00:00:00.000Hey, this is Anne with another update on the episodes that we need your questions for.
00:00:04.680We've gotten some really interesting ones in about why men are less likely to believe in
00:00:08.980climate change with some of your own stories included, but we need more. Keep those coming.
00:00:14.200We're also working on a deep dive about Gwyneth Paltrow with the author of her new biography,
00:00:19.100and we're still taking your questions on birding culture. That one's going to be so cute and good.
00:00:23.980hoarding, and food trends of all kinds. As always, you can submit those and questions
00:00:29.840you have for asking anything at culturestudypod.substack.com. Okay, thanks and enjoy today's
00:00:35.860show. So the book opens with this 1950 short story, sci-fi by Ray Bradbury, and it's called
00:00:44.960The Children the World Made, or more commonly taught as The Velt. And it begins with a pair
00:00:50.080of parents their names are Lydia and George who are really excited because they've just bought
00:00:54.680something called a happy life home this is basically an epic smart home it has taken over
00:01:00.440every maternal and housewifery function and of course Lydia is both ecstatic and completely
00:01:07.820depressed because this was her entire life they also and which is so depressing not to editorialize
00:01:14.220of course they also have two children which is the norm they're twins their names are Wendy and
00:01:19.140peter we can hear the sort of peter pan thing there and they have their own reality playroom
00:01:26.100which sounds really cool basically they fantasize they imagine things this is the height of freud
00:01:32.000mania so it's definitely psychoanalytic and then it's like a 3d vr room so they start to fantasize
00:01:38.620the sahara and the children just become totally obsessed and they won't leave the room and
00:01:44.440they're addicted to the room and slowly that vr becomes r it becomes reality and so when lydia
00:01:51.900and george go to a psychoanalyst they're like what should we do oh my god you know a psychoanalyst
00:01:58.160is like you must obviously remove the screen you must shut down the home the children catch wind
00:02:03.720of this trap their parents in the room and of course are murdered by a pride of lions what's
00:02:11.280left somewhat open is like is this just their fantasy or does it really happen it seems like
00:02:16.820it really happened this is the culture study podcast and i'm ann helen peterson hi i'm hannah
00:02:28.240zeevan and i'm the author most recently of mother media and also the distance cure both with mit press
00:02:34.080and i'm an associate professor of history at uc berkeley okay so your book is so so interesting
00:02:39.920to me and like just an example of all of the incredible work that's coming out of media studies
00:02:45.160right now because when I was reading it I was like wait is your PhD in psychology or is your
00:02:50.020PhD in media and that itself or in history right like in and you're in a history department now
00:02:55.920right yeah yeah so like it's doing all of these things so skillfully so how how do you describe
00:03:03.840but this is like the hardest elevator talk ever yeah so the book mother media you know i can say
00:03:10.360a little a little bit about what it tries to do but basically the first observation i had in
00:03:15.880writing it and i think this helps to sort of map the project is that we know as historians of
00:03:22.000psychology or feminist historians that in the 1950s we have both this like really pressurized
00:03:28.220image of the housewife at the center of her home. She's definitely white. She definitely like the1.00
00:03:34.420fictional Lydia has two or 2.2 children, and she's in the suburb. And we also know that in the 1940s
00:03:41.820and 50s, there was this huge pressure on what that mother at the center of that, you know,
00:03:46.640domestic console should be. She should be attentive, she should be libidinal, but not too1.00
00:03:52.120much, not too little. And we also know that this image is just a fake one. Or in the parlance of
00:04:00.660Stephanie Kuntz, the great historian of American motherhood, it was a way we never were. But it
00:04:06.780becomes this really important image. We see that now with tradwifery, etc. And so I looked at all
00:04:12.120that psychology that was trying to instruct mother on how to be. And I saw even if it's behavioralists
00:04:17.820who disagree with the psychoanalysts, et cetera, they all agreed that mother should be the sole
00:04:23.740conveyance of care to a child, just as technology is really appearing in this other role in aiding
00:04:30.300and child rearing. So the first argument is psychology decides the mother is a medium.
