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Writing about contemporary parenting so often gets stuck in a hand-wringing rut. Especially when it comes to parenting and technology, it can seem like there’s only one way to feel about it (bad) and only one way to write about it (angrily). But apps and devices are our familiars now. Isn’t our relationship with digital technology a little more nuanced than simply shame and loathing? For better and for worse, doesn’t digital technology belong to the poetics of our everyday life?
In her new memoir, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age (coming May 6 from Doubleday), New York Times journalist Amanda Hess leaves behind the stale conventions that plague so much parenting writing, and treats digital culture and the internet as it is: a character in our lives, deserving of our sharpest critical engagement, but also part of how we make ourselves at home in the world.
Second Life is a treat. While investigating the origins of many of the apps and tools that new parents have come to see as endemic to the parenting experience, Hess takes us on fascinating detours into the history of fetal imaging (no spoilers, but those photos of fetuses you’ll often see on anti-abortion billboards have a wildly ironic backstory), feminism’s flirtation with eugenics, and the origins of what we now think of as “natural childbirth,” the ideological forefather of which is a British obstetrician named Grantly Dick-Read. It’s also a tender and often very funny memoir of Hess’s first pregnancy, during which she found out her son would be born with a genetic condition, Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome. Hess’s writing about her and her partner’s pathways through the ever-shifting ethical terrain of genetic testing is unflinching and curious. She is a generous thinker, even when she’s up against ideologies that repel her.
I spoke to Hess over Zoom. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
In parenting writing, there is a pressure to be telling people how best to do things — and this book does not do that. I was grateful for that.
That’s a phenomenon in tech writing too. It’s like, is the technology good or bad? Does it work or not? Is it worth the money? And I’m someone who has been writing about technology for a long time, and I still don’t want to approach it as an expert. I’m actually really bad at using my phone and just swipe at it endlessly until it produces what it’s supposed to produce.
In the section about the pregnancy tracker you were using, Flo, you describe a notification you receive that reads, “Baby has gotten so smart and coordinated!” — while the baby is in utero. Do you think that apps like this, which are constantly assessing growth and assigning bogus characteristics, even before a baby is born, have the effect of priming the pump for a certain kind of intensive parenting?
I was using a period app (Flo), and then it became my pregnancy app. When it converted from a period app to a pregnancy app, it felt like it was inducting me into a completely new program. “Period mode,” was like, Listen to your body. Learn about your cycle. Make empowered choices. And then you enter “Pregnancy Mode” and it’s like, Grow the optimal human child! I think a lot of these technologies are habituating us to experiencing some outside surveillance of our bodies as normal, but also creating this expectation and hope that our babies be “normal,” or in fact, superior.
And meanwhile you’re developing a familiarity with the app. It starts to feel personal, because it’s communicating to you about such an intimate process.
I have this very distinct memory of the CGI fetus that my app conjured for me. It feels so silly talking about this, because my rational brain is like, Of course, the CGI fetus is not the fetus inside of you. It’s not like a window into your body. But the way I used the app, I felt that it was. It develops a mouth and eyes and ears, and it’s smiling, and then it’s tumbling around. Late in the pregnancy I ended up having an abnormal ultrasound, and then ultimately, my child was diagnosed prenatally with a genetic condition. I remember being so angry at the CGI fetus that it had pretended it was my baby and it wasn’t. And that’s such a dinky technology. It’s so stupid. And I just poured so much of my emotion into it because I was pregnant for the first time, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
In the book you go down a freebirther rabbit hole, and you end up attending one of their in-person weeklong gatherings, which you describe in an incredible chapter. What was it about the freebirthers — people who give birth unassisted at home, without doctors or midwives — that drew you in?
The groups that fascinate me are people who make me feel implicated in some way. I feel much more triggered by people who are doing an intensive mothering style that’s based in “science” or whatever, and they’re using pink brain emoji to be like, “Add this drink to your child’s milk to increase their brain power!” I’m not doing that stuff, but I feel like I am the target audience for that, so it bothers me.
With freebirthers, the parts of their presentation that interested me the most were ones where I saw echoes in this alternate parenting style that’s very rational and scientific. Throughout the book, there are eugenic strains to basically every technology that I’m talking about, and there’s this techno-eugenic idea that’s about using prenatal testing to eliminate certain kinds of people. And then there’s this “natural” presentation of it that’s about being okay with certain children dying in childbirth, because they’re being selected out. Those two projects feel aligned to me, though they’re expressed so differently.
Freebirthers are also associated with the anti-vaxx movement, which you don’t talk about in the book, but when we’re talking about technology and “nature,” it’s part of the same conversation.
I’m a member of some groups that are dedicated to my son’s syndrome, and once in a while, there’ll be a thread that starts about vaccines. Often it’s people questioning whether the COVID vaccine could potentially be related to triggering this genetic change. And I feel like I understand that feeling so much better now than I did before I wrote the book.
I think, because I was not raised to see my ultimate role in life as being a wife and mother, it’s easier for me to shrug this off, but I still feel it — this idea that mothers are expected to create these “normal,” idealized children. To me, disability is normal. But I think if you end up having a child who has a disability or rare disease — something that is unacceptable, basically, under these unspoken eugenic ideologies — you may find some comfort in the idea that the genetic change didn’t come from you, that it came from a pharmaceutical company. And you may also find some comfort in being able to craft this identity that reasserts your worth as a mother in fighting that pharmaceutical company in order to protect your kid. For me, it’s not vaccines. I don’t think vaccines are causing it. But doctors don’t know what triggers BWS. And it’s much more common in pregnancies that use IVF. So there are medical technologies that we know can contribute to some of these things. So vaccine hesitancy doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s just not the right answer.
Can we talk about your downstairs neighbors? In the book, there’s a section about how there were three roommates living below you, and they complained constantly about your kids’ noise, which drove you to distraction. I was wondering, as a fellow city-dweller who has had neighbor issues, how’s that going these days?
Well, those neighbors left, and now there are new people living there. And this is going against everything that I believe in, but I refuse to talk to them or acknowledge their presence, because I don’t want them to start a conversation with me and be like, “Your kids are like, really fucking loud.”
It’s really sad, because all I share with my neighbors is this silent annoyance. I didn’t know anything about my old neighbors. I knew that they didn’t have children, but I didn’t know if they were committed to not having children or anything like that. In that chapter, I started out really struggling. I created this profile of them in my mind as people who simply detested children. I would go on Reddit to read the meanest posts from child-free people I didn’t even know. I found this release by getting mad at the rude child-free posters in a way that I wouldn’t allow myself to be rude to the people downstairs.
But as that chapter progressed, I started to step away and see how selfish and focused on the individual family so much of this Instagram-approved parenting culture is. Whereas I started out being like, they’re being incredibly selfish because they are not recognizing that a child can’t stop waking up crying in the middle of the night, later I realized there’s a mutual selfishness that is interacting with each other. This conflict isn’t because either of us is bad. I didn’t know anything about them. But the way that our society is mainly structured, we share a floor and a ceiling, and that’s it. That’s the only thing that is shared between us, and I think that’s really at the root of the problem.
Maybe if you knew anything about each other, if you shared anything at all, it would be easier for them to accept that kids’ noise can’t be controlled all the time. Or that kids, in general, resist control.
I think a lot of the technologies that I write about in the book are about trying to seize this illusion of control of your kids. And I think it’s not an accident that many of them only work while the kid is sleeping. The only time they can be monitored fully is when they’re literally knocked out. But ultimately, I don’t have control over these people. And it’s pretty cool.
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