‘Second Life’ Looks at Parenting in an App-Obsessed World
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on Forum, when Amanda Hess, New York Times critic at large, was told her baby had a rare genetic condition, her first instinct was to grab her phone and Google her way out of it.

But instead of answers, she found anxiety, a feeling that would come to pervade her journey into parenthood. We talked to Hess about how technology, from fertility apps to prenatal tests and high-end gadgets, are both shaping and distorting our expectations of pregnancy and parenting. Her new book is Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age. Join us.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Amanda Hess remembers when her relatively positive relationship with technology changed. It was when she was pregnant and having a routine ultrasound that detected a potential abnormality. "'I reached for a sense of control and gripped tightly to my phone,' she says. "'It would not give me the answers I was looking for, but it would feed me wrong answers from its endless supply. It would serve me facts and conspiracies, gadgets and idols, judgments and tips.'"

Amanda Hess writes about navigating technology through pregnancy and early parenting in her new memoir, Second Life. Listeners, what digital tools did you turn to for advice during the stage? Did they help? Stress you out? Both? Hess, a critic at the New York Times who writes about the internet and pop culture, joins me now. Welcome to Forum, Amanda. Thank you so much for having me. Glad to have you. Gosh, your book brought back so many memories because I had my last one in 2018. Yeah.

So I want you to take us back to that ultrasound in the summer of 2020 when you were 29 weeks pregnant. What happened? Well, I thought that I had gone in for a pretty routine ultrasound. But in fact, the doctor, this is the phrase he used, saw something he didn't like.

And it really set off a four-week diagnostic period for me. So between like my seventh and eighth months of pregnancy, my son was ultimately diagnosed with an overgrowth disorder that's called Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, which is completely manageable at this point. But in that four-week period before I knew what was going on,

I felt so lost and really there was a part of me, even though this makes no sense rationally, that thought that like if I Googled hard enough, I could really figure out what was going on with me. Yeah. Your doctor even told you specifically not to Google it. But of course, that's an almost impossible thing to ask someone to do. What did you find when you Googled it?

You know, I found some medical information about the kinds of symptoms that children with BWS can have, including a large tongue.

It's an overgrowth syndrome, so it elevates the risk of some pediatric cancers. But I also found tabloid stories about babies who were born with big tongues who were diagnosed with BWS that used these very alarming headlines. I found TikTok videos from parents of kids with BWS that attracted all sorts of vile comments.

I saw a bunch of medical images of children who were being treated in hospitals, which is such a small slice of what my son's life is now. But before I met him, when I was still pregnant, all of this stuff really influenced my imagination around who he was going to be. Yeah. I imagine since you were describing sort of the state you were in when you

got this information, that it really affected the way you took in your searches and what it was putting out. Yeah, and I think eventually it also made me rethink all of the pregnancy advice that I had consumed in the first seven months. I didn't realize the extent to which all of this stuff is programmed around pregnancy

an aggressively typical, very normal pregnancy, normal mother, whoever that is, normal child. And within those, you know, drumbeats of normalcy, there's a lot of stigma embedded and ableism. And it was only, you know, after my son was born and I was taking stock of what had happened that I began to realize that.

Let me invite listeners to join the conversation if Amanda has a story that's resonating with you or if you had a similar experience. You can email forum at kqed.org, find us on Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or threads at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. Yes, you were consuming a lot in those seven months before pregnancy.

But I'm wondering also if you could sort of describe your relationship, you know, with technology, with the Internet, even before that, because it sounds like before that you had a pretty good sense of all of its pros and cons, but also seemed very competent in your own ability to navigate it. Yeah.

Yeah, I've been writing about internet culture and technology for a long time. And so I thought I had this steady relationship with it where I could like investigate some new internet trend and maybe get myself a little lost in it and then separate myself from it, write a piece and then, you know, move on to the next one.

And so I think I felt like I had a properly skeptical relationship to technology. And it was only when I got pregnant, which...

