A New Memoir Explores the Complexities of Pregnancy and Parenthood in the Digital Age
Fact checked by Sarah Scott
New York Times critic and journalist Amanda Hess' new book Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age is a portrait of a very online pregnancy. People who have become parents in the past decade or so can relate. Like Hess, many of us use apps to track our periods, calculate our expected day of ovulation, or update us on the size of the growing fetus.
Before the release of Second Life—which hit shelves on May 6—there were two widely accepted ways of understanding these digital platforms: they were either harmless ways to pass the time, or nefarious collectors of our private data. But Hess takes a different approach: She recognizes that filtering pregnancy and parenthood through the internet helps us process the immense changes that our bodies, personalities, emotions, families—everything—are about to undergo.
These digital spaces, which include not just apps but community boards where pregnant people and parents can interact, connect parents to each other, easing the loneliness that often accompanies pregnancy and parenthood. They also help us find likeminded people outside of the medical establishment with whom we can swap stories and experiences. But they have the potential to overwhelm us with information—and misinformation—sometimes heightening the natural anxiety that comes with this new phase of life.
Hess doesn't answer whether or not the internet is good or bad for new parents. But she does avoid disparaging the online spaces where (mostly) women spend their days seeking advice, comfort, and camaraderie. Hess is open-minded about the ways these spaces benefit parents, and honest about where parents' reliance on technology seems to fall apart.
Ultimately, her acknowledgment that the internet has granted pregnant people more power and autonomy over their care than they ever had before, and that spending time online as a parent is often an attempt to build community and become more informed is refreshing, and validating.
Here, Parents speaks to the author and journalist about her experiences navigating a medically complex pregnancy online, the pitfalls of parents turning to digital platforms while desperately seeking answers to complicated questions, and how parental anxiety is manipulated into an opportunity to sell parents gadgets that might not even be keeping their kids safe. Some answers have been shortened for clarity
In the book, you point out that some digital apps (Flo in particular) have this facade of cheerfulness and positivity, and meanwhile there is little to no information on medically complex pregnancies, or any type of pregnancy that might be outside of the norm. How did it make you feel to see that your experience had been erased from this digital space?
When I paged through 'What to Expect When You're Expecting' and didn't see a situation that remotely resembled mine, well—I expected that. But when I searched Flo's pregnancy forums for 'fetal anomaly' and 'birth defect' and got an error message back—'please try searching for something else'—that surprised me. Here was this seemingly vast resource, and there was no acknowledgement of a pregnancy outcome that affects many millions of women. It made me feel very alone, and that my pregnancy, and ultimately my son's life, was not just being overlooked but actively stigmatized. It would certainly be easier for femtech apps if all pregnancies were predictable and politically neutral, even miraculous, but anyone who's actually been pregnant quickly discovers that is not the case.
On these digital platforms there is a tension between having unlimited access to information about our bodies/fertility/pregnancy and being flooded and overwhelmed by misinformation.
During your pregnancy how did you make sense of unlimited access to not just information but to other peoples' personal experiences with pregnancy that are posted online?
During my pregnancy, I found myself searching for things that I did not want to talk to other people about—or felt that I could not talk with them about. It started early on, when I got a positive pregnancy test and had a lot of questions and an OB [obstetrician-gynecologist] who didn't want me to come in for several more weeks. Later, when my pregnancy got more complex, I searched for things that ashamed me—like the question of whether something I did during my pregnancy had caused a fetal anomaly. I searched for things that scared me—like all the potential outcomes of certain genetic results.
If I had to do it over again, I would try to remind myself that the internet wasn't going to solve those problems for me, but that I could use it to find some offline resources—books relevant to my situation, support groups.
I'm interested in the point you make about parental anxiety being translated into an opportunity for consumerism. Are products like the Owlet, Nanit, and others preying on parents very reasonable fears or genuinely offering a service. Maybe it's both!
I think the baby gadget industry functions a lot like the cosmetics industry or the diet industry. It makes us feel insufficient and then sells us the product that makes us whole again. A lot of nursery gadgets capitalize on the parental anxiety that babies are vulnerable and we can't literally watch them 24 hours a day. Instead we can wire up all these gizmos to record their every movement and alert us to perceived problems.
The vulnerability of babies is not made-up, but these products are not proven to detect or prevent any medical condition or emergency in infants; what they promise instead is vague parental assurance like 'peace of mind.'
Meanwhile, they convert the baby's image and data into a form of entertainment. The baby-data-sleep-console might legitimately distract the parent from their anxiety, or at least make them feel less bored while they're awake at night, but I see them more as parental entertainment consoles than anything else.
I felt the point you make about the Snoo [bassinet] offering insights in your child's sleep habits while it simultaneously "blocked me from understanding the real baby," was especially insightful. These products promise to unlock the secret to making parenting easier, but could they be increasingly alienating us from our kids in some way, too?
Yeah, I think that distraction and entertainment comes with real costs. These products habituate parents and babies to see surveillance as equivalent to care. They can insert themselves in the relationship and make it harder to understand each other. I didn't really see that side of it until I installed a baby monitor camera over my child's bed to test it out for this book.
It was only when I laid on the bed, viewing the room from my kid's perspective, that I noticed these four red eyes glowing in the dark of the bedroom. From my perspective, the camera beamed a beautiful image of my child to my phone no matter where I was in the world. But from his perspective, 'I' was just this cold and sinister digital presence.
One thing that still haunts me from my experiences with pregnancy loss is that I could not get away from Instagram posts and ads about pregnancy after miscarrying. As you dealt with uncertainty in your own pregnancy, did you encounter a similar situation?
I really felt during my pregnancy that the internet recognized me and my situation in a way that the real world did not. It 'knew' I was pregnant before my friends and my employer did, and that felt intrusive and intimate at once. But when my pregnancy turned complex and uncertain, all the Google ads for strollers and Instagram images of smiling, carefree pregnant women seemed to taunt me from my phone.
I came to see this as a much more insidious problem than just the issue of companies trying to sell products to pregnant people. They also sell ideas—about what a normal pregnancy is, what a good mother is, what an adequate female body looks like. I had to really unwind the ideologies and histories behind those ideas to break the spell that some of this pregnancy content had over me.
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