Technology has invaded and now dominates the everyday lives of families like an occupying force. Many conversations among parents lament the futility of resistance. School-issued iPads and Chromebooks must enter the home if our third grader is to complete their homework. Our fifth grader pleads for an iPhone. We are coerced to program every moment of our children’s days and constantly surveil them to maximize their safety. It begins with various kinds of baby monitors—which may also track breathing patterns and oxygen levels—and moves to GPS watches, and then, amid the inevitable claims that “every kid in my class has one,” the dreaded smartphone.
If there are parents who celebrate this brave new world, I have not met them. Most are overwhelmed at the sheer task of monitoring these devices. They feel detached from or at loggerheads with their children, and they struggle with immense pressure to limit screen time while feeling helpless to do so to any meaningful degree.
How did we get to the point where we voluntarily participate in a system nearly everyone agrees is burdensome and harmful to family life? In her recent book Mother Media, Hannah Zeavin traces an intertwined history of social science; the cultural norms of mothering; and the various technologies and media infiltrating parenting, the family, and childhood. Her focus is on the twentieth century, but the topic could not be more salient to our current predicament. Though her analysis is obscured by academic jargon and implausible or overwrought theoretical assumptions, Zeavin’s book raises urgent questions concerning the interrelations of technology and motherhood.
Zeavin opens with a discussion of Ray Bradbury’s prescient 1950 short story, “The Veldt,” in which an interactive, digital nursery indulges children’s darkest, wildest wishes and turns them against their parents. A psychoanalyst enters mid-story and advises the parents to unplug the nursery, but it is too late to forestall the tragic ending: the nursery consumes the parents. Bradbury’s story anticipates many trends that Zeavin traces. Social scientists spearhead the development and promotion of media that infiltrates parenting, only to condemn it when things seem to go wrong. Overburdened parents embrace media as a helper and babysitter only to be riddled with anxiety about the changes it introduces to the patterns of family life.
Zeavin’s most insightful point is expressed through a multifaceted pun on “media” and “mediation.” Motherhood is “remediated”—its burdens are purportedly alleviated—while it is “mediated” through media and technology. Media intervenes in the mother-child relationship but not just to help; it ends up reconfiguring the relationship and the expectations surrounding it.
Prior to the baby monitor, for example, mothers were not expected to watch their children constantly, but once the technology became available, mothers had to meet the expectations it generated: they must now have eyes on their children at all times. Similarly, with constant entertainment now available to stream on demand, parents, as I can attest, feel they need to replace the infinite programming of TVs and tablets with the counterprogramming of organized sports and hobby clubs. Many of these machines and programs were developed to help the mother, but in light of the anxiety concerning dependence on them, the mother must redouble her efforts and become an adequate replacement for the machines. Media replaces the mother, but a good mother will replace media, producing a cycle of unfulfillable expectations.
Moreover, the scrutiny of media often morphs into scrutiny of mothers. Zeavin shows how childhood pathologies—autism and schizophrenia in particular—were associated with media: schizophrenia with overstimulating “hot” media, like film and paper media, and autism with “cool” media, like the telephone or the low-quality picture of 1960s TV sets. This evaluative framework shifted onto the mothers, who were compared to machines as they were blamed for their children’s maladies: “refrigerator mothers” were too cold or emotionally distant, while “bulldozer mothers” were too hot or overbearing.
Critical attitudes toward parenting are still expressed this way. “Helicopter parents” micromanage the lives of their children, sometimes into adulthood. This style of parenting is exacerbated (to the point that it is now practically expected) by social media, which normalizes a lack of privacy and constant exposure to others’ lives as entertainment. The media invades, surveils, controls; the parents do likewise. Both, we tend to think, are responsible for the pathologies of anxious, isolated, infantilized children.
Zeavin integrates this social and cultural history with a history of the social sciences themselves, which monitor, scrutinize, and attempt to control the technological “mediation” of parenting through clinical studies and governmental programs. These intertwined histories are presented through a bleak—and academically voguish—set of assumptions, in which every cultural or social change is the result of some system of oppression. To be sure, Zeavin’s approach does uncover the many ways in which the cultural history of technology is inflected by unbalanced power relations. Nevertheless, the author’s adherence to unjustified theoretical assumptions, even if they are in keeping with broader trends in historiography and the humanities, leads to overreach and implausible causal assertions, as well as vague, charged generalizations that obscure more than they illuminate.
