← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
The Struggles of Motherhood in the Digital Age
00:25:32
New York Times culture critic Amanda Hess found herself comparing her experience as a new mom to those of other moms online.
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- [00:00]
Alison Stewart
All of it is supported by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates for multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. This is all of it on wnyc. Hi, I'm Alison Stewart. Just a reminder, we have been reading our May get lit with all of it book club pick and it's almost time to discuss. The novel is audition by Katie Kitamura and we'll meet this Thursday at 6pm at the New York Public Library. Tickets are free, but there are only a few left. We're almost sold out. So now is your chance. Get yours by going to wnyc.org getlit that's WNYC get lit. Our special musical guest is musician and Broadway star Reeve Carney. It's happening this Thursday, May 29th. Once again, tickets are available at wnyc.org getlit that is in the future. Now let's get this hour started with Second Life. When Amanda Hess first learned she was expecting, she took out her phone and googled what to do when you get pregnant. The Internet answered. Amanda's social media algorithm soon began marketing content and products designed for moms to be. Then there were the apps like Flo, which told Amanda it was prepared to become, quote, an expert on you. And don't forget the mommy influencers, Tradwife, Tiktokers, the free birth society podcast. Throughout her pregnancy, Amanda observed just how much smartphones and algorithms are now a part of motherhood and giving birth, which can be especially challenging when a pregnancy becomes complicated for a mother like Amanda experienced with her first child. She wrote a book about her story. It's called Second Having a Child in the Digital Age. Amanda Hess is here now. She's a critic at large for the New York Times. Welcome to wnyc.
- [02:17]
Amanda Hess
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:18]
Alison Stewart
Before we get to the specifics of your story, sort of the $64,000 question is how much did your relationship with technology change once you became pregnant?
- [02:30]
Amanda Hess
Radically. It was so radically different. I mean, I've been writing about Internet culture and technology for a really long time. And so I had this habit of really just examining things from a distance, like picking up some new trend or object or whatever and analyzing it and then put putting it down and really not thinking about it again. And it was only when I became pregnant that I realized that that critical distance was completely gone. And I was just really sucked into these technologies in a way that I had never felt before.
- [03:08]
Alison Stewart
Listeners, we want to bring you into this conversation. For our new mothers out there, what was it like for you to have given birth in the digital age? Call or text us at 2124-3396-9221-2433, WNYC. What was your relations the Internet? Did you rely on any apps, have algorithms, tried to market certain content or products to you? 212-433-969-2212, WNYC. So that was what was going on with you personally when you pulled out and you put on your reporter hat. What was the way that Internet changed the daily experiences of the average woman being pregnant? That was you personally, the average woman, what does she expect once her phone realizes she's pregnant?
- [03:56]
Amanda Hess
Yeah, I mean, first of all, like, very quickly your social feeds will understand this unless you take great measures to hide that information from Meta or any, like Google, any of the other companies. Instantly. For me and for many of the people I talked to, it was ads that started to target you with like prenatal vitamins, beautiful maternity dresses, stuff like that. And then I think on an emotional level, what starts to happen is that all of these technologies that are so eager to assist you or offer you advice or product recommendations are starting to train a pregnant person, I think, really to understand that they are being surveilled and monitored by this outside authority which has a lot of opinions about the right way to make a baby.
- [04:59]
Alison Stewart
Tell me about those opinions. What do you mean?
- [05:02]
Amanda Hess
So immediately after I started using this app called Flo, when I was just tracking my pregnancy, when I was. I'm sorry, just tracking my period. And it was really kind of Girl Power themed. It resembled my diary when I was in middle school. And I would use it about.
- [05:21]
Alison Stewart
It regulates ovulation, regulates when your period's coming.
- [05:24]
Amanda Hess
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would check it basically once a month to understand when my period was coming. And that was like a really comfortable use for me. And immediately when I got pregnant, I activated something called Pregnancy Mode that started serving me recommendations just like constantly. So there was new content every day. And it would tell me the specific leafy greens it thought that I should eat at different weeks of pregnancy. It would tell me what might be ought to look like developmentally inside the womb. It would show me a presentation of what its idea of a pregnant woman looked like, which I describe as like a Barbie doll with its head cut off that, like, starts to get to have this, like, exaggerated bump week after week. And really, I think what it told me on a more subconscious level was that, like, I needed to change everything about what I was doing, what I was even thinking, and that I should think about being pregnant all of the time. And it created a feedback loop where that became more possible.
- [06:33]
Alison Stewart
Oh, that's so interesting. I remember being pregnant and you just want advice is really all that you want. It sounds like you received something different than advice.
