Life Kit - Hidden ways technology can influence your parenting decisions

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

From pregnancy tracking apps to smart baby monitors, technology is ingrained in parenthood at every turn. But at what cost? In this episode, Amanda Hess, author of Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, shares how data, metrics and our relationship to technology can shape child-rearing — and create barriers between parents and their kids.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Federal funding for public media has been eliminated, which means decades of support for public radio and television from both political parties is ending. To be clear, NPR isn't going anywhere, but we do need your support. We hope you'll give today to keep rigorous, independent, and irreplaceable news coverage available to everyone free of charge. Make your gift at donate.npr.org. And thank you. You're listening to LifeKit. From NPR. Hey, it's Mariel. When Amanda Hess found out she was pregnant with her first kid, she was home alone.

She'd just taken a pregnancy test. I immediately Googled what to do when you get pregnant. That was a pretty good clue to the internet that I was pregnant now. Amanda is a critic at large at the New York Times and the author of Second Life, having a child in the digital age. I think one of the things that's so insidious about pregnancy-related. tech is that a lot of people are not discussing their pregnancies much, especially at the very beginning of them. I told the internet about my pregnancy before I told anyone else, even my husband. I wanted to wait for him to come home to tell him. As a writer covering the intersection

of the internet and pop culture, Amanda was probably more familiar than most with all the subtle, surprising ways technology can embed itself in our lives. Through our fitness trackers or those games we play on our phones while we're on the subway. But when she got pregnant, her relationship to the internet got complicated in a way she really didn't want or expect. The way that I used the internet was to put in any feeling or information that I maybe felt a little ashamed of speaking to anyone else about. So it just becomes this repository for like all of my fears and like my weird body stuff and stuff like that, I just fed that to these apps and systems that exist to try to make money off of me.

It happens so fast. Amanda was served ads for products like prenatal vitamins within 48 hours of her first pregnancy-related internet search. To put it bluntly, her pregnancy had market value, although the numbers might surprise you. According to Amanda's research, some online data broker, Those are companies that collect, aggregate, and sell your personal information. Charge a mere $85 per 1,000 pregnant consumers.

Another charge is $95, and for an additional $10,000, you could buy 1,000 due dates for those 1,000 babies. For context, that's about the same as it would cost to buy the data of someone who has obsessive-compulsive disorder and purchases CBD products, and less than someone who purchased a Donald Trump-themed chess set. The point is, when you're pregnant and you share that information with the internet, that pretty cheap to data brokers but completely priceless to you information is used to influence your decisions at one of the most vulnerable times in your life. Before Amanda got pregnant, she understood that websites were tracking her and serving her ads based on her personal data, but she didn't really see the harm. So what if some website collected cookies on the type of pants she likes to buy? Maybe that would eventually lead her to the perfect pair of jeans. But I was so vulnerable in this moment where, like, babies really do need some strange things that I had never considered before.

And then there's a lot of stuff that they don't need that these companies were soon eager to sell me. And those decisions, you know, really, I think, set the tone for me for, for, how I was going to relate to my child, like how I was going to parent them. And for so many reasons in pregnancy, the stakes of my online life were just raised in that way. On this episode of Life Kit, reporter Andy Tagle talks to Amanda Hess about how her experience of becoming a mother changed her relationship to the internet. And what we can all learn about the invisible ways technology affects how we think about pregnancy and parenting. We'll talk about how the internet serves us an unrealistic portrayal of parenting, how to decide if and when you need all that high-tech baby gear, and how to work through those complicated feelings when you post your kids' pictures on social media. Could you share a little bit about your experience, you know, finding out that you were pregnant and finding out how seemingly all the mommy companies knew you were pregnant?