Even though this is a very common occurrence and a totally natural thing, like a human being growing inside of me was so strange and overwhelming and I wanted to do it correctly, whatever that meant. I didn't know what that meant. And so my relationship with technology just changed.

became a lot more intense and intimate immediately when that happened. You were pretty attached to an app called Flow. Can you tell us about the app? Flow was an app that I used to track my periods, and it was sort of styled like a girl's diary. And I found it really useful, but I only used it about once a month. It just told me when I should expect to get my period. And then if I felt...

like bloated and lousy the day before, then I just knew a little bit more about what was going on. And so I really liked it. But I didn't realize when I first downloaded it to track my periods that it's also, of course, a fertility tracker that would tell me, you know, when I was at my most fertile. And then it also became a period app.

you engage something called pregnancy mode. It became a pregnancy app, and you engage this thing called pregnancy mode. So when I engaged pregnancy mode, it really changed from this kind of girl power period tracking gloss to something that was much more like a disciplinary program for how to grow the optimal baby. Yeah, and it sort of would—

give you these images of sort of an idealized pregnant person, an idealized view of how your baby was growing. What did those look like? Yeah. So at the time, you know, the first time I used Flow, this was in 2020. And so it has, you know, changed somewhat in the past five years, and I haven't looked at it

too recently, but at that time the pregnant person looked kind of like a Barbie doll with her head popped off. So she was very slender and white and the app purported to show how the typical or the idealized person would be like her body would be changing during pregnancy. And it also showed me this floating orb

that had first, you know, just a few cells like a blastocyst and then an embryo and then finally a fetus. And it would show me, you know, the developmental stages of the fetus in this like kind of hyper-realistic CGI baby doll form that really looked like it was like

floating in outer space and not inside me. And yet, even though that all sounds so ridiculous, I started to use this app so much, just opening it several times a day that it really felt like on this sub-rational level that I was looking at my baby when I was looking at my phone. You eventually learned that Flow was a startup created by men. How did that affect you?

that experience and relationship you had with it. Yeah. Well, so I, when I became curious about who had made flow, I went to their website and I navigated to the about us page and there was no information about us, about them, about who had made it. Instead it was like cartoon images of mostly women. And so I thought that was odd. And so, you know, it's not a secret. It was made by two brothers and,

And they, you know, last year, Flo was valued at over a billion dollars. And so these two brothers became the first femtech creators to create a femtech unicorn company. Wow. You sort of touched on this earlier, but

The incentives of the tech industry and often these startups, which are predominantly male-led, when they're woven into pregnancy and parenting, what are some of the impacts that you saw? You mentioned, especially with regard to your kid, you know, the ableism and various other things. But it felt like also things you were describing really touched on sort of sexist and even misogynistic ideas there.

Yeah. You know, one of the first things that I noticed about Flow is that it has this pink icon when you press on it on your phone and there's this white feather in it. And when I asked Flow what the feather represented, they said it, you know, it represented like this...

femininity. And so it is a very like feminine presentation there in the app. It's also made for, you know, hundreds of millions of women and others all around the world.

use flow and it's facilitated like tens of millions of pregnancies. And so when you think about that for a few minutes, like obviously it's not...

And I think before I got pregnant, I thought pregnancy was kind of like what it looks like in the movies. Like you're uncomfortable and maybe you throw up and then at the end, like your water breaks and then you race to the hospital and the baby comes out.

And it was not until I was pregnant and I started to really talk to like my friends who had had kids, my friends who were becoming pregnant, that I realized that there's just such a tremendous range of outcomes.

of pregnancies and a lot of them, you know, people don't speak about to their friends. They don't speak about them publicly and they don't necessarily make their way into these apps unless the person programming them, you know, is very specific about it. We're talking about how technology can shape and distort our expectations of pregnancy and parenting. And we'll have more after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Ina Kim. When New York Times critic Amanda Hess was told her baby had a rare genetic condition, she turned to the internet and tools for help. But instead of answers, she found anxiety. This is one of the stories she talks about in her debut memoir, Second Life, having a child in the digital age, which is about how technology can shape our expectations of pregnancy and parenting in ways that might do more harm than good at times. And

Listeners, if Amanda has a story that's resonating with you, feel free to email, call, or post your thoughts. The email address is forum at kqed.org. The phone number 866-733-6786. You can find us on Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or Threads. Did you rely on apps, prenatal testing, other digital tools in pregnancy or early parenting, and how did they affect you? Let me go to caller Lindy in Berkeley. Hi, Lindy. You're on.

