Is Tech Really Helping Parents?

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I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is a Sunday story where we go deep on one big story.

My kids are growing up so fast and it seems like just as fast as they're growing up, technology is zooming ahead even faster.

As a parent, it can be really overwhelming, especially when they're babies and they're really little and just seem so fragile.

And companies can really play on parents' fears and anxieties to get them to buy gadgets and tech far beyond what's necessary.

And that's one of the ideas explored in the new book by author Amanda Hess, Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age.

Today on the Sunday Story, on the media producer Molly Rosen talks with Amanda Hess about parenting in the new age of tech.

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We're back with a Sunday story.

On the media, producer Molly Rosen is talking to author Amanda Hess about having kids in the digital age.

Here's Molly.

So there's a reason that I am doing this interview and not one of our hosts, and that's because I just had a baby nine months ago.

Oh my gosh.

I either recently experienced or am in the midst of some of the things that you write about in your book.

And I really felt like your book helped me process some questions that I did not even know would arise for me.

You have written for many years about the internet and pop culture, and this book is a lot about how various technologies mediated the experience of your pregnancy and birth and parenting.

When did you decide that there was a book here?

You know, I have been writing about the internet for such a long time and I have this relationship with it where I I have a critical distance to the things that I'm investigating and it's very routine for me to look into something that's happening on the internet and maybe like join into a community for a little bit and then leave and leave it behind emotionally too and it was immediately when I got pregnant that I realized that that was not going to happen this time

and I just had a very different relationship where the critical distance was like completely gone.

But I did, just because I'm so used to it, I started taking screenshots and notes of things that I was seeing related to pregnancy online from the very beginning.

And then when I was seven months pregnant and I had an abnormal ultrasound and I realized that my pregnancy was less than normal, I had this feeling, this intense superstitious feeling, that by taking notes on my experience, and like writing little jokes to myself about how funny maternity wear advertising is, that I had doomed my pregnancy in some way, this very powerfully superstitious feeling, and I'm not a superstitious person.

And so then it was clear to me that I was not going to be writing about this experience.

And then it was only later after my son was born that I realized that this feeling of superstition and this just sub-rational

part of me that was driving so much of my interaction with the internet was actually really interesting to me and I should try to find out more about why I felt that way.

Yeah, that's so interesting because I feel like I hear you saying that you almost had your critic hat on at first, where some things were maybe funny or unusual, and then it got very real.

But that almost made it more worth exploring and writing about.

Yeah.

And I also felt like I've done a bunch of stuff on the internet that maybe is less than productive for myself, just wasting time trying to solve like a plane crash from 15 years ago or like more seriously trying to lose some weight and getting like a little bit obsessed with an app that shows the jagged line of my body trying to approach this straight line of my goal weight or whatever.

And I always felt like the only person I was really hurting was myself.

But immediately when I got pregnant, I was like, I'm now using these tools to bring another person into the world.

And I think that also forced a reckoning for me in trying to understand better how I was internalizing some of the messages from those apps.

I do want to ask about one of the apps that you used pre-pregnancy and then during pregnancy, which is a period tracker app called Flow.

It's very popular.

And when you became pregnant, it switched into pregnancy mode.

How did your relationship with the app evolve over the course of your pregnancy?

When I first downloaded Flow to track my period, it was, you know, it sort of presented itself to me as this like girl power app that's for learning about yourself and empowering yourself through knowledge of your body.

And it's very feminized in its presentation.

It sort of looks like a pre-teen diary.

And I found it very helpful actually, but I didn't think at the time that I downloaded it that it would also transform through pregnancy mode.

It makes it so clear that it's gamifying a pregnancy.

And immediately when I activated pregnancy mode, I just had a completely different experience with it.

And the interface was so different.

You know, it had turned from this kind of empowering diary into a disciplinary program, something that would tell me what I should be doing every day or every week, and then show this visualization of my progress through like a CGI image of like a stock pregnant person whose belly is expanding and a CGI image of like this cell floating in nothing and then a blastocyst and an embryo and a little shrimp-like being and then like a little peach baby doll that represented my child.

And I think the thing that I never could have explained to myself before and is difficult for me to even understand now that I'm not pregnant anymore is that when I looked at that janky image of a fetus, I felt like I was looking inside my body.

It felt like it was really a true representation of my pregnancy, when of course, it's just this cartoon that's generated for tens of millions of people who activate pregnancy mode through the app.

Aaron Powell, there was a federal trade commission complaint filed against Flow in 2021 regarding its handling of sensitive personal information.

Obviously, a period tracker app, it's very personal information.

I'm curious, after your reporting, what are your thoughts on the use of these apps and the potential privacy implications?

There is a lot of concern that data from a period app or a pregnancy app will be used explicitly in, like, a case to criminalize an abortion or a miscarriage or a stillbirth or something like that.