Yeah, I found that when I got pregnant, my relationship. with technology deepened in this really complex way. I've been writing about internet culture and technology for a long time. So I had this relationship where I was very used to going in and examining some online phenomenon or downloading an app, writing about it, and then like deleting it, getting out and moving on to the next thing. And when I got pregnant, I found that this critical distance that I had between myself and technology products had like completely collapsed and I was reading them you know as this like really a naive consumer again um where they took on an almost like magical mystical force for me I don't know how many other people

had this experience but I thought about pregnancy is like a time when you're just like allowed to eat like ice cream and like pickles at the same time and what I learned from these like combination like wellness lifestyle brands that were suddenly like following me on Instagram was that the ideal is like this new elevated form of restrictive eating that's supposed to like not only preserve your form as you pass through pregnancy but also, you know, the implication is that you need to be eating to really optimize the life of your future child in a way that goes beyond like avoiding sushi or whatever, you know, you might have been told. And I think just through the repetition of all of this stuff,

I was ingesting like an ideal of what a pregnant person was supposed to look like, how their fetus was supposed to be growing. And it's not that these apps really changed my like physical behavior so much, but they changed my point of view. And what they really did was get me used to this idea of an outside authority, like monitoring my pregnancy and my body. and, you know, seemingly reflecting it back to me and acting as if it knew me on a personal level.

How did that shape your pregnancy? How did that shape your, you know, your relationship to your pregnancy, to your growing fetus? How did that change things for you? I mean, I really only understood how it affected me after I was about seven months pregnant. When I was seven months pregnant, I had an ultrasound that I thought would be like a very standard routine

an ultrasound and instead I was on the ultrasound table for much longer than I expected to be. And then when the doctor came in, he told me that he saw something he didn't like. My son was sticking out his tongue on the ultrasound, which I noticed and initially thought was cute, but is apparently unusual to happen, you know, persistently through the ultrasound. And that was really the moment that my relationship with the internet shifted, where, first of all, I started. I became even more, like, sucked into this power that I had given it to explain my life to me and explain my pregnancy to me. But also, it was the beginning of understanding that it didn't know anything about my life. And it couldn't explain it to me.

to me one of the most I think sticky pieces of technology that I used when I was pregnant was my period app flow which then became my pregnancy app when I unlocked pregnancy mode which is like a very overly gamified term for what it is it served me in this image of you know first like a blastocyst and then an embryo and then a fetus that would regenerate like every week with a new form and then by seven months like I had seven months of looking at that this sounds so ridiculous to say but it was so true I started to like think on some level that I was like looking at my baby when I looked at this CGI image that was actually served to like tens of millions of people who were

pregnant and it was really only at that moment i remember opening flow the first time after that ultrasound and seeing it with this like serene closed mouth smile and realizing like my baby's tongue is sticking out like this isn't a picture of my baby like it's not this is not him um and rationally i understood that but emotionally i didn't understand that until that moment Takeaway one, even if you consider yourself a savvy consumer of technology, it's important to interrogate your relationship with new interfaces, especially if you're going through a big life change or they involve your health, if you find they're taking up a lot of your time or all of the above, your period tracker, the pregnancy app that tells you what size fruit or vegetable your fetuses weekly, the newborn feeding and diaper log with customizable widgets and real-time data across multiple devices, these are you. these all might offer very helpful, well-intentioned tools and information. And also, they likely have strong financial incentives to keep you coming back day after day, buying in on those parental ideals. So before you panic or compare, pause and consider the source of all that

data. After I understood that this like idealized vision of my fetus was not what my child looked like, like I wanted to know what he would look like. I wanted to know what his life would be like. I wanted to know what our relationship would be like. I wanted to know what people would think of him. After that ultrasound, I had this four-week diagnostic period that ended with a diagnosis of Beckwith-Weedman syndrome, which is an overgrowth disorder that causes, among other things like a child's tongue to grow very fast and to like have an extra large sized tongue. and this is really it's such a minor thing in the range of human differences but it was enough to really just like cast me out of this like of the center of the pregnancy internet and at first

that felt very rude like I felt like I you know had created this sort of like community in these apps and now I wasn't they didn't apply to me anymore and I wasn't welcome there anymore but at the same time it was the beginning of me understanding that you know disability is normal it's in a range of normal you know this idealized version is is not normal it's like a fantasy and it can be very destructive um and i think what i found when i first you know when when i got a diagnosis for my child i was googling as hard as anyone as ever Googled, trying to understand what he would look like and the images that I found

and the stories that I found when I googled it I found medical information about the various symptoms that BWS can cause. I found experts at various children's hospitals in the United States who I could speak with. But I also found a lot of medical images of kids with BWS where they're photographed for medical purposes