- [06:42]
Amanda Hess
I think what I was looking for was assurance that I was doing everything okay. I actually didn't end up, like, eating the leafy greens that Flo suggested that I eat. But I was absorbing all of these ideas of, like, what a pregnant woman looks like, what a fetus looks like at a certain developmental stage. And then once my pregnancy became complex, I think I realized later that I had internalized all of these ideas about what a normal pregnancy ought to be and how prized a category that was of a normal pregnancy. The thing that, like, all of this advice was trying to guide me to get. And then when I didn't have that, I felt almost like I realized then that the content wasn't for me. And I felt almost like cast out of this online pregnant community that I had been inducted into before.
- [07:43]
Alison Stewart
As you mentioned, with your first complication, there were pregnancies. With your first pregnancy, there were complications. Excuse me. Would you mind sharing a little bit with us? What happened with you? Sure.
- [07:54]
Amanda Hess
So I had an ultrasound at seven months pregnant that I thought was a routine ultrasound, and it ended up being less than routine. The doctor saw my son sticking his tongue out, which I initially thought was very cute, but apparently was not normal for it to be happening, you know, through the entire ultrasound. My son was ultimately diagnosed with an overgrowth disorder that's called Beckwith Wiedemann syndrome that causes, among other things, children to be born with very large tongues. But it took really four weeks, A very intense, like, prenatal imaging and genetic testing in order to figure that out, where there were all sorts of theories that were proffered by, you know, doctors about what could be going on from things that were, you know, nothing, literally nothing is happening to, you know, catastrophic, like, brain abnormalities. And so living in my pregnant body for that diagnostic month with this, you know, my future child inside me, who I had not met, who had become a patient inside of my body that was also a patient, it was a really, like, awful, difficult time for me where I really wanted to kind of disassociate from my body. And that was the time When I think I was sucked into my phone more than I ever had been before, just because I had this, like, insatiable drive to figure out what was going on. And I was so trained to just Google it, and I was doing the most advanced Googling that I possibly had ever done.
- [09:44]
Alison Stewart
But doctors will tell you, don't Google.
- [09:46]
Amanda Hess
Yeah, my doctor did tell me not to Google something. And I think the thing that I was really searching for, which I found later, was just like a conversation about what was happening to me. I think, you know, on one level, I wanted to know specifically what my son had, like, what he would be diagnosed with. But on all of these other profound levels, like, I wanted to understand, you know, just like, all of the ethical issues that a person is thrust into when they become pregnant and that pregnancy becomes complex and they have to start making medical decisions. I had never made a medical decision for another person before, much less a person that I had not met yet. And I think for me, because my pregnancy was so complex, like, the thing that I found when I started Googling, like Beckwith Wiedemann syndrome, was all of these cultural artifacts about that syndrome that were created by, you know, desperate parents who were looking to raise money for medical procedures that were written by tabloids like the Daily Mail, that were exploiting, you know, the images of these children who were in hospitals, images from medical journals that had, you know, made their way into Google Images. And so what I really started to understand was that the Internet, while it wouldn't tell me it couldn't diagnose my son, it was telling me what people might start to think about him, you know, after he was born.
- [11:28]
Alison Stewart
It's interesting. When I was prepping for this segment, I chose not to Google it. I would rather meet you and have you tell me about your son and tell me about your experience. I just want to share that with you.
- [11:42]
Amanda Hess
Yeah, no, that's so interesting. I mean, I. You know, I had this experience, so I knew that my son had BWS before he was born, and I had done all of this Googling, and then I ended up having to have a C section. And as I was being wheeled into the or, like, I started crying. And I think, like, my husband and people around me thought I just really didn't want to get the surgery, but that was not it. I think I was really. I was afraid to meet my son, which is something that. I mean, it sounds so ridiculous now. It's almost hard for me to be ashamed of that feeling, because immediately after he was born, you know, he's a baby. He's my baby. And so he was so beautiful. And like, it really struck me at that moment how an illness or a disability, you know, in the way that it's filtered online, can be so divorced from just humanity. And then all of a sudden there was a real person in front of me and he looked so incredibly different.
- [12:54]
Alison Stewart
Social media is all about people posting the best pictures, the best day of their whole life. Did that have an effect on you as a new mom?
