Offline with Jon Favreau - Momfluencers, Baby Gadgets, and the Perils of Parenting in The Digital Age

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Are we surveilling our children too much? Do we need fancy gadgets to track their sleep? Should we be taking so many pictures of them? Longtime New York Times culture critic Amanda Hess joins Offline to discuss why the optimization of childhood may just be another empty promise of the information age. Amanda's new book, Second Life, follows her digital identity crisis as she grapples with her newborn baby's rare genetic disorder, traversing the Facebook groups, Reddit threads, spy cams and momfluencers she and other parents use as a 21st century substitute for a proverbial village.  

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Yeah, it's really great quality stuff and very affordable. So stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from Quince. Go to quince.com slash offline for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash offline to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash offline. We really have absorbed this neoliberal idea that like everything can be made a market and everything can be assigned a value and that's like the best way to like decide what's good. So even when you are looking at your baby who like, of course, you want to be successful, you, of course you want them to be good, you want them to be like a

good baby, to be like the best child that they can be or whatever. I at least found that I was just like on critically in some ways, like applying this system that when I think about it, I find quite horrifying actually like to my child where like if I got a data set from him from sleeping, I used a crib that would tell me like the hours and minutes that he slept. And I saw that he slept 20 minutes more than he did the night before. Like I would be so happy about that number that my literal baby has no idea what that is. He doesn't know why I'm happy, why I'm congratulating him on his night or whatever.

It's so deranged. We do that too. We're like, hey, you know what? Two hour nap today wasn't an hour and a half like yesterday. We got a full two hours. Napping king. Yeah. nap today wasn't an hour and a half like yesterday we got a full two hours. Napping king like yeah. Hey everyone, welcome to Offline. So today is our first episode without Max.

And before we get started, I wanted to give you all an idea of what the show is going to sound like and look like now without them. As some of you might remember, I started the show to have conversations about all the ways the Internet is changing how we live, work, interact with each other, and how spending so much of our lives online is shaping our politics, our culture, our economy, the media and information we consume, the way we raise our kids, our mental health, even our sense of purpose and happiness. I love having those conversations. I love learning from really smart people in different fields. So I want to go back to that.

When there's a lot of news about technology and the internet, which there often is, we will still cover those stories. And we may bring on guest hosts to help me out from time to time, like Max. But either way, my goal is that each week you and I can learn something new about life in our digital age, or at the very least, commiserate about the weird, scary world we live in so that we don't have to navigate that world by ourselves.

Today I'm kicking us off with a conversation about having children in the digital age, not necessarily raising children, but having them. Being a parent, or preparing to be a parent, or even worrying about what it's like to be a parent. My guest is longtime New York Times internet culture critic, Amanda Hess, who recently published her first book, Second Life, a memoir about how becoming a parent changed her relationship with technology.

It's both funny and moving. She takes us through the world of Facebook groups and Reddit threads, gender reveal videos, baby spy cams, momfluencers, and all the unexpected ways that parents search for answers and community has been reshaped in the digital age. It's a great book. I genuinely couldn't put it down. And I'm very excited for all of you to hear my conversation with Amanda about how technology and the internet has changed the way we think about parenting. Here's Amanda Hess. Amanda Hess, welcome back to Offline.

Thank you so much for having me. I love your book. I loveline. Thank you so much for having me. I love your book. I love it. Thank you. It is funny, poignant, beautifully written, refreshingly different from any other parenting book I've read. I think it's because I was expecting another book on how to parent, and this is a book about being a parent,

and especially being a millennial parent in the digital age, which I can very much relate to. I think you said somewhere that you were initially planning on writing a book about technology and the Internet, and then when you became pregnant with your first son, that idea sort of morphed into this book. What made you want to make that shift and write this memoir instead? Um, I had been writing about internet culture and technology for a long time. And so I had this very like cynical relationship with it.

Where was my job to just go into some internet community and check it out or like a series of Tik TOKs or whatever. Watch them, like figure out what I think about them, write about it and then move on to something else. And so I had this very critical distance from technology, even the stuff that I was just using for myself. I always had this kind of critics lens when I was using it. And it was only in pregnancy that that completely went away.

And I just had this most, just the most intimate, scary, intense, like almost religious experience with my technology and that I have never had a religious experience in my life. And so, eventually, as I started to stagger out of that, I realized that that was really what I needed to write about. So how did your relationship with technology become so much more intense become so much more intense once you found out you were pregnant? Well, so at the time I was using a period tracker

called Flow and I had downloaded it after I heard about what period trackers were. And I just downloaded the first one that came up on the app store. And I started tracking my period and I really liked it. It was really working for me. Like I basically had a relationship with it where I checked it once a month. It told me when to expect my period. I knew when I was going to be like pretty angry or sad for maybe no reason. Now, you know, it supplied a reason for that. And so it helped me.

And also it was just this very casual relationship. I wasn't looking at it all the time. And that changed when I started to notice that, of course, it's not just a period tracker. It also is a fertility tracker. It tells you when it thinks you're the most or least fertile. And as my husband and I started to think about having a kid, I just noticed it a lot more. And I kept sort of like looking at that.