For instance, Zeavin often repeats the claims that the nuclear family is “fictive” or “a fantasy” and the mother-child dyad a “fantastical notion.” What lies behind these statements is either trivially true—no nuclear family or mother-child relationship is isolated or independent of other relationships and circumstances—or something that would be better stated in historical or statistical terms—for example, about how typical family structures have shifted over time.
Zeavin consistently describes cultural worries about media, technology, or mothering as “panics,” a loaded and dismissive term. She states that in the twentieth century as now, “panics about bad mothering” are rooted in a culture “obsessed with motherhood,” one “that delimits what a mother should be, look like, and do.” But surely family life and mothering norms are central aspects of any given culture. Saying a culture is obsessed with motherhood is like saying Italian restaurants are obsessed with pasta. Placing certain expectations on motherhood seems universal to all cultures, not something particular to our time and place or idiosyncratically “obsessive.”
Zeavin treats any demand on mothers or cultural definition of motherhood as somehow problematic. This precludes her from carrying out the most essential task of a book of this kind: separating the problematic, unreasonable, or harmful demands on mothers from the reasonable and culturally helpful ones. To treat the distortions media and technology have wrought on motherhood and the family, we must first ask more basic questions about the nature and function of parenting and the mother-child relationship. To dismiss any position on those questions as an imposition is to hamstring the inquiry into how media or technology can corrupt (or facilitate) those relationships.
As Zeavin points out, the technologies that are meant to help lessen the burden on mothers often increase it. Instead of sending children outside to play, mothers are now the masters of “screen time,” setting up firewalls and monitoring devices, telling kids when and for how long they can use a device, disciplining children when they inevitably work around or defy these constraints. Mom, of course, is almost certain to have a device of her own draining her attention and time, even as it is now essential for surveilling the children, completing basic household tasks, and doing her own job.
Zeavin writes that, from the perspective of the media-saturated present, the “social panics of the comic book or television may strike us as silly or quaint,” but they do not strike me in this way. In retrospect, these forms of entertainment were the first step toward the impossible situation in which parents now find themselves. Constant media consumption began in the twentieth century and accelerated in the twenty-first. Those “panicking” were right to be concerned, and many of them foresaw a future much like our present, with children and adults alike spending their days absorbed in personal devices and otherwise isolated and anxious.
Reliance on technology for entertainment and companionship—along with other factors like the car and the growth of suburbia—has also remade the social environment in ways that now lock parents into the technological paradigm. A mother could send her children outside to play all summer, but even ten-year-olds outside by themselves or walking to the library may occasion a call to Child Protective Services. The sight of children alone is now sufficiently rare that a neighbor might consider the parents neglectful. Many families live in areas without parks or sidewalks on which children can safely walk, and many communities do not prioritize public safety. The perception that being outside is dangerous for children is overblown in some cases, but in others it’s a reality. Families are thus put into a double bind. They are urged to limit or eschew use of media and technology, but they must conform to social conditions predicated on the pervasive use of that technology, which thereby make other kinds of activity or socialization increasingly fraught.
Zeavin does briefly address those worried and actively working against the pervasive presence of media in childhood and family life in the book’s coda. Through a series of tenuous connections, she traces such movements through the Waldorf philosophy of education (the underpinning of many tech-wary private schools) back to Nazi Germany. This attempt to locate the intellectual roots of tech skepticism in fascist ideology is strained and unconvincing, and her implication that “anti-tech purity is inextricable from a notion of blood purity” overreaches, to put it mildly. Zeavin dismisses the antitech movement wholesale through guilt-by-association, without providing an alternative model for approaching parenting in this tech-dominated era.
This is a missed opportunity. A nuanced examination of this movement on its own merits would have been illuminating. Even parents with plenty of cultural capital who attempt to opt out of various technologies find themselves at odds with the expectations those technologies helped create. Such families are uniquely situated to demonstrate how difficult it is to oppose the infiltration of technology into every facet of life. Partially because of the atomism fostered by technology in the first place, mere dissent on a family-by-family basis proves insufficient to withstand technological expectations and pressures. The plight of the family mirrors that of the individual: the tools we have welcomed into our homes and lives, which were touted as supporting ideals we hold dear—sociality, self-expression, motherhood—have instead transformed those ideals in ways we have only begun to understand.
Mother Media
Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century
Hannah Zeavin
The MIT Press
320 pp. | $34.95