- [13:03]
Amanda Hess
I think so. I mean, I think one of the things that is so pernicious about the Internet is that I go to the Internet to talk about things that I am too ashamed to talk to my friends about. And one of those things was like, what is my body gonna like after this pregnancy? Is there anything, you know, not too labor intensive that I can do during the pregnancy to sort of like return to my previous form unchanged, you know, And I think that is a fantasy that a lot of like maternity products and maternity wear is selling to women. This idea that like you're going to be pregnant, your body's going to be changed, and then perhaps like you'll just like become yourself again, maybe if you buy like the right oil or something. And again, like, I didn't buy the oil, so it's not like I feel like I was, you know, robbed of something. But I did buy, I think, the idea that I should look a certain way and I didn't. And that represented like a failure on some level.
- [14:18]
Alison Stewart
My guest is Amanda Hess, critic at large for the New York Times. We're talking about her book Second Life. Having a Child in the Digital Age. We're taking your calls. If you're a new mom, what was it like for you to be pregnant during the digital age? Did you have the Internet? Did it make you feel more or less confident about delivering your baby? Our Phone number is 2124-3396-9221-2433 wnyc. In your book you talk about the free birth movement, specifically the Free Birth Movement Society podcast they advocate in at home births, not medically assisted births. First of all, why did you find that interesting?
- [14:57]
Amanda Hess
I think when I was in my month long diagnostic period where I just wanted to disassociate from my body, I became really interested in women who had a pregnancy experience that was radically different from mine. So as I was going spending all of this time in hospital hospitals, in an mri, in an ultrasound room, I started listening to this podcast where women were describing often managing their pregnancies with very little to no prenatal care, and then giving birth unassisted. So with no obstetrician, no midwife, often without a doula, in an attempt to be the person with the most authority over their birth who's in the room. And, you know, it was really an experience where I wasn't hate listening, I wasn't a fan listening, but I think I was trying to understand something emotionally about how medicalized my pregnancy was and also to understand the harms of just completely rejecting technology and medicine and how. How dangerous that can be.
- [16:16]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, There was a woman who's quoted in your book from NBC News, had interviewed her, and she made it sound like it was the perfect way to go. Until it wasn't. Would you tell us a little bit about her?
- [16:28]
Amanda Hess
Yeah. So there was a woman whose. Her name in the NBC piece is Judith, who was also listening to the same podcast and absorbing some other unassisted birth content online, decided that this was the way that she wanted to manage her birth. She did not go into spontaneous labor, which once you're after a certain number of weeks, maybe like 41 or 42, many doctors will suggest that you be induced. And of course, she didn't have a doctor, so she wasn't doing that. When she finally did go into labor, she realized that her amniotic fluid was stained brown with meconium, and she ultimately did transfer to the hospital where she delivered a stillborn baby. Stillbirths happen inside hospitals and outside of hospitals with midwives and doctors. But when you have no medical assistance, you know, there's no opportunity to try to change that outcome. And I, you know, I first read her account when I was early in my pregnancy. This story came out in 2020, and I thought, like, wow, I don't want to read anything about a stillbirth right now. When I'm pregnant, it's not something I can emotionally handle. And then after my pregnancy became complex, I found that I was interested again, I was interested in other people who had these complex pregnancies and who took a different route than I did. I think in a way to assure myself that even though I was going through something that felt like hell, that it was ultimately the right choice for me.
- [18:15]
Alison Stewart
You said 2020. So during that time, we were all on our phones a whole lot more. Yeah, you gave birth in 2020. How do you think being pregnant during the height of COVID impacted the extent to which you relied on your phone for answers?
- [18:31]
Amanda Hess
I mean, I think I've heard from a lot of new parents who find the experience to be incredibly isolating, especially new mothers. And I think just Covid made that so intense and literal, where I, you know, all of the people who you might rely on to become kind of like, helpers or alloparents or whatever, you know, I didn't want in my house because I didn't want anyone to make my baby sick. This was 2020 before we knew what the effects of COVID might be on a pregnant person or then on a newborn. And I didn't want to get my parents or older people in my life sick either. And so I think it just supercharged this experience of instead, you know, being kept company by the Internet, which can't actually offer you any real assistance. It can't hold your baby or, you know, bring you a meal. I mean, it can for a cost, but it can offer you advice. And I found that, like, ultimately, advice was the last thing that I really needed. I think parents need a lot more support and a lot less advice, but advice is really the only thing that can be sort of transmitted in that form.
- [19:52]
Alison Stewart
My guest is Amanda Hess. The name of her book is Second Life. Having a child in the Digital Age. Once you became a mom, was the Internet helpful to you at all? I mean, there are many Reddit groups, subgroups of new moms who want to give each other support. Or did it turn out to be more harmful? Or is it just a tool, the way you use it?