And so now I knew not just when to expect to be angry and comfortable. But when I was passing this time in a month where I was passing over what I saw as like the opportunity to get pregnant and I kept passing that over and it sort of, it really just became like this idea of the ticking biological clock is like, you know, I think that's a pretty sexist cliche, but here it was like, it was in my hand. It was like, TikTok, okay, you passed that date. Now you'd like, maybe you want to wait for the next one. And so that's when it sort of intensified. And then when I did get pregnant,

I realized that there was this mode in flow called pregnancy mode that you can activate when you are pregnant. And so I activated pregnancy mode and it said, are you sure that you want to activate pregnancy mode? And I was like, yes, yes, I do. And it turned into this, you know, in completely different interface that I was now looking at like 10 times a day. Yeah.

I saw that you said a lot of times you were not looking to flow for actual advice or real information, but it just becomes this checking habit and this sort of person, not really a person, but a thing that you have a relationship with. I remember my wife Emily had something similar through both pregnancies. And I think for the first one, for our first one, I downloaded like one of the apps that tell you like, and your child looks like, pick the fruit or vegetable. It is a weird, it's a very weird experience. Yeah. And, you know, especially early in pregnancy, like I wasn't talking about it to anyone except

my husband who also didn't know anything about being pregnant. You know, I didn't even typically, at least for me here in New York, like a doctor didn't want to see me until I was like dating eight weeks pregnant or something. So I had just like these weeks that I was just waiting to even discuss it with anyone and it was the only thing that I was thinking about. And you know, if you're following like the general medical recommendations, there's a lot that you're expected to do in pregnancy to just like discipline your body in these completely to me unexpected ways.

And it wasn't that flow was like telling me what those things were because I could like figure them out myself. But it was as if it was just like this check-in buddy that I like I wanted some kind of feedback for all that I was giving to my pregnancy. You know, I was like giving up so much. I was sick. I was not like, you know, eating or drinking like the things that I normally would. I just, I wanted something to recognize it. And like flow was like always. Flow is there. There to do that. Yeah. We also had our first child during the pandemic, like you did.

So I can very much relate to what you write about that experience. You said, COVID stuck me in a looping preview of parenthood, trapped in my apartment, cleaning things with a moist wipe. The whole world remaps my anxious and isolated state. So when we were especially anxious and isolated state. So when we were especially anxious or isolated or irritated, Emily and I would say to each other, is this, is this parenthood or is this the pandemic? I imagine you guys had a similar experience.

Yeah. And I think it was something that I had, that I figured out later that every new parent feels isolated. And actually after my kid was born, there was a part of me that was like really smug that it happened during the pandemic. Because I was like, listen, I can't leave my house because I have a newborn, but nobody else can leave their house either. It was like in that way, but it did, it became this very intense concentrated time that I think is, you know, was relevant to me in a slightly different way. Like when my second child was born in 2022. How was it different then?

It was different in that, like, I could take him to a restaurant. But it was the same in that, like, I don't know, I had always like, you know, when you're young and living with roommates, I don't know if you've had this experience, but I was just like, I was so excited to move into the first place that I just lived in alone, like where I could do everything that I wanted. And it was just all suited for me. And then once I had kids, I realized like, I am stuck in this apartment all of the time. Like I am so, I was so naive about kids that this is the stupidest thing

ever. But it just never occurred to me that like, you can't leave the house even when they're sleeping. Like you have to be there all night, even though like you're not, there's nothing to do. They're just like sleeping through the night or whatever. And so, um, just like the way that our, um, culture is set up where we're all like living in these isolated spaces, we're all cooking in these isolated spaces, like doing our laundry in these isolated spaces. It made me so angry because it was so inefficient. Like I could just as easily have done like cooking for like another family too. It was just like I had to be constantly

going back to my apartment where my kitchen was where my kids could eat. Because it was wasn't that easy to like feed them literally anywhere else. Yeah when our second was born in December of 23. And I remember like a couple months into it, we were like, wow, we can bring him to a restaurant or on a walk or like have him go see people at someone's house. We couldn't do that with Charlie, right? Because it was July of 2020 when he was born.

And I remember when Emily got pregnant, we thought, well, by the time July comes around and Charlie's gonna be born, then the pandemic will be over and we'll be able to go out. And it was like, nope, that is not the case. Yeah, yeah, I know, it was a lot. So you were around seven months pregnant when your doctor said he saw something he didn't like.