and then they're published in journals and it gets into Google images and then I can see them but they're not like any kind of loving portrait that anyone any normal person would like take of their childs. Because they're taken for medical purposes they're in these like highly sort of like medical environments like surgical environments stuff like that and so that was very alarming too and then I found you know some online discussion of BWS where I saw comments from strangers who um you know some of whom were saying oh ah or oh poor kid and some who were saying i don't think that child should be born like i don't think that that's acceptable um and it was only after my son was born that all of those images were replaced with his true image

and he's my son and he's a beautiful person and so i was like oh of course like he's a adorable. And so I went from thinking that he sticking his tongue out on the ultrasound was very cute to thinking that it was really alarming and a medical problem, to thinking that it was something that was going to like really stigmatize him in his life, to thinking finally when he was born like he was cute again. And that was a difficult journey for me. So takeaway two. Consider how and to what extent you want to seek out information. information online. Knowledge is power. It's true. And also, the internet is bottomless. For parents or parents to be, that means unlimited potential, not just for finding resources, but also

for building on anxiety. So try to ask yourself, before you opt in, what data is truly necessary on your path of pregnancy and parenthood, whether it's online, at the doctor's office, or even at home. Amanda, would you talk a little bit about the pros and cons of popular tech today, like the snoo and the owlet and the nanit? Because this was a big question when my son came along. Can you talk a little about when it's worth it to let this technology into your little one's nursery when you might just be lulling yourself into a false sense of security?

Yeah, so when I was first pregnant in 2020, I heard about this device called a snoo, which is a robotic bassinet that is supposed to rock your baby to sleep essentially and emit this wishing noise that's supposed to sound like, you know, the sounds of the womb or maybe a rumbling car in the car seat, all of these places where babies are supposed to sleep better than like lying flat on their back. And my husband and I were so taken by the marketing pitch for this. Like there's no product that I've ever bought faster, I think, because what they said was that on average snoo babies sleep one to two hours.

more than babies who are not put to bed in a snoo and if you've like had a baby one to two hours is like a lifetime so we had signed up for this parenting list serve and we like source this second hand version of it it was clear to me from the beginning that like it wasn't turning him into a miracle sleeping baby like it was difficult for him to go to sleep in the snoo or out And I just couldn't let it go, I think, because I had spent money on it. But also, I had bought into this premise that it makes babies sleep one to two hours more. And so I think I had this fear that if he were not sleeping in the snow, maybe he would sleep even worse. Yeah.

And so what I realized later was the snoo, like many of these products, you know, offers these like data-driven insights into how many hours your babies. sleeping when they're going to sleep when they're waking up uh it like visualizes their sleep and gives you reports and stuff like that but really it had stepped between me and my baby and made it really really difficult to understand what kind of sleeper he was understand like how he would sleep naturally um what he really needed because from day one when we got out of the hospital i had put him in I had put him there. And I think, like, a lot of these products promise this kind of, like, omniscient insight into your baby.

But what they also do is make parents reliant on this tech company to tell them, like, the very basics of, like, what their baby needs. And I think if I could do it again, I wouldn't buy any tech for my baby. until after he was born because it's really difficult, I think, to predict what your family actually wants and needs. I was so nervous about bringing a baby home that I can see now that like buying certain things helped make me feel like I had some control over it or that some unseen data compiling force had some control over him that I, you know, that I failed to have. Yeah.

And I realize now that, like, you can only really know your baby by paying attention to your actual baby. Takeaway 3. There's a lot of great parenting tech out there designed to make life easier and provide you with more peace of mind. But at the end of the day, being a parent and a new parent especially, is just tough sometimes. So don't expect high-tech gear to solve all your problems or quell all of your anxieties. And in fact, over-reliance on glitchy, imperfect technology can have the opposite effect.

So before you invest in that smart sock or ultra-HD baby monitor, make sure you understand the needs of your kid and your family to be sure that your tech is truly serving you. And that same wisdom applies to parenting and social media. I mean, I think one of the reasons I wrote this book is because becoming a parent is an incredibly profound time. And raising a person is a very profound thing. And I felt this intense need to understand it and to narrate it and to share my life with other people. And I think we've always done that. And social media is just such an imperfect tool for doing that. and increasingly, like, it feels like one of the only ones we have access to.