- [20:15]
Amanda Hess
Yeah, I mean, I think it was a tool for me, and I ended up writing a whole book about this. And so, of course, like, I'm very interested in what people are saying on the Internet about birth and new parenthood. And I think I used it as a way to understand what people were thinking about me as I walked my baby around New York, both, like, just in terms of, like, new parents and babies and taking up public space with a child. But also, as a child, you had, like, a visible disability that was, I think, confusing to a lot of people. And so I went online to try to understand what people might be thinking. And of course, like, the Internet is not a true approximation of, you know, how everyone in your life actually thinks about you. It's this very filtered and, I think, emotionally charged space. But working through it in that way, I think, was helpful for me to understand, like, how I wanted to parent, how I wanted to present myself and my child to the world.
- [21:26]
Alison Stewart
I did want to ask you about Snoo. Snoo. Sort of it imitates the womb of a mom. I'll read what the line says from their website, SNOO imitates the sounds and movements of your baby's favorite place, the womb. It automatically responds to calm fussing and aids sleep. Plus, snoo keeps your baby sleeping safely on the back for all nights and naps. Tell me about you and the snoo.
- [21:55]
Amanda Hess
Yeah, basically you strap your baby in there and the snoo rocks them back and forth ultimately pretty quickly and emits this whooshing sound that ultimately also becomes pretty loud. And the thing that, you know, I read about the SNOO while I was still pregnant before I realized that my pregnancy was somewhat complex and I was such an easy mark for the snoo because what they promise is that SNHU babies, which is what they call them, sleep on average one to two hours more than a typical baby. And for a new parent, one, two, that's everything.
- [22:34]
Alison Stewart
Those two hours, Are you kidding me?
- [22:36]
Amanda Hess
Two, like, you know, if they had said, oh, on average one, I would think, oh, you know, maybe that what that really means is 40 minutes. But 1, 2, 2 hours, which is such a powerful concept to me. And so my husband and I ended up like sourcing one off of this parent listserv in our neighborhood and setting it up, you know, before the baby even arrived. What I didn't know was that my baby would also have a different sleep mechanism, which was an oxygen machine that would pump oxygen into his nose via a little itty bitty cannula to make sure that his oxygen supply was not being foreclosed by, you know, his very large tongue. And so even though I came home with this necessary medical device, I wasn't ready to give up. Like mice knew fantasy. And so I was hooking him up to like two different things @ once and trying to make it work. It never really, I think, worked for him, but I actually, because I had used the snu, it was so difficult for me to know if it was working. Maybe he's a baby, he only sleeps, you know, three hours a night and the SNOO is making him sleep five hours a night. Or maybe he's a baby who would sleep seven hours a night if he weren't in this, like snoo, if he was just in a normal crib. And so what became interesting to me about the SNOO was how all of these smart enabled devices like promise to help you understand your baby and to optimize their sleep and other things more, but really they also get in the way of this authentic relationship with your kid where you might actually understand like how they do sleep and what they need.
- [24:22]
Alison Stewart
Where was your partner in all of this?
- [24:24]
Amanda Hess
Oh, man, he was everywhere. I mean, he was the. He was. I think the greatest thing about my husband through all of this is that he was such an involved partner that I didn't have to explore in my book, you know, the effects of all of this stuff falling on mothers. And often, you know, I think some of the best technologies that we used were ones that just aligned us and like, connected what we were doing. So an app where you inputted, you know, the times that you fed your baby and how much you fed them. Because my son could not breastfeed and we were bottle feeding him, I was still. I decided to pump breast milk. And so I was often pumping milk while my husband was feeding him, or I was pumping milk while my husband was sleeping, or I was sleeping while my husband was feeding him. And so a very simple app that just like, you know, informed us of what the other person had done was so helpful. And that's just an app that does one thing and it's the thing that it tells you that it's going to do. And I think so many of these technologies, you know, sell you on doing like 100 things and that's what really makes them sort of like, so ultimately unhelpful.
- [25:45]
Alison Stewart
The name of the book is Second Having a Child in the Digital Age. My guest has been Amanda Hess. Thank you for sharing your story with us.
- [25:52]
Amanda Hess
Thank you so much for having me.
- [25:54]
Alison Stewart
I'm Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, our team has been reporting high quality news about science, technology and medicine. News you won't get anywhere else. And now that political news is 24 7, our audience is turning to us to know about the really important stuff in their lives. Cancer, climate change, genetic engineering, childhood diseases. Our sponsors know the value of science and health news. For more sponsorship information, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.