Yes, I'm a nurse midwife of 40 years. I had my first child in the 70s, so I've seen the whole arc of women and their relationship to their bodies and their pregnancies. When I had my first child, it was normal to have a baby, and none of this existed. As a nurse midwife, my patients were bombarded more and more frequently as the 80s, 90s, and 2000s and 2100s came along.

And now women are experiencing a very different reality as you're experiencing.

what do you call it? Our guest, yes. It's describing, and it's really terrible. For one thing, it separates all the emphasis on prenatal testing makes women think that most pregnancies are at risk. They are not. The risk for somebody under 40 years of age for a chromosomal problem is less than 1%.

Lindy, thanks so much for sharing this and for the arc of your experience, you know, really informing the way you feel about it. Amanda would love to get your thoughts on what Lindy is describing. I mean, overall, she feels like this sort of shift from what she's seen, you know, back in the 80s, you know,

and 70s is sort of terrible. And she also specifically calls out prenatal testing. Wondering what your thoughts are. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. That's so interesting. I mean, so I got, you know, so many prenatal tests during my pregnancy. And ultimately, I got one specific test that showed that my son had this rare genetic condition. And I was so...

grateful to have had that test because it meant that when he was born, his doctors could better care for him. But in the book, I also write about just the rapid, rapid expansion of all of this technology. It's expanding, you know, I think faster than even doctors are able to really keep up with and understand exactly what these tests are testing for. And one of the things that I wrote about was this very, you know, increasingly common experience of

Right.

Yeah.

like some kind of condition, becomes this sort of rite of passage of a normal pregnancy too. And how that makes us feel about our own kids, our own bodies, about disability. It's a really complex phenomenon. Yeah. You have this line where you say the tests...

This, I think, is one very specific one by the biomedical company Natera. But you say the test's panoramic view could not see children or adults with disabilities, much less envision communities in which they thrived. The branding suggested that abortion was a parent's personal decision, so personal that the word could not even be published. And it implied that caring for a child with disabilities was the parent's responsibility alone. You talk about just sort of this undercurrent approach.

eugenics through all of this. Do you want to say a little more about that? Yeah, that piece that you just read is, you know, me reflecting on the branding of a biotechnology company's website that sells prenatal tests. And so it sells prenatal tests that test for a wide range of conditions that have a wide range of outcomes. And

But every, you know, stock picture of a family or a pregnant woman or babies on that page show just like what you would imagine when you typed in healthy baby, you know, healthy twins, healthy pregnant woman. There's no...

There's no imagery of any child or adult who is disabled or who has any of those conditions. And so the message that that sent to me was that the tests exist to, A, provide peace of mind to someone who, you know, gets a negative result. And they tell me that, like, the only desirable or kind of, like, even...

So there's the whole prenatal testing aspect of this and the fact that it's becoming more and more recommended, it feels like, across the board, too, for anyone in any stage of pregnancy at any age. Yeah.

pregnancy as well. The other thing that you write about, which I also related to a lot, is just the overwhelming marketing that happens once the internet finds out that you're pregnant. You say, hey, pregnancy turned you into a

coveted consumer. Talk about some of these commercial pressures that were just like seeping into your mind. Yeah, I guess I was naive, but I was surprised at how quickly the internet like figured out that I was pregnant. And I wasn't keeping the information from the internet. I typed in, what do you do when you get pregnant? Like immediately after I got a positive pregnancy test. And so I told the internet before I told my husband, before I told anyone else.

But it was about 24 hours before I started seeing just, you know, walls of Instagram ads for...

