Parenthood Cannot Be Optimized
Americans, by and large, have become connoisseurs of preparation. Newlyweds scour online public-school ratings to decide on the neighborhood where they’ll raise their notional children. Tutoring programs offer to help students with the SATS, MCATs, or just about any other standardized test. Leisure activities—pickleball, baking—tend to encourage rigging oneself up with just the right gear, and plenty of different product-review sites will recommend the best-fitting sports bra or superior pie dish. Even at rest, there is something to do: Rings and watches track heart rates and sleep states and inform wearers of their “daily readiness” first thing in the morning.
This phenomenon is rampant in the great American sport of childbirth and child-rearing. As Amanda Hess, a New York Times critic at large and a savvy analyst of the online world, lays out in her spot-on and brutally funny new book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, approximately no amount of online prep actually readies you for the experience of having a baby. The only thing that can prepare you for parenthood is experiencing parenthood. But that experience is free (well, after accounting for the skyrocketing costs of caring for that child). So what parenting experts are selling—via the latest tech and all-seeing algorithms—is the illusion of control.
Hess starts her story with the unexpected: When she was seven months pregnant, she had an “abnormal” ultrasound, one of those hour-long affairs in which a medical technician murmurs to herself and refuses to confirm or deny any trouble at all. Her son was eventually diagnosed with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, a congenital condition that, among other things, causes rapid physical growth. Hess was already perennially online, but misfortune—and its kin, helplessness—turned her pregnancy and her son’s young life into a mystery to be understood. “If I had the phone,” she thinks in the middle of her ultrasound, “I could hold it close to the exam table and google my way out. I could pour my fears into its portal and process them into answers.”
But the phone itself is just a gateway—I imagine that women in the 15th century lined up outside Gutenberg’s press for pamphlets that would help them tame their wikked cild. What Hess analyzes, even when it’s laughable, distasteful, or downright harmful, is expertise. This is what so many participants in the online attention economy crave, and the internet is all too ready to proffer it up. But parents who are less online feel the same pressure, because the marketplace of expertise trickles out far beyond the realm of influencers and e-tailers.
As a member of the particularly online elite, Hess herself is also an expert of sorts, one I’ll gladly follow into the dense digital jungle. Yet she also smartly paints herself as just another willing victim of the internet, a contradiction that speaks to how so many people view their online habits. Information, she explains, is simply waiting to be accessed and used. Everything she sorts through is fodder for Second Life’s questions about who—and what—to trust online when bringing a human into the world.
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Hess does all of this without sharing a drop of advice—hallelujah. Instead, she escorts readers on a wry tour of the buffet of options available to desperate new parents. First there are the apps: Flo, the cutesily named period tracker created by two men; Baby Connect, a sleep-and-feeding tracking app that drove my husband and me crazy over how many milliliters our newborn was eating. Next come the gadgets: the Snoo, a shimmying bassinet that allegedly makes babies sleep for at least an hour longer than a typical crib; the Nanit, an eye-of-Sauron-style video monitor; Owlet, a sock-like heart-rate and oxygen sensor that turns your baby’s crib into a mini NICU. Lastly, of course, there is the parade of experts: freebirthers, who deliver alone in the wild; the self-taught parenting sages of Instagram; the Dr. Beckys of the world. Individually, these service providers have been well covered by journalists. Some of them are earnestly engaged in helping parents navigate a bewildering time of life. But as pieces of an ecosystem that encourages the monetization of parental helplessness, they take on new force. What they promise, collectively, is a level of insight—into sleeping habits, developing psyches, and much more—so powerful that it will bulldoze a path through what we know to be intractably rocky terrain.
Flo, for instance, promises its users they will “become an expert” on themselves, Hess writes. In practice, that means it offers women information about ovulation phases and mood shifts. And then, reportedly, it sells the data to Facebook. Hess uses it anyway: “Online advertisers already profited off the assumption that I hate myself. Would it really matter if they found out exactly when I hated myself the most?” The app claims to predict not only the timing of her periods, but “the emotional contours of my days”—which is not the same thing as helping her deal with them. A period is, to a degree, manageable—birth control (there’s that word) can regularize it, or sometimes even cut it down to an annual lining shed. But the experience of having a period simply must be endured: No information can get you out of it entirely (though an IUD might). The same goes for the gizmos that enable new parents to observe their little ones in previously unobservable ways. Track their heart rate; measure how much they twitch in their cribs: What used to be a beautiful and endearing, if sometimes nerve-racking, moment—watching a newborn sleep—has been sold as a method to ward off the specter of harm.
Nowhere is the clamor for tricks and hacks more pronounced than in the flood of personalities who sell online courses with titles such as “Taming Temper Tantrums” and “Winning the Toddler Stage,” as if a tiny child were a foe to be defeated. When I solicited 21 sets of parents from my 8-year-old’s class to send me names of experts they loved or loathed, 26 names arrived in just a few hours. This cavalcade of professionals has induced many new parents like Hess, and me, to imagine that we are on a pathway toward resolving the “problem” of parenting (that it’s hard) with techniques that will stamp out childishness itself, as Hess describes it. “Eating paint, resisting baths, ruining the holiday family photo: any permutation of normal childhood behavior could trigger a specialized, expert tip.”
Experts promise not only tips that are essential but new methods that are “revolutionizing”—as the media have put it—the back-and-forth between parent and child. These breakthroughs, Hess suggests, are oversold. Seeking historical perspective, she reread Benjamin Spock’s 1946 classic, Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, imagining that his advice would sound relatively conservative and fusty to herself and many modern parents. “Instead,” she writes, “I found that the advice was virtually unchanged. Spock advised parents against scolding children, threatening them, punishing them, giving them time-outs, or shooting them cross looks. He advised them to embody the role of the ‘friendly leader,’ the parent who casually redirects their toddler with the full understanding that pushing boundaries is the child’s job.” The basic guidance is the same; it’s just been commodified and reproduced in so many forms that most parents can’t help but buy into the notion that more information is better than good information—and that, as Hess puts it, “our kids could be programmed for optimal human life.”
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For all her button-pushing, Hess is never snarky or sentimental. She generously recognizes that she is bumping up against narratives that regard child-rearing as a perfectable behavior. It is no surprise that so many moms and dads (including me) have fallen for it. Our phones now serve as both the cause and the proposed solution for all of our anxieties. The possibility that the perfect parenting fix is just a click or two away has become just as addictive as any other handheld engagement bait. Some advice is certainly helpful, but the idea of mastery in parenting is an illusion—one that seems to lurk just beyond an ever-receding horizon. At one point, a friend of Hess’s reminds her that the obsession with choice shared by “a class of professional strivers” is a way “to control and optimize every aspect of life.” Hess’s reflection on her friend’s comment is telling. “Babies don’t work like that, and that’s part of what makes parenting meaningful: you do not get to choose.”