instagram and TikTok and whatever. Medical moms are a very online archetype that I had been aware of before and I just felt this real distaste [for], not understanding at all how you could expose your child in this way.
That response still exists within me, but it's been complicated by an understanding now that it's really important for people to talk about their lives and to tell stories about their lives and to share those stories with other people. And when you are a parent, particularly when you're a mother, particularly when your child has complex medical needs, your life can be completely consumed by that activity. And so if you are to speak about your life, that's what you're going to be talking about, that's what's right in front of you. And that's what was right in front of me as I was writing this book. I think the problem is that social media is such an imperfect, to put it mildly, way for us to tell stories about ourselves and it's incredibly fraught. But my understanding of that kind of person, what they were doing, really deepened as I became a parent myself.
One of the things that I can really relate to is how the internet can encourage a form of compulsive checking. But it was also a huge resource during your son's diagnosis. How would you categorize your relationship with the internet at that time?
Before I had this experience, I would never have considered that I might be experiencing OCD. I had this idea that OCD was someone who's, like, constantly checking to make sure they had their keys whereas I was always losing my keys and I never knew where they were. But after my pregnancy, my husband gave me this book called Stop Obsessing! and I realized that I think I do experience this obsessive pattern, and the carousel of all the things I can check on my phone just works so perfectly to fuel that obsessive compulsive cycle. I certainly, especially at times when I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety, am pulled into that compulsion to check.
Was it helpful or not? I mean, certain parts of the internet were really helpful to me, particularly after my son got the diagnosis during my pregnancy. I'm sure that every rare syndrome has a Facebook group of people who have it and their families, and so I was able to access those, which was really helpful just to see how many thousands of people were in there and to not feel like I alone am going through this thing. It's a big world that we live in and there are many people who may not live next door to me but who are available to me to talk to about this.
But I also really had this sense at first when I was starting to Google BWS [Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome] that the images and the kind of commentary that come up around a syndrome, or other forms of disability, can be really steeped in stigma and medicine and trauma. And it was only after my son was born that I realized just how biased and slanted that vision is, and how it really just takes a syndrome or a disability just completely outside of its human context. It was only when he was here as a person that I could really see that.
My checking manifested as hypochondria, and still anything health-related on the internet feels so extremely fraught.
I also feel like our medical system—it's so bad. Even if you have the best available medical care. I had this experience recently where someone I knew was in the hospital and they were sick and I was doing this advanced Googling. I was on Google Scholar, and I talked to a doctor who was like a friend of a friend and they were like, please don't consult Doctor Google. And I was like, you know what, I will stop doing that when it stops sometimes being right.
One of the discourse cycles we're currently in is about people being child-free versus people who have children. It feels like the internet exacerbated it in the sense that they are almost like two warring fandoms. What's your take on that?
There's a late chapter in the book where I talk about my neighbor who's always complaining about my children being loud. And, uh, my children are loud, but I think what the internet did was allow me to project all of these attitudes on this person who I really didn't know at all. I was really drawn to these child-free and eventually anti-natalist subreddits where I could imagine these arguments playing out. I was like, this person doesn't have kids and they don't understand that I can't just muzzle them, and they were like, this person has kids and so they don't have any respect for anybody else's time or space or whatever. And I have no idea whether any of that is really salient with this person. It was just a little soap opera that I played in my mind that was facilitated by the internet.
But I do think there's this divide and I don't know if it's technological or if it's just expressed there, but there's this construction of a child-free person as someone who doesn't need any assistance, doesn't need another person, doesn't need for themselves to ever be taken care of, and there's this construction of the person who has children who's, like, selfishly becoming a burden on society. And I think all of that is so untrue and everybody actually needs so much more support and care socially than people are generally afforded. And if we're lucky we'll all become old, and we'll all experience various forms of disability. So I just think it's this false construction, which is unfortunate. But the falseness of it can thrive online, where you're not really actually moving through space.
This is something that I feel like I do because of the internet: You probably come across maybe 100 different characters online that you have in your brain at any given time, and then the problem is then your brain kind of projects one of those pre-existing characters that you only know from the internet onto a stranger, essentially. Like if someone voted for Trump, I'm projecting a very specific person onto them that is really just a fictional person I have assembled from things I've seen on the internet.
We all have this unconscious, like, image library in our brain, and for me the internet is now the main place that I'm replenishing that library. So it's not necessarily that if I had had a kid 40 years ago the media that I would have been exposed to about pregnancy or disability would have been good—it obviously would have been very bad. But I just wanted to talk about the contours of this very modern experience that I was having.
