SECOND LIFE: Having a Child in the Digital Age, by Amanda Hess
In 1997’s “Surrendering to Motherhood,” the baby boomer writer Iris Krasnow jettisoned Ram Dass and journalism to find full-time enlightenment in her four joyously Fudgsicle-smeared sons. A decade later, in “Alternadad,” the Gen X-er Neal Pollack exposed his fetus to Beck; come new fatherhood, to stay cool, the writer started a band. Now, millennials join the parenting memoir canon, notably via Amanda Hess’s engrossing “Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age.”
Described by the A.I.-penned FactsBuddy.com as “a woman of average stature with son Alma born in October 2020” (both name and month, she wryly notes, are inaccurate), Hess is actually a New York Times critic at large on pop culture and the internet. So it’s fitting that the obsessively phone-swiping, not-particularly-maternal Hess begins her motherhood journey on an app.
It’s a menstrual tracker, aptly named Flo, who dispenses quasi-scientific girl-boss advice throughout the month — flagging Day 21 as an opportunity “to tackle thorny conversations with colleagues or managers.” Flo also tags Hess’s days of ovulation in blue, awakening her muffled ticking clock.
A strength of “Second Life” is how, with a reporter’s gimlet eye, Hess lenses out from her personal experience. Her research reveals that Flo’s creators are less “Our Bodies, Ourselves”-style feminists than the “tech-bro” twin brothers Yuri and Dimitri Gurski from Belarus.
Still, Hess finds clicking on her medicine-pink “global menstrual surveillance tool” grindingly addictive, spurring a descent into other internet rabbit-breeding holes. WebMD alone invites 74 companies to track her and stores 153 cookies in her browser; instantly, digital advertising algorithms rise up after her, like winged monkeys in plant-based clothing.
Hess has a (hilariously reluctant) native’s ear for the (awful) millennial marketing sound. A trending Free (a.k.a. natural) Birth influencer has a “podcast voice” primed “to dish on the pitfalls of modern dating or recap a sexy true crime.” Modern maternity companies are “branded with severe abstractions”: names like Ripe, Storq and Hatch. In “smarmy baby talk,” the magazine Babe by Hatch confides, at Week 8, “your baby is the size of a CBD gummy,” and asks if Hess has picked a name or “was waiting to assess their vibe.” Her “moods were fluctuating while preggo” because the hormone HCG “was en fuego. Circumcision was totally your call mama,” genetic testing “a loaded convo. Either way, I was large and in charge and ready to crush the whole ‘mom’ thing and I should probably buy a flask of belly oil for $64.”
Hess’s baby’s vibe turns out to be Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, a rare abnormality. “Don’t Google it,” warns the doctor. Whipping out their phones, Hess and her husband indeed find little useful information. The web’s wide-not-deep maw spits out everything from News of the Weird-style accounts of babies with freakishly large tongues to British Museum-scanned stone tablets with dire omens: “If the tongue of the reject [a.k.a. baby] is wide on its throat and hangs down from its mouth, an enemy will seize my border city through revolt.” Or so said 650 B.C. Mesopotamians.
Happily, the baby arrives (no spoilers), a brother follows and nursery gizmos with Australian outback-evoking names — Keekaroo, Woombie, Ubbi, Nanit, Owlet — come calling. Hess buys a used Snoo, a robotic cradle ($1,695 new as of this writing) promising the parents’ holy grail of an extra one to two hours of sleep a night. A dad posts his four-month-old’s perfect blue sleep graph on Reddit, swoonily tagging it #SNOOporn.
Come toddlerhood, the Instagram influencer Big Little Feelings (3.5 million followers) offers Hess easy hacks for conscious parenting. BLF cites George Floyd’s murder to promise “your child will be the change we need in this world” — as will, presumably, their online course “Winning the Toddler Stage” ($99).
In the end, Hess concludes, “The American model of parenting in the 2020s was a punishing and isolated ordeal.” But are millennials truly the first to feel alone? Alison Gopnik wrote in “The Gardener and the Carpenter” (2016) of a multibillion-dollar industry that had transformed child care into what her publisher termed “obsessive, controlling and goal-oriented labor.” In “Feminist Theory,” bell hooks notes this model “isolates children and parents from society.”
Gen X and baby boomer parents, too, bought tons of stuff (Exersaucers, Avent bottle systems), over-hovered (were our 2-year-olds “gifted”?), attended ridiculously overpriced “baby music” classes instead of sensibly pooling child care.
Hess describes a millennial mom, Nev, whose friends politely decline free babysitting. Nev poignantly yearns for her grandmother’s community, where “you just drop in on each other and bring food and kind of do life together.”
Perhaps, then, it will finally fall to Gen Z to prove it really does take an (irl) village. Or Qvilage-aroo.
SECOND LIFE: Having a Child in the Digital Age | By Amanda Hess | Doubleday | 248 pp. | $29
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