Latest news with #SecondLife:HavingaChildintheDigitalAge
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
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. Read the original article on Parents
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
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. [Read: What parents of boys should know] 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.' [Read: The biggest surprise about parenting with a disability] 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.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
05-05-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
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. 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.' 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.'
CNBC
29-04-2025
- Health
- CNBC
Not all technology is bad for kids, journalist and author says: 'I'm much more appreciative of screen time than I thought I would be'
For the last few years, psychologists and social media experts have been sounding the alarm on the harmful effects of excessive screen time. In his 2023 report "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation," U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy named social media as one of the main reasons young people feel more alone. "Several examples of harms include technology that displaces in-person engagement, monopolizes our attention, reduces the quality of our interactions, and even diminishes our self-esteem," Murthy wrote. In his best-selling book "The Anxious Generation," New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the case that technology rewires young peoples' brains and leads to anxiety and depression. Being cautious about how much access to technology kids have is probably smart. However, there are ways to utilize screens that aren't harmful. In her new book "Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age," journalist Amanda Hess outlines some of her more surprising revelations about technology and parenting. "I'm much more appreciative of screen time than I thought I would be," she told CNBC Make It. Television played a crucial role in helping Hess figure out what to do with her then three-year-old son after he underwent a complicated surgery. The procedure was "really difficult for him physically and emotionally," she says. Initially, she was unsure whether letting him veg out in front of the TV was unhealthy. But a psychologist assured Hess that at least while he was in recovery, a little more TV time than usual was totally OK. "That was a tool that anyone else would use when they get out of the hospital and they're feeling crummy, to just watch a lot of your favorite TV shows, and so that was really helpful for us," she says. It's not uncommon for Hess to let her son watch television when she needs to do household chores or hop on a work call. "We have a TV party in my house," she says. While excessive screen time can shorten your attention span and lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness, not all media consumption is bad. Longer form content that encourages you to engage can help you think more deeply, psychologist Gloria Mark told CNBC Make It. "A lot of things on social media and things we find in short-form content are designed to shock us or to appeal to very basic emotions, like surprise or anger or [humor]," Mark said "These basic emotions keep us on a superficial level when we're looking at this information, as opposed to if you pick up a book or you read a long-form article, then you have time to deliberate and you have time to do deeper processing of it." Mark offers up some tips for how to spend more time engaging with longer form content: Remember, while it's good to be aware of the kind of content your kids are watching, it's also OK to give yourself a break and have, as Hess might call it a "TV party."