When I spoke with lawyers who defend women in pregnancy criminalization cases, they told me that they had not seen a case where that had happened yet.

I think what is obvious to me just from using the app, even if we don't know exactly how this data is being used, is that a consumer surveillance app functions to get us used to this idea that there ought to be an outside authority that is tracking and monitoring a pregnancy or even you know a menstrual cycle and that this is a good and necessary thing and that our bodies must be controlled and datafied in this way in order to have an optimal pregnancy or an optimal birth.

And so I'm much more interested in the cultural habits that might emerge from the widespread use of that technology.

Yes.

You're right that advertising on Instagram became so personalized that it started to feel intimate.

What did you find through your reporting about how many trackers were interested in the data about your pregnancy and about how much that information was worth?

So immediately after I got a positive pregnancy test, I searched what to do when you get pregnant on Google.

And a WebMD link popped up.

What I was not aware of was like how embedded in the online advertising ecosystem WebMD is.

So I then later went back and retraced my steps and found that when I searched for that again and went back to that WebMD page,

That action had allowed 74 ad tracking companies to track me and stored 153 cookies in my browser and also sent that information to Facebook.

So about 24 hours after I made that search, when I was just like staring at Instagram, I started seeing my ads turn into prenatal vitamin ads, maternity dress ads.

And so a lot of the times when a tech company is accused of using sensitive data that has to do with menstruation or pregnancy, they'll say something like, there's no part of our back end that's tracking who is and who isn't pregnant, but there really doesn't have to be because the systems are complex enough and automated enough that it just knows that if you search what I searched, you may be more interested in prenatal vitamin Ad than someone who has not searched for that and ended up on the I Just Got Pregnant page on WebMD.

You open your book with a pretty intense scene.

You're lying on an exam chair in the doctor's office and your routine ultrasound is going kind of suspiciously long.

The technician keeps taking images and you can tell that they've seen something that they want to look into.

This starts you on what you call a diagnostic odyssey, trips from one medical specialist to another.

Could you walk me through how this experience unfolded for you?

Yeah, I mean, I was lying there on the table and every time this had happened previously in my pregnancy, there was a little voice of worry that was like, what if something's wrong?

What are they going to say?

And every time it was completely normal and this time it wasn't.

And so it felt like this thing that I had long feared was coming true.

And the thing that I remember the most about being on that table, my husband wasn't there because this was 2020.

And so guests were like not allowed in an ultrasound room.

And my first thought wasn't, I wish my husband was here.

My first thought was, I wish I had my phone with me here so I could start Googling these things that I'm seeing the technician investigate on the screen.

And then once I did seize my phone, I seldom let it go.

You wrote that if I had the phone, 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.

Yeah.

Eventually when the doctor came in, he told me that my son was sticking out his tongue on the ultrasound persistently, which is unusual, and that he suspected that it might be a rare genetic condition called Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, which now I'm very familiar with because he was right, and my son does have that.

But at the time, all I heard was unrecognizable German name syndrome, and it was incredibly scary.

It took a full month.

to confirm that that's what it was.

And in between, there were many theories, some of them catastrophic, about what was actually going on.

Later, what I really came away with from that experience was, you know, I had started in the pregnancy internet so centered in its image of what a pregnant person in a pregnancy is supposed to look like.

White, able-bodied woman who has enough money that maybe she'll buy a gadget to put in her nursery.

So we're gonna pay a lot of attention to her.

And then, you know, this image from Flow that was just just like stock fetus.

And it was only after I had that ultrasound that I realized, of course, Flo's stock image did not look like my son looked on an ultrasound.

And this other pregnancy internet zone that I had entered was

one that

acknowledged disability, which the generic pregnancy internet really did not.

I felt like I had been cast out of the normal pregnancy internet that had spent seven months trying to get me to feel like it was my community.

And at first, that felt awful.

And later, I now think of it as such a gift to have this opportunity to see all of the assumptions that I had been making all along that didn't apply to me and, frankly, like do not apply to anyone.

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So I want to move on to early parenthood.

You go through something with your first son that to me just sounded incredibly difficult, which is that you had to strap on oxygen tubes every time he was sleeping.

And as someone who is very familiar with the difficulty of newborn sleep, that just sounds hard.

And you embarked on a journey where you tried out some of the baby products on the market to optimize sleep.

I'm curious what your takeaways were from that.

Yeah, so before my son was born, my husband and I learned about the snoo, which is this robotic bassinet that like sways back and forth and emits a whooshing sound that mimics the womb.

And the snoo promises that snoo babies, it says on average, sleep one to two hours more than babies who do not go to sleep in the snoo.

And if you've ever had a baby, one to two hours, one to two hours is like a lifetime.

Yeah.

That's such a long period of time to suggest that you can add to your baby's sleep.

And so I was like, I am using this thing and like I'm going to try to get my one to two hours out of it that I had been promised or whatever.

I didn't buy it from the company, I bought it secondhand, so I didn't have any of its like troubleshooting access.