I thought I was going to make this big decision about whether to put my son's image on Instagram, and then after he was born, I had this, like, compulsion to do it, and I didn't even really think about it. And I've since reassessed that, and what I've come to understand is, like, I had trained myself over years of Instagram use to photograph new things, photograph beautiful things, like photograph moments of joy and put them online and when I

was in this newborn phase especially because this was 20-20 and so I was like locked up in my house that was my baby like my baby was the thing that represented all of those things and so of course I was going to post it and I think at the time

it felt like an expression of love and I think it is that but I also think that it was just training I think it was just training from this app of like what I should be putting out there. Even though I had just gone through this experience during my pregnancy of really confronting the idealized nature of like new parenthood and really becoming disillusioned by it. I was then like just like obsessed with posting him in a way that like, like, did not acknowledge all of the really difficult stuff that we were dealing with, especially the medical stuff we were dealing with, because I didn't want to at that time disclose his

diagnosis and to like create this embodied image of him that was like wedded to his medical data in that way. And so it meant that I was then creating this idealized image of my own son that really downplayed his difference that didn't acknowledge his disability. And they're like good reasons to keep that private, but I don't know if there were necessarily good reasons to keep posting his picture all the time. Takeaway four, participation in parent media, that desire to show off your kid or prove your love of them to the world, can feel reflexive. but like so much other technology in our lives

it's likely more of a habit built over years and years of use so it can be undone if you want to learn more about how and why you might want to do that we've got a great in-depth episode all about how to navigate sharenting that's parents sharing online what do you hope other parents might take away from your experience you know are there any lessons learned or lasting wisdom from writing this book that you like people to walk away with

It's natural to want to know your kid before they're born, but you can't. I think you should guard your imagination and not just give it up to any tech company that can capture your attention. And for me, I mean, the best thing I did was have my video monitor break and not have a warranty. So I had to get a new one, and instead I got just like one that works like the very oldest baby monitor. it's just an audio monitor so I can hear in my bedroom what's happening in my kids' bedroom in case they are screaming. And what I really learned from that shift was like something that I thought I needed or I thought was desirable, like was actually unnecessary. And that wanting something, like desiring something is not the same as that thing actually being good for my family.

so when I was like testing out fancy monitors and devices like I was really drawn to looking at them because like I'm addicted to screens like I like like looking at screens and if the screen has my favorite people on it my kids like I'm going to be looking at it all the time but I don't need to be doing that and in fact like there's so much that I could be doing were I not doing that And so for me, it's really just drawing a line between something I want and something that's actually good for me. And those are different things. Amanda Hess, author of Second Life Having a Child in the Digital Age, Thank you so much for talking with me. Thank you so much. This is really fun.

All right, let's recap. Takeaway 1. Be cognizant of the personal health data you share on the Internet and critical of the pregnancy and parenting information you consume online. Even if you consider yourself a shrewd online consumer, the constant messaging and ad placement on pregnancy tools and parenting websites might be influencing you more than you think. Takeaway two. Consider how much data and information is helpful and necessary to you. And when it might do more harm than good.

Like, did you actually feel better after you spent three hours Googling the potential causes of that small pelvic pain early on in your pregnancy? Instead of waiting to talk to your doctor about it? takeaway three when it comes to parenting tech make sure the tools you invest in aren't creating unnecessary barriers to closeness or growth that might be easier to do if you wait to buy anything until you understand the specific needs of your child and takeaway four in case you need the reminder you're not required to share your kid online and in fact there are a lot of good reasons why you might want to opt out technology internet they're not going anywhere but if you can find pocket of your life to make do with less and be present with your kid more, well, where do I sign up? That was LifeKit reporter Andy Tagle in conversation with writer Amanda Hess. For more Life Kit, check out our other episodes. We have one on how to decrease your screen time and another on how to make a budget.

You can find those at npr.org slash life kit. And if you love LifeKit and you want even more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash LifeKit newsletter. Also, if you have episode ideas or feedback you want to share, email us, why don't you, at LifeKit at npr.org. This episode of LifeKit was produced by Claire Marie Schneider. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan, and our digital editor is Malika Grieb. Megan Kane is our senior supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer.

Our production team also includes Margaret Serino and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support comes from Neil Rouch, Sina LaFredo, and David Greenberg. I'm Mariel Segarra. Thanks for listening.