Your son was ultimately diagnosed with Beckwith-Weidman syndrome, a rare genetic disorder. And you write in a very moving, I think, relatable way about how your relationship with that technology changed again after the diagnosis, everything from trying to Google your way out of the problem, which lots of people do with medical stuff, to eventually seeking out online communities of parents who were going through a similar thing. In what ways did that make you feel better and in what ways did it make you feel worse? So when this happened, you know, I thought I was going in for a routine ultrasound that

was just going to be very quick and that I would leave and then go on with my life and continue to plan my birth or whatever. And it lasted a really long time. And so even when I was there, sitting on the table with a technician who doesn't, if anyone has been in this experience, the technician won't tell you anything, any actual information. They're just taking the pictures. So I knew that something was different or wrong. And I had this feeling,

this was also when, you know, my husband wasn't in the room with me because you didn't have any support people there in 2020. And my first thought was not, I wish my husband were here with me. It was, I wish I had my phone here on the table so I could just like furtively Google the parts of my baby's face that this woman is mapping so that I can like assume some kind of informational control over this situation that even though it is unfolding inside of my body,

I have like no control over and I have no insight into. And I think, you know, everything that happened from there, it helped me in this way. Like I hadn't realized in the seven months leading up to that that all of the pregnancy content that Flo had been giving me, that I had been getting from other digital pregnancy resources or pregnancy books or whatever, is so focused on the typical pregnancy. It's focused on the normal pregnant person and the normal fetus and the normal baby and the normal child. And like,

it was such a shock to me to learn at that point that like, all of these kind of tools that I thought were like so tailored to my pregnancy specifically were of course, like of course not, they're tailored to like hundreds of millions of people's pregnancies. So that it seems to apply to all of us, but really like no one's pregnancy is like totally typical. No one's child is completely typical. And I think that's something that a lot of parents learn sometimes like after their kid is born

and I got to learn before he was born, which was great. The thing that sucked was that before I realized that I was just like madly, madly Googling, trying to understand what my son was going to be like, what, what he was going to look like, what people were going to think about him. And just seeding my imagination with all of these like basically like smears and lies about like the kind of person that he was going to be and really spending all of this time like stigmatizing my own child before he was even born and it was only when he was born and I saw him that I was like, he's a human baby.

He's like the cutest thing in the world. He's so incredible and amazing. And you know, of course, but his, just like the idea of him and the idea of him having this disability that I never heard of was so alarming to me that I just like bathed myself in online content about it that is not set up to like help or reassure a person in my circumstances. I remember you wrote that your doctor specifically said, this is what it might be, don't Google it. And of course, they all say, don't Google it, don't go online, and then you do, right? Because, I mean, and you write about this, I think, quite powerfully in the book,

that what we really want is control. And we think the technology and the internet, by virtue of giving us more information gives us control and in reality it can't, you know? Yeah. I mean he sent me home and said, you know, don't Google it, but I was going to come back like 24 hours later to have an amniocentesis, which is just this gigantic needle that they stick into you and they take out these vials of amniotic fluid. And so like for those 24 hours and then for the four weeks until the last like test came

back from that, I was spinning out. Like I needed to have someone to talk to about it and because I didn't, I needed my phone to act like it was doing that for me. This was before AI was in every single thing and I don't want to even think or imagine how that would have affected my experience because right now I'm like, there are people who are like asking chat, GPT, spiritual questions, like that's stupid. But I would have been doing that at that time. I had the same thought reading the book, which is I'm like, first I thought about it with flow. It seems like a character. And then I was like, what if, and like today, there's, and certainly within a year or so,

there's going to be these chat bots, I'm sure, designed to help people through an entire pregnancy that give you information, help comfort you if you're having trouble, act like a doctor. And I wonder how that will change everything. And it doesn't seem like it's gonna change for the better, even though it may, you know, at first glance, it might be nice to like have more information

at your fingertips and have someone comforting you, but I don't know that it can really replace actually talking to someone like you said. Yeah, I mean, I've thought about that. I haven't actually gone in and done the searches that I would have done and seen when it spits back. But what I did when I Googled Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome was find all of these sources that were A, like tabloids,

like the Daily Mail had a story about a toddler who was born, I should say BWS is an overgrowth disorder. And so it causes, among other things, like most kids to be born with an extra large tongue. It also is a cancer predisposition syndrome. So it causes like a heightened risk of certain pediatric cancers. So the first thing I found was a Daily Mail article of this toddler that it was like announcing in its weird all caps manner like was born with this enormous tongue and was like fighting cancer and his parents were like trying to raise money for as many surgeries as pictures of him in the hospital. And then I found medical sources that, you know, all of these images that had been taken in medical journals from, you know, that had been uploaded from like decades and decades and decades ago up to now, where children are like posed in this medical way.

That's not the way that you would pose your child to take a picture to like put on your mantle. It's like them like laying down in this like prone position maybe passed out like from anesthesia with their tongue maybe like pushed out as far as possible. And then I found like comments from people on Reddit that were like using BWS to make arguments about antinatalism that like children with that condition shouldn't be born because it's inhumane to just people who came across something on TikTok and were like, wow, that's gross. And so if I think about an AI that is trained on all of the human knowledge, like people talk about this, like it's such a great thing, like all of the human knowledge about BWS.

Like, it's so, that stuff is so awful. And at least when I was paging through this stuff, I could step back and be like, okay, the person on the antinatalist Reddit page is probably a kid. I can go to their search history and see that all they're talking about is video games. Like, it's not personal. They just don't, they don see that all they're talking about is video games. Like, it's not personal. They just don't, they don't know what they're talking about. It's a lot harder with an AI. Yeah.