The two big topics right now when it comes to technology and parenting are whether to show your kids on social media, and if social media is detrimental to kids’ mental health. Where do you fall on these issues?
I feel like the child itself is such an unpredictable variable that you might find that your intentions are disrupted by them. I feel more positively about screen time than I imagined that I would. My kids are 2 and 4 now, and so they're not super small newborns staring into a screen anymore, but they watch just the shittiest shit that I can imagine. I hate it so much, but I find myself so charmed by them being charmed by it even though it's just like janky CGI that seems like it was written by artificial intelligence.
Honestly, my approach to sharing their images has been really affected by the circumstances of publishing a book—I've taken their images off my Instagram account and stopped posting them because it's [been] converted into this book promotion machine. And I feel so sensitive to the parts of my children's experience that I'm sharing in the book that I don't want to then also facilitate people linking that to their image or their name.
There's something that I've come to appreciate about social media sharing since I've written the book, which is once I write the book, it's out there and it's completely out of my control. And that is true to an extent with social media, but also I can't just delete the book. I can delete my Instagram. I can delete all of these images. Some of the influencers that I've written about have done this, and now I can't see images of their kids anymore. And so there is something that is helpful about at least having that bit of control over it.
When we think about parenting spaces online, we’re mostly thinking of spaces that apply to motherhood. I’m wondering if you came across any fatherhood-specific online spaces or hangups?
There are. There's a lot of Instagram and TikTok content, and a lot of it is like—there's mom stuff like this too—it's more humor based. It's recognizable dad humor. And I found that for my husband, maybe because there's just less content, it's so intensely stereotypical, maybe even more than the content that I'm served. It's all about how dads are like, getting drunk on a golf course on a Saturday morning and their wives are calling them and they're not picking up the phone or whatever. And my husband doesn't really drink and he doesn't golf so I don't know exactly where it's coming from.
There's definitely stuff that exists to target and serve them. I talk about all of these smart baby gadgets and [how] a lot of those integrate men into the marketing of them. I think there's a sense in which they're sold as a method for a man to take this control over parenting that is maybe more masculine-coded and centered in data and technology. Even if they don't necessarily have as much of a biological or physical experience at the very beginning, they can achieve this closeness through surveillance. You know, the internet just works as this machine for operationalizing consumer capitalism, and it will reach any segment that it possibly can.
The common thing you hear about being a mom on the internet is no matter what you do, there could be criticism and you kind of have to be this perfect mom for everyone. And the guy content is like, "We're bad at this."
It's almost insulting in a different way where it's like, I'm assuming that you're basically not parenting and that's funny to us or whatever. There's this reinforcement of low expectations.
Have you found any technology that is helpful, or that you’d recommend for parenting or for children?
I really like gadgets that just do what they say they're gonna do, like our baby monitor that basically works like a walkie-talkie, the same way that a baby monitor would have worked 100 years ago. It's so great, and the great thing about it is that it doesn't do too much. I think it's taken me a while to understand that wanting to have a certain power as a parent is not the same thing as that power being good for me to have.
So even though my kids are a little older now, I know plenty of people who still have cameras set up in their little kids' rooms and there's definitely times when I would like to have a porthole into their bedroom and not have to physically announce myself in there in order to see what's going on. And I think that's why it's important for me to not have it, because those few moments when it seems really desirable or necessary I know would expand into this constant checking that I don't want to make time for in my life.
I'm so sorry to compare this to being a cat owner because it's obviously so different, but I had cameras set up in my apartment for whenever I went on vacation. And they would detect movement and send you alerts. And I had to dismantle them all because it would ruin vacations. I'd get the notification and check, but then especially if I started to notice a pattern of them always triggering the camera at the same time every morning and then I didn't get one one day, I'd spend the day being like, “Oh my God, are they OK?”
All of these surveillance mechanisms can turn into essentially nanny cams. We don't typically have childcare within our house because my kids went to daycare, but there are daycares that have live streams of rooms, which is just so violent to me. No matter how right-thinking a person you think you are, the power that's facilitated by you being able to surveil someone at work working with the person who's most precious to you, I think would just turn anyone into a monster.
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age will be out May 6, and is available for pre-order now!
Welcome to the weekly scroll, a roundup of articles, links, and other thoughts from being on the internet this week! Ahead: a creator who returned from the dead, an ousted executive editor, and an interview about sweaty feet.
What I’m consuming…
“I Found an Entire Book That Was Written About … Me. It Only Got Weirder From There.”
Missed this when it first came out, but thank you to Fast Company for the shoutout!
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