Special, expensive, gold-flecked prenatal vitamins for beautiful, flowy nap dresses featuring a model with a baby in her arms. Stuff that I think Instagram knew that I wasn't very interested in maybe 48 hours before that.

immediately adapted to this new stage. And, you know, I found I learned a lot about how these

ads actually work. And I think I was also naive in imagining in my mind that there's some she's pregnant now switch that some human has to turn on inside MetaHQ to give me those ads. And of course, it's all just a lot more complicated than that. And machine learning works without

even the engineers necessarily knowing exactly what data they are drawing from and how they're working. Um, but it's, it was the first time in my life that I really saw targeted advertising as a threat to me because I was so vulnerable to buying stuff in that time. Yeah. What do you think it's feeding on? What desires and thoughts when you're pregnant? Um,

I've never been a parent before. How do I be a good parent? How do I be a good mother? How does my body recover from pregnancy looking exactly like it did before? All of that stuff. I think, you know, I had such an experience with pregnancy where I felt like I needed to prepare for everything before my child is born.

came out and existed. And really, I could not become a parent until I had a child. I couldn't become my specific son's parent until he specifically existed. But it's very seductive to believe that there are all of these preparations, consumer and otherwise, that you can make. Yeah. And they're so sophisticated, too, at understanding how to

capitalize on those desires, those fears and anxieties, and also just simply to make you want to buy things. I loved your example of the Instagram woman, you know,

Who was dressed as a pregnant milkmaid and sipping Topo Chico from a straw. And you were like, I hated the ad, but I wanted the dress. I know. I think, you know, part of what makes this so insidious is that, like, I'm not the kind of person who, like, wants to necessarily go on the radio and admit that, like, I wanted to look pretty during pregnancy. But, like, of course...

I did at times and I felt so out of my body and like so sick and just bad. And there, you know, there's this idea that they sell that like if you have this dress, like maybe you won't appear that way at least.

We're talking with Amanda Hess, a critic who covers the intersection of Internet and pop culture for The New York Times. Her debut memoir, A Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age. And listeners, share with us your own experience of relying on apps or tests or digital tools in pregnancy or early parenting and the effect that they had on you or any questions or thoughts you have on Amanda Hess's story. The email address is forum at kqed.org. Our

Social channels are Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or Threads. Call us at 866-733-6786. And let me go next to Sarah in Oakland. Hi, Sarah. You're on. Hi there. First, I just want to thank you, Ms. Hess, for sharing this. It's so amazing.

amazing and vulnerable. And I really, um, have a lot of gratitude for you, uh, you know, stepping out and, and sharing this. So thank you for that. That takes a lot of courage. Um, I, I was just thinking about particularly with the flow app, um, and sort of like, you know, apps like it, the application of pregnancy and all that. Um, and particularly that the founders of flow are men, um,

cis men, I assume, which is important to note that it's just this like need to have women's experiences mediated by some authority figure, which is overwhelmingly cis, white, male, heterosexual and non-disabled. And it's just crazy to me that even the thing that under most circumstances, you know, a body that can get pregnant

under most circumstances, if you did nothing, you would continue pregnant until the baby was ready to come out and you would give labor. You'd have labor and you'd have the baby. It's actually like this almost fully internalized process that your body knows how to do. It would be terrible to go through it like that, but it's sort of the ultimate example of telling women...

not to trust themselves, their own body signals, their neighbors, their aunties, all these people around them who have this valuable information. Like if it's not in the app, then I'm automatically suspicious of what that crazy auntie said, which may have actually been much closer to this individual person's experience. Oh, Sarah.

Yeah, thank you. And Amanda, that word that Sarah uses, mediated, right? It's a word that comes up a lot in your book, too.

Yeah. First of all, yes, of course, Sarah's right. The men who created Flo are cisgender. So like they don't menstruate. They cannot become pregnant. And yes, I mean, this was the thing that I found most powerful about Flo more than any specific advice it gave me, which I usually discarded it.