You, at one point you wrote about how, um, this is what happens when the failures of the medical system collide with the incentives of social media platforms. Um, and, you know, I think we all experienced that during the pandemic as well too around COVID, but it really is like medical health stuff mixed with people talking about it on social media and everything that social media incentivizes really is a terrible mix. Yeah, I mean, I really felt like the internet was the only place that I could go and it's such a bad place to go, but it was the only place that I could go. And it's such a bad place to go, but it was the only place I had this experience where like,

after the amniocentesis, I was put in touch. Uh, with a genetic counselor, I was like assigned a genetic counselor from lab corp. And I remember being like the genetic counselor works for the laboratory testing company. And she's like advising me about which tests I should and shouldn't get. Like I, you know, I definitely like put my tinfoil hat on a little bit where I was like, you know, but it's true.

Like it's, is she incentivized to like tell me to get, you know, in some way completely out of her awareness to get as most, the most test possible, even if that level of knowledge is like not the right thing for my family because it's the right thing for LabCorp. And once you're in a situation where like medical care is monetized, even if you get pretty good medical care like I did, it really just muddies the waters and it's impossible to sort of navigate them.

Yeah. And like you said, the place that you go for that is the internet. Offline is brought to you by Zbiotics Pre-Alcohol. Let's face it, after a night with drinks, you don't bounce back the next day like you used to. Offline is brought to you by Zbiotics Pre-Alcohol. Let's face it, after a night with drinks, you don't bounce back the next day like you used to. You have to make a choice. Either you have a great night or a great next day. But you know what?

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No questions asked remember head to zbiotics.com slash offline and use the code offline at checkout for 15% off There's a lot of surveillance involved in parenthood, brands, marketing products to you because they know you're pregnant, psychological screenings after the baby's born, and then of course the surveillance of our kids, which you write about using the example of The Nanit, an app that is right on my home screen, for which people who don't know, it's basically like a baby spy cam over their crib and then maybe their bed, depending on how long you keep it. Right, how long you keep it. Right.

How do you think all this surveillance has changed the way that we parent today? I mean, I had this feeling during pregnancy that I was being so surveilled, like by ad tech and by the apps that I was using. And they were really getting me used to this idea of some ephemeral outside authority, like checking in on me and making sure

that I was doing pregnancy okay. And then when my kid was born, it was like, congratulations, Amanda, like you are in the surveillance seat now, you know? And, um, because like I was in such a vulnerable place, like I had never had a newborn baby in my house, like ever. I didn't know like how to change a diaper. And it turns out like it's not that hard. And if you fail to change the diaper, nothing horrible happens.

Like it's fine. You know, you just like try again. But just that general feeling like I'm not prepared to be a parent, but the baby is here. Like what do I do? I think any way that we can get a sense of control over that is desirable, especially if it's this way that we have sought control for, I don't know, like 10 or 20 years of intense

like internet use like I had. And I think like, I don't know, you know, something like the Nanette really turns, it turns your phone into this like child-focused entertainment console. And like, I do find my kids so entertaining and like they're, you know, I love to watch them. I love even more to watch them when I don't have to like stop them from running into the street or like, you know, get them to like pick up their food off the floor. Like, this idea of watching them at night. Yeah, when they're in their room, they're in the dark is like so seductive. Um, but what I realized, like I set up a Nanette in my house, like briefly

for a few months to test it out. And it was not until I laid down in the bed with my son at night with all the lights off and I was like rubbing his back that I saw what he sees. And it's not this beautiful entertaining image of his mother. It's like four glowing red eyes. And it made me wonder, just like the accumulation of surveillance we're doing

of them, not just in these nursery devices, but just like taking constant pictures of them, having their caretakers take pictures of them, uploading them to like an app. How is that making them, you know, perhaps conflate surveillance with attention, conflate surveillance with care? And what's going to happen when like, you know, the person on the other side of the screen like isn't this person they love and trust. But it's the government, which is, you know, from the minute that I take their picture and I put it in like my Google account, that's already a possibility and that's already happening.

I know it's, it's, I really struggle with it because you do want to have all those pictures and you know, my eldest, Charlie's old enough now where he likes seeing the pictures of him and his friends and everything else right because he's like looking at the screen of the pictures and so you think that there's benefits to it but then I don't know I was I was in you know he still has the Nanit in his room he's four and I was I lie in bed with him every night and like just last night we were looking up at it, or two nights ago, and he's got a flashlight, because he doesn't like the dark. And he's like, every time the flashlight hits the nanite, the red eyes go off, right?

Because that's, it's supposed to be like infrared, you know, night vision. And I'm watching it happen, and he knows exactly what's going on. He's like, look, look what happens when you hit the flashlight. And I was like, this is, I don't know, this is too much, but he doesn't know anything else, you know? And he said that in school they have like security cameras and he's like, yeah, sometimes me and my friends, we look at the security cameras and we try to blast them out of the sky. It's like, oh God. Well, that's good training. That is good training for him. That is important. That is important. Yeah.