And so it meant that I was also then going online to new online communities of parents being like, How do I get this thing to work?

Like it says to like actually make my child sleep more because he was not a great or easy sleeper.

And the thing that I really took away from that experience was

this device, which not only promised to like improve my baby's sleep, but also promised to improve my understanding of my baby's sleep in that it also like spat out this data and insights into when he had woken up, when he was fussing, when he was going back to sleep, the cumulative hours he had slept had actually gotten in the way of me really understanding him and what he needed for sleep.

And so after I used that, I became curious about all of these other products that are on the market, smart baby cameras, the Owlet, which is a quasi-medical sock that you put around your child's ankle that gives you insight into your child's pulse and oxygen saturation and stuff like that.

And I really came to understand because I was using a real medical device, I wanted only to get rid of this device.

Like I only wanted to banish it from my home.

And I was so excited when he was seven months and we could get rid of it.

He had like grown out of it.

And the idea that this is now like a precious commodity that tech companies are selling to people to like bring the medical environment into their home, I think is so interesting and speaks to just this tantalizing idea that we can completely control and optimize everything about our baby's health and their sleep.

And it makes sense to me that so many of these things are focused on sleep because it's only when your newborn is like knocked out that it seems like you have any control over them, really.

Yes, that's actually a big takeaway of mine from your book was that it's about technology.

But I also saw it as really about you as an individual working with all these different systems, the medical system, the economy, these technology platforms.

And I'm curious how your experience in writing this book left you thinking about the control that we like to pretend that we have over our lives.

Yeah, I mean, I think because I experienced this like profound loss in control during my pregnancy, it actually helped me when my son was actually born to let go of that a little bit.

I saw a lot of peers and friends who I think were like really in the thick of that, in the newborn stage, just trying to make sure that nothing bad happened, that nothing south of normal was happening or whatever.

And I was like, I already know that something abnormal has happened and that for whatever reason has given me the confidence that like it's going to be okay.

But I also think

the older your kids get, the less control you have over them and the easier it is to see that you never really had that control.

They become their own person and you realize that it was the same personality that they've had from the moment you first held them.

And it's only really in pregnancy and then this newborn stage when I think technology companies can provide this fantasy that you do have total control and that every decision that you make will have some profound effect over their future.

So I don't know if it was writing the book or just having my kids grow up and grow away from me a little bit that let me understand that that was the thing that I had really been looking for and that is so elusive and can't actually be delivered to a parent.

Aaron Powell, you said something really interesting, which I think has come up a couple of times, which is that you see this as technology companies kind of getting us used to the need to have this kind of outside authority telling us this information about our very personal lives.

And I have noticed actually becoming a parent that I'm willing to compromise on some things with technology that I don't think I would have otherwise.

I think because it feels so important.

So for example, my husband and I use this app tracking our baby's sleep that uses AI to have these predictive windows about when he should go to bed.

And we sometimes joke that like, I don't know if we would know when he's supposed to sleep.

Embarrassingly, like, I think we wouldn't know without the app.

I mean, I really felt like during pregnancy, I was trained to see myself as somebody who needed to be surveilled, that my pregnancy needed to be surveilled in order for me to do it correctly.

I became comfortable with that.

And then once my child was born, it was like, okay, you're the surveillor now.

You're in the surveilling seat, like you have the app on your phone that monitors your baby.

I tried out this camera in my kids' room called the Nanit, which is an AI-enabled baby monitor.

And I used it because I wanted to see what these emerging technologies were like.

It does this thing where through machine learning, it monitors when your child is moving in some way and it captures video and puts it in a little feed for you in the morning.

So I could see when my kids were rustling in their sleep or when they got up or when they said something, just this little movie made of surveillance footage of my kids.

And obviously, like, I think my kids are the most beautiful people in the world.

And so I was like, oh, they're so cute.

And then it was, it wasn't until one night I laid down with my son to help him try to go to sleep that I was able to see what he sees from this camera.

And it was just four glowing red eyes.

And it made me really question

how our kids are experiencing these things and how surveillance is becoming equated to care.

I think some of these apps promise, like you say, that if we just had the right data, if we have enough information, we can solve all of our own problems.

I think what we get is a lot of information and insights and data and advice when what we actually need is support.

I think a lot of these technologies just encourage us to pay more attention to our own kids when we need to be figuring out how we can have a vision of taking care of other people's kids and allowing other people to take care of our kids, not in a way that is part of the care economy, but that is just built into our society.

Amanda, thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

This was really fun.

Amanda Hess is the author of the new book, Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age.

This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Jenny Schmidt.

The original on the media episode was produced by Molly Rosen, edited by Katia Rogers, and engineered by Jared Paul.

The Sunday Story team also includes Justine Yan and Liana Simstrom.

Our executive producer is Irene Naguchi.

I'm Aisha Roscoe.

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