Yeah.

to surveil him and to take on that role and like to start to, you know, apply to his body. So, yeah, it's, you know, more than any piece of data for me. It was just this habit that I found really insidious. Yeah. You thought about deleting the app at one point, but what stopped you? Superstition. Superstition.

I've never been superstitious before. I mean, again, like a human being growing inside of you. Like it's a pretty wild thing, even though, you know, that's how we all came to be here. And I really felt like if I deleted the app that in some sense I was like deleting my baby. And I was scared to do that. I didn't want to bring in whatever luck that

could make for me. Yeah. And your point earlier about sort of continuing to embrace tools that sort of surveil that monitor, you know, you had a monitor for your child's sleep schedule. When did you sort of start to recognize that connection of, you know,

maybe surveillance being normalized in the pregnancy process than being an option to you in the parenting process. Yeah, I mean, I think it was later on. So many baby devices, like they're so...

and they exist to like help you to get closer to at least like a simulation of your adorable baby. So many of them work during sleep. So, you know, maybe it's a smart baby cam where you can watch your child sleeping wherever you are. And from, you know, from my perspective, I,

I didn't use a particularly fancy camera, but I did try one out while I was writing this book, one that is like Wi-Fi and AI enabled.

And I found myself, you know, really delighting in the images of my kids that it would produce and delighting even in the image of myself that it showed me when I would come in and like sweep my baby out of his crib or whatever. And it wasn't until one night I laid down with one of my son's

And I noticed these like four glowing eyes coming from the camera that they don't see something cute and adorable and lovely about me. They see these like robot eyes. And that's such a different experience of care than the one that I was experiencing. This whole thing that.

Sarah was mentioning, and we just talked about with regard to mediating and optimizing and everything with regard to the experience of pregnancy and parenting. Do you think that that in part is sort of what drove people to the other extreme of just having zero intervention whatsoever? You write about the free birth movement and the free birthers.

Yeah. So there's been like somewhat of a free birth movement in the United States, you know, since the 1950s. But that was also a time when there was a lot of sort of

Yeah.

It's new found like popularity is not just that people are responding to how mediated pregnancy is, but also that, you know, there are all of these tools for people who are interested in free birth to meet online. And free birth, just to be clear, is like a term for unassisted birth. So giving birth without...

an obstetrician or a midwife, usually without a doula. And so generally the point is for the birthing person themselves to be like the highest authority there over the birth and maybe a friend or partner is there as well. Right. And to have absolutely nothing between you and child and the whole experience, I guess. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I really found like I became somewhat obsessed with these people because my pregnancy was so mediated. And once it became complex, it was so medicalized. And that was something that, you know, it's a hard experience becoming a medical subject in any context. And then for your child who you've never met to become a medical subject within your body is...

Just it was such a nerve wracking experience. And I really found this escape in like listening to podcasts where women were describing just like giving birth in a yurt. But I also found like there, you know, there can be a fetishization of no mediation that I think, you know, can also be quite dangerous. More with Amanda Hess after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Amidst a terrible storm, Idemeneo promises the god Neptune that he will sacrifice the first person he sees if he and his crew survive the tempestuous waters. But as he arrives safely to shore, his relief transforms into horror when the first person he lays eyes upon is his own son.

This summer, venture into the storm with Mozart's sublime opera, Idomeneo. June 14-25. Learn more at sfopera.com. Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF, presenting Parade, the musical revival based on a true story. From three-time Tony-winning composer Jason Robert Brown comes the story of Leo and Lucille Frank, a newlywed Jewish couple struggling to make a life in Georgia.

When Leo is accused of an unspeakable crime, it propels them into an unimaginable test of faith, humanity, justice, and devotion. The riveting and gloriously hopeful parade plays the Orpheum Theater for three weeks only, May 20th through June 8th. Tickets on sale now at BroadwaySF.com. Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

We're talking about how fertility apps, prenatal tests, high-end gadgets can affect the experience of pregnancy and early parenting, how it can shape and distort our expectations of it. New York Times critic Amanda Hess was told her baby had a rare genetic condition, and she turned to the Internet and tools for help.