I don't know. I also think like we don't often have caretakers come into our house, but we have like babysitters who put them to bed sometimes. And like having a nanny cam used to be like this really specific choice that a person would make. And it was this big cultural thing that we were all talking about. Like, is there a nanny cam like hidden in a teddy bear or whatever to watch the nanny? that a person would make. And it was this big cultural thing that we were all talking about, like, is there a nanny cam, like, hidden in a teddy bear

or whatever to watch the nanny? And now there are all of these systems that are set up that beam the information like straight to your phone. They alert you whenever anyone goes into the room where whether you've like planned for this or not, like you can monitor your domestic employee, like just do it, whatever they're doing. And I think anyone who works, you know, the idea of somebody watching everything you're doing is like really, it's really horrifying. But

also as a parent, like it's so seductive that you could just look in and see what's happening at any moment. I got to hear more about your experiences with the free birthers, which I did not know was a thing until I moved to LA. You can imagine it's somewhat popular here. So this is a very online community of people who choose not to get any medical attention of any kind during pregnancy and then including childbirth.

What interested you so much about this community? There was a point where when I was in this like diagnostic hell during my pregnancy, I was going in to see doctors, like sometimes every day, to get like imaging or tests or whatever, or I was getting a new test result. And then after I got the diagnosis, I was still, you know, planning for this longer term relationship with the medical system because I knew like my child would be

born he would go to the NICU where he would be treated in certain ways and then he would be monitored like throughout his childhood for various things and there was really this part of me that was like like I hated the medical system so much at that point, even though it had given me this diagnosis, which was the most valuable thing to me. It was such an awful process and it was so traumatizing that I became really interested in like spending some mental time, especially during that diagnostic period where I didn't know what was going on with like women who are narrating stories about doing the exact opposite thing.

They're like, I haven't seen a doctor at all during this pregnancy. And in some cases, it was just like, you know, first I was just like interested in what this choice was. And then there were certainly times when like just listening to this stuff made me feel super smug about my choices when the main thing that I felt was like this intense unease at how medical this entire experience was. And so I really just started listening to their stories as a way to, I think, process the choice that I was making, which was on this complete opposite extreme, and knowing that, like, neither of them are ideal, but there's also a relationship to them where, like, the

intensity of the medical experience causes some women to, like, completely reject it. Yeah. Well, I mean, can you talk a little bit about getting to know these various online communities of parents and how that helped you understand where, I think you mentioned where anti-vax sentiment comes from? Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I started listening to a podcast called The Free Birth Society,

which is it's every person who decides to birth without assistance is not like a member of the society, but it is like the best at marketing itself as like a free birth resource. And I realized like after listening to their podcast that they offer this whole range of programs for encouraging autonomous birth, which when I first interacted with them was sort of like blandly liberal feminist themed. Um, and then like over time just flipped to like Trumpy, just pure Trumpy like RFK junior stuff. Um, but what I understood like starting, and then eventually, so I went to a festival called the Matriarch Rising Festival, where these free birthers congregate.

And I was like the weirdest person there, because I was like, from New York City, I had had two C-sections at that point. And talking with these women was really illuminating, because I understood like, there were so many aspects, so many like things that I had also been absorbing from this like hyper-rationalist medical side that were existing here too, just in different forms. And one is like, there's like an incredible stigma against disability. And there's this incredible,

I think like unspoken desire to have a healthy child, which I think often really means a normal child. I had not realized before I gave birth what a weird phrase 10 fingers, 10 toes is. I don't care if it's a boy or a girl as long as it has 10 fingers, 10 toes. It's like, actually, I don't care about it. I want my child. I don't care about it. Like I want my child, like I don't care about the toes. But it is just this like very overt like ableism that's just slipped into like normal conversation.

And I think like what I found, what I came to understand was like, not only was that stigma there, like it is I think everywhere, but also I was encountering women who had a much different upbringing than I did, who were raised in like conservative communities and very religious communities where like the role of the mother was like a very supreme role. And it was the thing that they had been planning,

like since they were girls to do and to like execute well. And that sort of, you know, I only started thinking about that when I downloaded Flow. You know, I had never like thought of myself as like, just like someone who it was really important to like be a good mom or the best mom or even a mom. It was not something I really thought about until it was time to think about it. And so this combination of feeling this intense pressure to do everything right as a mother and this intense but really unspoken stigma against disability means that when you have

a child with a disability, like I blamed myself at first. I was like, what is it, what was it about me that caused this? Even if it's like a completely random thing. And so I could understand the steps by which someone was raised in this like intensive motherhood society, had a child with a disability that was stigmatized and somewhat ostracized, blamed themselves, was not comfortable with the medical system, wanted a solution, wanted an explanation for what had happened, and gets to reassert their authority as a mother by campaigning against the pharmaceutical companies or the medical system. I could see an alternate reality where this happened to me. Instead, all of these thoughts just existed in my brain and were just swimming around in there until I