And she wrote about that experience in her new debut memoir called Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age. She's a critic who covers the intersection of Internet and pop culture for The New York Times. Listeners, does Amanda Hesse's story resonate with you? Did you rely on apps, other digital tools in pregnancy or early parenting? How did they affect you? What was your experience with prenatal testing?

You can email forum at kqed.org, find us on our social channels at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. So, Amanda, talk about the moment you first met your baby. Well, I'll say, you know, the moment before I met him, um...

I started crying. And I think, you know, I was being wheeled into an OR and I got the sense that maybe, you know, people who saw me crying thought that I just really didn't want to get a C-section. But really, I was a little scared to meet my baby.

I feel ashamed to say that now, but it's true. And the second he was, you know, cut out of there and he was like brought around the blue curtain and I saw him, you know, I just, we had been through so much and I just fell in love. I know that's not an immediate thing for everyone, but just seeing him there, like having survived that with him,

He was also so cute. And I had had this idea in my mind that was like, you know, it was so dominated by the most extreme possible images of medical images where, you know, children are kind of like piglets.

pinned down and examined and photographed. And then those images make their way to medical journals. And then those make their way to, you know, Google images. And in fact, like he was a baby and he was so beautiful. And so it was really an amazing moment.

And you call him Alma. Can you tell us why you call him Alma? Yeah. Well, I didn't want to use his real name. And there's a website called factsbuddy.com that had a, I found like a short biography of me on it. But it's this, it's seemingly AI assisted website that produces like biographies of many, you know, sort of

not famous people like journalists or pastors. And when I found my bio on there, it said that I had a son who was born in 2020 and his name was Alma, which I thought was fantastic.

So funny because that's not his name. But I had once posted a photo of him on Instagram along with like a meme from Phantom Thread featuring one of the characters from that movie whose name is Alma. And I don't know, but I'm guessing that

whoever or whatever compiled that bio conflated those images and thought that that was my son's name. Yeah, it just goes to show how wrong, how sort of silly and also lazy and also just completely a mess the internet can be. I know. I mean, it makes me feel so warm and fuzzy when I think about that because it, you know, it...

It's one of the few instances where I can say like the Internet, it doesn't know my child like it pretends to know. But it has this like instead, you know, very distorted idea. And it becomes very clear when they think that that is your son's name. It's a beautiful name, but it's just not his.

You struggled with putting photos of Alma online. And I think a lot of parents struggle with, you know, how many images of your child to put online. But talk about how it can be fraught for parents with a child with a genetic condition and the types of things you went through in that process.

Yeah. So before he was born, I, you know, I wondered whether I would post his photo online. And then after he was there, like, I couldn't resist. I was like, this is like the most exciting and beautiful thing, person in front of me. And I've become very used to posting the most beautiful things that I see on Instagram. Yeah.

But I also found, you know, instantly after I started and my husband started posting photos of him that, you know, he was born with an extra large tongue, which is one of the sort of cardinal symptoms of BWS. And people started noticing that and asking questions or making assumptions like telling us that we should investigate whether he has BWS.

tongue tie and needs to get it snipped. And so it made me question how I ought to present him online. And I think before that, I didn't realize that I was, you know, managing his image in this way. But I was choosing, you know, I was taking thousands of photos of him and only posting once, you know, one once in a while. And

It was only later that I looked back at my Instagram grid and I saw that, you know, I would be posting a photo where his tongue was like a little bit between his lips or when his mouth was totally closed. And never a photo of his tongue like sort of presented in the way that I would normally see it around the house, which is like just much larger appearing. Because I wanted to protect him, I guess, at the time. And I didn't feel like I wanted to...

justify his appearance or his presence to other people, like I sometimes had to do in life when I was, you know, strapping him to my chest and walking him around the neighborhood. Yeah, I really appreciated this encapsulation where you write, if I revealed nothing, I worried that it meant I was ashamed of my son's condition. But if I emphasized it, it meant that I felt he needed an affirmative defense.