wrote the book and figured out that they were there. But I could just see this path. And it was depressing because to me, you know, it's just so much more complicated than dismantling like disinformation, which is also not going to happen. But it's so much, I think it's so much deeper in American culture than that. Well, it is, it's such a human instinct to want to find reasons for things that happen that are unexpected or distressing or whatever it may be. And you can blame, it's like we're always looking, you know, I've had people like this in my life and family too. It's like someone gets an illness, someone's diagnosed with cancer and it's like, well,

what did they do wrong? You know, like what did they do? Did they do this as a kid? Did they smoke too much? And it like, it makes us feel again, it's back to this theme of control, right? Like we have some control over the randomness of what happens to us in life. And so you could either blame yourself, you could blame a big company, you could blame some political reason. I get it. I get where it comes from. More of my interview with Amanda Hess in just a minute. But first, two quick housekeeping notes. This Friday, June 6th,

you can join John Lovett, Tim Miller, and Sarah Longwell from the Bulwark for Free Andri, a fundraiser at World Pride at the Lincoln Theater in DC, they're raising money to help bring makeup artist and actor Andri Hernandez Romero back to the U.S. after he was denied due process and deported to an El Salvadorian mega prison like so many others. All proceeds will go to the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, the organization fighting to reunite Andri and others like him with their loved ones. Before the live show, Votes of America will join forces with the Human Rights Campaign for a protest at the U.S.

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And you get your parents' address on there. There's just all kinds of on there. And it's really nice to have Delete Me, not just, like they said, for the one time thing, but it constantly updates you because there's always new personal information running around online. So take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners. running around online. So take control of your data and keep your private life private

by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for our listeners. Today get 20% off your Delete Me plan by texting offline to 64,000. The only way to get 20% off is to text offline to 64000. That's offline to 64000. Message and data rates may apply. message and data rates may apply. How do you think that they went from being like vaguely feminist to Trumpy?

I think there's this spectrum. They, you know, many of them still identify as feminist. Some of them, like there's one who is pretty prominent who now identifies as like pro-patriarchy. So she's really like completely changed her branding. I think part of it is like when free birth is not just something that you believe in, but it's your business, you are following trends of like the people who you think might be interested in this.

So in 2020, I saw like just this like 2020 was like a time when the rupture really started to happen, but at first I saw things that any other brand would put up that was about valuing Black lives and talking about how free birth is important for Black women who are unsafe in the medical system, stuff like that. And I think it just over that like really polarizing time just flipped to a point where like they could no longer kind of like straddle this line and they had to sort of like pick aside and people on the left were calling them out for things that they had said that were they felt were racist or that were transphobic.

And they were like, okay, we're done. Like we're done. Pretend that we're not going to hide anymore. You know, we're like on the right. I don't know how common that is. But I think we've seen brands like other like, you know, very prominent brands be really into like Pride a few years ago and now just be like more than happy to just like follow the administration's lead and like dismantling any DEI stuff.

Yeah. You know, so I think it's like a sales tactic like anything else, but. I also think the shift within the Republican Party under Trump from traditional conservatism, as we once knew it, to an ideology that's much more anti-institutionalist, anti-establishment, cynical about everything, let's just tear it all down, probably helped push some of these people into that camp because, you know, then the left becomes a defender of institutions, including medical institutions, health institutions, and they probably just don't trust those kind of people anymore.

Yeah, and I mean, sorry to the left, but those institutions are hard to defend sometimes. And ideally, the left would want to make their own changes to them, but because they're such a, they're under such pressure, like, of course you have to defend them. And it puts, it puts you in like a really tough position politically. One of the other big themes in your book and probably the one that will stay with me as a parent is this idea of child optimization,

which you identify correctly, I think, as an especially millennial phenomenon. We talk a lot on this show about how the internet and social media offer sort of the illusion of human connection. And your basic argument is that, like we said, the internet offers parents, or would-be parents, sort of an illusion of control. And if we just consume more information, listen to more experts, buy more products, then somehow you write, our kids could be programmed for optimal human life. Why doesn't it work out like that? I mean, first of all, like they're children, you know?

And so like, I don't know, everyone who I know who's like had a newborn and then had a toddler and then had like a four-year-old, like you get wise to it after a certain period of time, like you do not have control over this person. And also in some sense, like they've been who they are since the moment they were born and you can like see it in their eyes and like their newborn photos. But also, I don't know,

I think it's this really sad phenomenon where like millennials, like have been told that they need to have been told that they need to work so hard to get these diminishing returns. And also just the educational system that we, you know, we were like the first generation to start to have to take. I think we really have absorbed this neoliberal idea that like everything can be made a market and everything can be assigned a value and that's like the best way to like decide what's good. So even when you are looking at your baby who like of course you want to be successful, of course you want them to be good, you want them to be like a good baby, to be like the

best child that they can be or whatever, I at least found that I was just like uncritically in some ways like applying this system that when I think about it, I find quite horrifying actually, like to my child, where like if I got a data set from him from sleeping, I used a crib that would tell me like the hours and minutes that he slept. And I saw that he slept 20 minutes more than he did the night before. Like I would be so happy about that number that my literal baby has no idea what that is. He doesn't know why I'm happy. You know, why I'm like congratulating him