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

it also becomes very tricky. And when I decided to write this book and release it and be specific about the genetic condition that my son has, I took all of his photos off of Instagram and I don't post them anymore just because I wanted to try and strike some kind of

But, you know, so much—I've put so much of him out there. And even though I don't post his image anymore, like, just even the fact of taking these photos of him and putting them in my phone and putting them into Google Photos means that all of these databases have access to, like, every—

particle of his face, you know, and God knows what those will be used for in the future. So even though I'm not posting stuff anymore, it's still a part of that system. Yeah, totally. I'm thinking about the one example you have given right now of just where it was really positive, where, you know, social media, the internet could have a really positive effect on

helping you see other kids with BWS, helping you feel like you were connecting to a community of people who were going through it too? Yeah, I ended up joining a few online support groups for families of kids with BWS and also adults with BWS. And I found them, you know, to be so comforting and

I didn't, you know, usually post in them. If my son had, like, a medical event coming up, I might ask a question and get some advice from people who had just been through that, even, like, at the same hospital. But just knowing that there were...

7,000 people in one of the groups, that there were 11,000 people in one of the groups was so gratifying because even though BWS only shows up in about 1 in 10 to 15,000 births, there are a lot of kids around the world. And so there are many, many kids with BWS. They just don't live next door to me.

This listener writes, I have found a split in my pregnancy for the usefulness of tech and the anxiety from it. While there are many well-meaning and positive messages, the sheer volume of social messaging for parenthood and pregnancy that run the gamut and range so far to either extreme makes much of it just decision fatigue. Let me go to caller Allison in Petaluma. Hi, Allison. You're on.

Hi. Hi, Amanda. I am so thankful that you've opened the door to talking about these issues. I'm a certified nurse midwife practicing for 30 years now in various settings, and I too have watched how my patients, how it was easy to sort of instill confidence in them back in the 90s to now, which is amazing.

My patients are walking around just in fear, in fear of the unknowns and are not...

are easily made confident in their body's ability to grow a baby, to birth a baby, to parent a child. And it's near impossible today as a provider, given the health care system such as it is, the little bit of time we have with someone to instill that confidence anymore. And it's not just social media. It's our political climate where we are.

situationally right now in the United States. I spend a lot of time as a provider trying to figure out how to

to make my patients trust their body's ability to do things. And I also have wondered, why aren't young women talking more about this? Why am I not seeing more politically about this? As we did in the 70s and 80s with the natural birth movement. So I'm so grateful for you, and I want you to continue talking about this. Let's not make this the end of the discussion. I don't want your book to go on a shelf and collect dust.

You know, we haven't even spent much time talking about breastfeeding. You know, I watch my patients being told they need to pump their breasts, you know, before they even give birth so that they'll make colostrum. You know, imagine that. Yeah, I'm hoping we continue this conversation big and loud. Allison, thanks. Do you hear that a lot, that this just really isn't being talked about?

Well, I just put out a book, so this is the only thing that I'm talking about right now. But I do think, you know...

That other people are saying, wow, thank you so much for this. I didn't really feel like I could talk about this or that this was really being talked about. Yeah, I think there's some sense in which like, you know, when you engage pregnancy mode in flow, it's kind of it looks kind of like a dinky app. Like the CGI is like whatever. It's it almost seems like below critique.

And I really wanted to show on the page just how deeply this not very sophisticated technology got into my brain. But I also think it's such an important point that the caller just made that...

These technologies are, you know, they can give a person a sense that like their body is not their own, that they don't have the ultimate authority over their body, that there's some.

AI, whatever that like has all of the answers and it's not within them. And that's something that exists in these technologies, but it can also exist in our medical system and it exists in our law. I mean, women do not have authority over their bodies in most states in the United States. And so I think drawing all of the connections between these like interlocking phenomenon is, was really important for me. Yeah.