on like his night or whatever. It's like so deranged. We do that too. We're like, hey, you know what? Two hour nap today wasn't an hour and a half like yesterday, we got a full two hours. Napping king, like yeah. And the Nanette, like I have a friend who has it Two hour nap today. crib queen tonight or whatever. It's really like, I don't know, it's like a Buzzfeed quiz for like your child's crib

personality. And of course you're obsessed with your baby and so like you want to know everything. But it just how slickly it's translated into like the commodified versions of identity that we're so used to like having built for ourselves online is, was really striking to me. I'm so glad you wrote about Big Little Feelings, which is a very large popular Instagram account with two millennial moms who offer and sell parenting advice. Can you talk a little bit about your experience with Big Little Feelings?

Yeah, I hadn't heard about Big Little little feelings until my first son was a toddler. And my friend told me about it. And so I googled them and I realized like big little feelings sounded really familiar. And it's because it's like this kind of like word salad of like, littles and bigs and like big feelings that kids have or whatever. And so it's just like very perfectly, I think, millennially marketed. And I became interested in them because like, once I started reading, I wanted to read parenting advice from quite a long time ago. And I decided to read Dr. Benjamin Spock's book, which was originally published in the 1940s.

So I got a version from the 1940s to make sure it wasn't like it's been updated 100 times. And what I found when I read it was that there were so many similarities between what they were saying or what a Dr. Becky is saying about being like the calm, collected leader of your home of like not reprimanding your children or even like shooting them cross looks of not yelling at them, of not hitting them, of course. And so this approach to discipline, you know, it expands on the internet and it,

there are all of these sort of like intense and complicated distinctions between different programs. But the thing that it's based on, I think, has been circulating intensely in our culture for a really long time. And so I thought it was curious that even though that was the case, a lot of these accounts, big little feelings included, really market themselves as this radical shift from like what the boomers did to us, where they're like, we know that you have trauma from your childhood.

The implication is it's because of the disciplinary program that your parents used. We know so much better now, and you're going to create the child that you could never be because you were never given the opportunity to be. And it's such, I mean, first of all, there's a great deal of trauma in childhood. Of course, the idea that it is based on this specific account you follow or book you read, I think, is ridiculous. And so, I don't know. I just, I found it really interesting that at the same time that these accounts were

saying we don't have a village anymore and that's awful for us. Like it's so hard. We can be your village. And also the program of our village ensures that no actual other human, especially anyone older than you is like actually, um, qualified to speak to your child because they don't know like all of the scripts that we're going to like unfold for you in this program is like, um, I find it very odd, but at the same time, just like having watched enough of their videos, like their voices speak through me all the time. I can hear their words coming out and just like sometimes it works and you know, sometimes

it doesn't work, but when it works, you're like, hmm. Wait a minute. No, I think I started following it, I only started following it when Charlie was a toddler too and inevitably I would, every time I would scroll past it and see like a tip from Big Little Feelings, it would be like something that I was not doing or I was doing and I shouldn't be doing, right? It's like, and it's all the like, you know,

stop clap hands emoji, telling clap hands emoji, your child to be careful, clap hands emoji. You know, I'm like, we're not supposed to say be careful. Yeah. Stop telling them to say thank you. Stop telling them to say I'm sorry. It's like, oh, I guess I'm okay. I'm just supposed to chill out here and do it.

Yeah. It's hard. It's a weird. I thought you wrote about how parenting brands like Big Little Feelings reacted to the murder of George Floyd. And this line destroyed me. Big Little Feelings appeared to be sincerely suggesting that racist police violence would not exist had Derek Chauvin's mother bought winning the toddler stage for $99.

Yeah. I mean, it was one of the, and they were not alone, but like they were one of the brands that like had a very sincere post about Black Lives Matter that then seamlessly transitioned into a hagiography of their own program and why it was so important to speak to children in this very specific way. And I think a lot of them use this language of this being a political program, that it is a movement that they're building of followers who are all in their individual homes, maybe using the same words with their kids. Although I think it's important to note that following big little feelings does not mean that people are like following it on Instagram, doesn't mean they're following it with their

kids. It doesn't mean that they're not yelling at them. It doesn't mean that they're not yelling at them. It doesn't mean that they're not hitting them. It's a piece of media that someone is following. It doesn't mean that that is the mold of parent that they have become. And I found this political language to be really depressing because I think there's so much about parenting that is political and that we do need a political movement that supports parents, but most, like more than parents' kids, and that it should be this collective responsibility for us to make sure

that like the kids in our community are like, let's start with being housed, fed, that they have hot meals, that they are clothed appropriately for the season. Before we get to this program where it's like, and everyone has the same disciplinary program that their parents are parroting to know, I think it's this, it's something that we see a lot, which is this invocation of a political program that is actually really more about isolating children in the family and keeping, like, you know,

keeping your own eyes focused on your kid, as opposed to like thinking about ways that you can help your kid that's more community-minded, really. Offline is brought to you by Armora Colostrum. Working out and caring for your body are some of the best ways to be offline. Discover the transformational health benefits of Armora Colostrum that have earned

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to parent, maybe I wasn't parented quite that way, and maybe just, you know, treating kids more like their whole people and adults is better in certain times. But it is, and you get to this point, it is sort of skipping over the larger issue that we all face, which is the saying about it takes a village. It doesn't seem like the village can ever be the internet and the online communities for parenting and that we discover on the internet. And that raising kids with the help of family and neighbors and people who you're close to in life,

that's probably a better way to raise kids and certainly an easier way to raise kids. And people have done that for, used to do that for hundreds of years. Yeah. And I think the thing that's difficult is like, you need to include people who are not parents in that like political movement. People who will never be parents. I mean, one of the things I'm most ashamed of having become a parent is that like, I never thought about how I could help families

before I became one. I never realized how hard it was. You know, I had like a general sense that like children had rights that were, that we were like, and they were being underserved but like no sense in which like I might have an obligation as a young person who had like time resources whatever to like help children in my community. I was like children you know are people who parents hang out with and that's not me like I not really, I'm not allowed on the playgrounds,

you know, cause that's odd. Yeah. But there really aren't a lot of spaces where that becomes possible. Yeah. How do you mediate your kids relationship to screens? Like, how do you think about that now? Cause that's the other big.

Yeah. I mean, this is where my, I'm not giving parenting advice comes in. Like I, I don't do it that well. Um, my kids, like, like I, I tend to believe like big screen better, like biggest screen, the best or whatever. Like my kids watch a television in our house. Um, and there are things that I don't like about the television. Like I, you know, I'll put on Disney Plus and they have all of these options. And even though I personally like those options more than the vast and confusing

options that are on like YouTube kids, just the fact that they have so many options and they are like constantly demanding that I like change Oh the thing and they're demanding a specific thing to watch like um it's just so different from when I was watching tv when I was a kid where like yes I loved watching tv but like I had to watch what was on there and if I didn't like it like I had to find something else to do. Um, but it really is like, I use the TV a lot and I do it because like, it's the only way that I can like do things that I need to do for my kids. Um, and I think one of the reasons that something like big little feelings is popular is because it's like a form of like expertise

and like help for your kids that you can seem to acquire. Like maybe when you're like at work looking at your phone or whatever, or where you're like laying in bed at night. The times when I am actively taking care of my kids in the mornings and the evenings are like incredibly fraught and chaotic and my kids are like incredibly fraught and chaotic. And my kids are two and four and they love to wrestle. And like being able to turn my back and like cook something for them and make

sure that they're not they don't get like scalded in some way. Like the TV is great. So I love it. But, you know, I don't know. I feel like I I haven't figured it out and it's only going to get worse. My kids don't have their own devices yet, so I haven't had to navigate that at all. I'm dreading that day. And it's also a very millennial thing. You point this out that treating parenting is like a second career that you can study

up on. I do this day that you're with the kids and then afterwards when you're in bed at night and you don't have that much time, you're like, okay, maybe I can listen to a parenting podcast or read a book or figure out plans to make them more interested the next day so they won't be so bored. And it's like, it's just hard.

That's not, at some point you start to learn to let go a little bit and to sort of let go of the perfectionism and it's like, all right, if we're all just going to hang out and play and do nothing and just hang out in the house, that's fine. There's no activity today. It's going to be okay. Yeah. I mean, online, like, parenting influencers are not really my thing.

I think I was just like, so by the time I got to them, I was already writing my book. And so I was like, I'm like, I can completely divorce myself from this emotionally. But I do buy books. And like, I've definitely stress bought books that are like, you know, healing your yelling child or whatever that like I've never read like I never even opened but just like the internet click of like buying it or whatever like made me feel like I did something I was at least making progress even if my kid was gonna wake up at 530 in the morning and yell and I'd be like it's it's very early and your neighbors are sleeping you know and it would happen the next day or whatever but I didn't have time to read the book and that's fine.

It's just they're kids and it's hard. It's hard. I don't know. Last question. What has surprised you most about being a parent that you really enjoy? I, so after all, after all that, having nothing to do with the things that I studied or like the way I tried to prepare myself during pregnancy, like I feel competent at it, even though I can't give you any advice about what to do and like I don't know how to tell any other

person how to parent their kids. Like I am good at it, I think. I'm good at being a parent to my kids in a way that has surprised me. Like I never saw myself as maternal. I had like very little, even like babysitting experience. My closest friends had not had kids yet. And I just like, I love building a relationship

with my kids and I'm not good at maybe molding them in a particular way but I'm good at like being there for them and being their mom. And that's the most important thing, so. Yeah, it's so awesome. Amanda, thank you so much for joining Offline again. And also just congrats again on writing a fantastic book. I hope everyone reads it, whether you're a parent

thinking about being a parent or just wondering what it's like to be a parent. I think it is a fantastic read, so thank you. Thank you so much. As always, if you have comments, questions, or guest ideas, email us at offline at crooked.com. And if you're as opinionated as we are, please rate and review the show

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