Let me remind listeners you're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. This listener writes,

Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I didn't use peanut, but I found a similar thing happened when I joined like a local mama's group. Honestly, like the best thing I joined after my first pregnancy was a mutual aid group in my neighborhood because it was still really concerned with kids. It was concerned with kids in our neighborhood, but it was concerned with like

putting real needs and real resources together, as opposed to just like sitting alone in your apartment and spinning out forever about something that could be wrong, but probably wasn't. Yeah. And breastfeeding is such a tough, breastfeeding is, I was laughing when Allison was bringing it up because, you know, it did feel like it just really pervaded those early days post giving birth. And

And you write about an app that you relied on called Baby Connect to track your milk production after the baby was born. What effect did that have on you? Yeah. So I pumped breast milk because I had intended to breastfeed my baby, but because he had this very large tongue, he wasn't able to latch. But he could take milk from a bottle, and so I would pump it and put it in the bottle and then give it to my husband usually for him to feed him.

And I did get this sense of kind of like power and authority in turning my body into data and like having this kind of like interface where I felt like I could control it because I felt like.

had failed because I wasn't able to breastfeed. And so I sort of like got this kind of like technological zone of control where I had lost what I perceived to be like this physical control. But it also like drove me a little nuts. It was just like, you know, a dieting app that I had once used where I was like,

You could see the line of your weight inching downwards. And here, like, I could see the line of, like, my milk output inching upwards. And I got, like, pretty obsessed with, like, making more milk. I ended up throwing away a bunch of milk because I wasn't able to donate it because I was on antidepressants when I was pumping the milk out.

But I became obsessed with like getting this like large yield. And I think I was just really used to apps that prime you to just do something more intensely over time. Ultimately, a friend of yours points out that parenting's meaning comes from the fact that there is so little in your control. Yeah.

I mean, now that my kids are two and four, like, I have no control over them. And, you know, I just really have to sort of embrace that. But I think that was a lesson that, you know, I learned in pregnancy when I, my brain was just really, really, really trying. And my thumbs were, like, really, really trying to get control over this thing that I had no control over.

And then once my kid came out and I had a diagnosis and so I had, I knew the sort of things I needed to do to care for him. I think it was easier for me to let go because I had already been through that experience in pregnancy. And maybe some parents have that experience, you know, with a newborn. But yeah, by the time they're four, you know, like he's faster than me. I can't even catch up to him.

Right. It's such the opposite of what tech tries to convince us that we can do and be. It feeds on our desire to be the sort of perfect parent while also pushing this idea that there is such a thing as perfect parenting.

And a child is completely not something that you can control. I know, that can be optimized. But I think, you know, in the very early, in pregnancy and in the very early days, you know, it can seem like every choice you make has these, you know, potentially grave consequences that it could like really determine their health or their personality. And at a certain point, you know, they're just who they are and you get to learn what that is. And it's so great.

Amanda Hess, thank you so much for your book. Thank you so much for having me. It's called Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age. And you can also catch Amanda's writing in the New York Times about pop culture and the internet. Oh, I

My thanks as well to listeners and, of course, to Mark Nieto for producing today's segment. Our team includes Caroline Smith, Francesca Fenzi, Jennifer Ng, Susie Britton, Danny Bringer, Brendan Willard, Christopher Beale, and Christopher Greiley, Brian Douglas, Brian Vo, and Jesse Fisher. Katie Sprenger is our operations manager for podcasts. Ethan Tovan-Lindsey is vice president of news. And our chief content officer is Holly Kernan. I'm Mina Kim. Have a great weekend.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Amidst a terrible storm, Ida Mineo promises the god Neptune that he will sacrifice the first person he sees if he and his crew survive the tempestuous waters.

But as he arrives safely to shore, his relief transforms into horror when the first person he lays eyes upon is his own son.

This summer, venture into the storm with Mozart's sublime opera, Idomeneo. June 14-25. Learn more at sfopera.com. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go! That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together! ♪

Most of our media are owned by a handful of tech billionaires. But there's one place that still operates like the internet was never invented.

On the new season of The Divided Dial from On the Media, we're exploring shortwave radio, where prayer and propaganda coexist with news and conspiracy theories. And where an existential battle for the public airwaves is playing out right now. Listen to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.