00:04:35.960The second part is then looking at all of the people who fabricated the technologies that we
00:04:41.160all know whether or not we love them the baby monitor you know that the high-tech crib and its
00:04:47.560antecedents and on and on how they and television of course but also comic books how they all began
00:04:54.660to think about media as doing the work of standing in for mother because mother actually can't just
00:05:00.720be the the unique conveyance of all culture all transmission all love something else comes in
00:05:06.900And so the book is interested in how mother as medium and media as mother play together and have shaped our understandings of mothering today. I'll give the contemporary classic example, which is next time you see a mother shushing her child with the iPad, go interior and see how you feel about it. And the book is sort of interested in offering a prehistory of how those feelings about children in front of TV, children in front of iPad came to be.
00:05:32.380Yeah. So you write that during this formative time, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, there was, as you say, new and exquisite attention to the nuclear family and these new definitions of what mother is, what father is, what a child is, and these definitions, which are not fixed.
00:05:53.300Like, I think sometimes it's easy because they've been so naturalized for us to think, like, this is how we always thought of these roles, but that these definitions haunt us today.
00:06:01.620So can you talk a little bit more about that just as we start our conversation?
00:06:07.020I mean, you know, I've had this exquisite luck myself to teach the greatest group of graduate students ever, History of the Family, my first semester at UC Berkeley.
00:06:18.040and the first thing we did was read this and i promised them i was like this will be the most
00:06:23.320boring week of the syllabus and i'm so sorry but we have to do it which is we read you know these
00:06:28.440really intense debates from the 80s 90s about what american family life was and it was really
00:06:36.000recent that we were like oh huh we didn't always live in nuclear families and part of what that
00:06:42.640does that fixed image is it excludes or extrudes people who have had all kinds of different family
00:06:49.340life and not just like in a new modern way historically um so the the first thing the
00:06:55.700book wants to do is be like basically everything we think about immutable family life is wrong
00:07:00.040and and like let's look at how that prescription came to be so there's a lot of free and directing
00:07:06.520in the book like here's what all these people were pressurizing or putting on women whether
00:07:11.700they're upper class women, lower class women, women of color, white women, because there are
00:07:16.480all these different signatures for each of those groups. And the pressures are unevenly felt,
00:07:21.920but they're not unevenly articulated, meaning everyone's a problem. And so I wanted to show
00:07:28.480that too. Yeah, you have this, I think, who is it that you're quoting Melinda Cooper, that the
00:07:33.100history of the family is one of perpetual crisis. So like, there's always these different solutions
00:07:38.080that you're trying to deploy and it always has to be unsuccessful that family has to be in crisis
00:07:44.880so nothing can ever actually work yeah i think the other way to look at that is the book tries
00:07:49.140to show both from above and more from above as well as below the kinds of solutions that were
00:07:54.660posited to various family crises the one i'm paying most close attention to is one that is
00:08:02.180materially about labor how can new standards of reproductive labor new forms of mothering
00:08:08.960coexist alongside new expectations and new desires that have a channel to leave the home say as well
00:08:17.540as you know pressures on women who have always worked outside of the home that's like an uneven
00:08:22.080part of the history of women at work and how that gets voiced as a problem that can be dealt with
00:08:28.360with technology it can be dealt with you know it's this kind of techno boosterism stuff we're0.56
00:08:33.180totally used to in the present but i i'm also showing how that emerges so you know that's the
00:08:38.880crisis and then what happens is mothers are both blamed for not being totally present
00:08:43.140and for mismanaging the media and by the time we get to the ipad we know that one
00:08:49.160but in fact this has been a question since they called tv the boob tube i always forget that that
00:08:55.180actually is referencing like an actual boob and not like um i don't know like a thing that dads
00:09:01.000say you know because it rhymes or something yeah um i mean that's a good tee up for this other
00:09:06.980argument of the book is that all of these like panics and discourses around media were actually
00:09:13.920like darkly twinning the same panics and discourses around mothering so like can we think of
00:09:20.220maybe point us to a specific example whether the boob tube or comic books or something else that
00:09:25.300comes to mind we're gonna we're gonna do so much historicization in this episode but that
00:09:30.340starts us off with an example of that sure i mean here's here's an example so the book opens with
00:09:37.320the story of the limbergh baby kidnapping which most most readers should be you know we've just
00:09:43.240heard from the introduction we have ray bradbury the first chapter is on the question of paid as
00:09:48.480well as unwaged caregiving beyond the mother because that's the first place this panic over
00:09:53.780mother as the proper only exclusive quote-unquote pure medium of care comes from so there's so much
00:10:01.380happening in terms of labor between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century
00:10:05.760and then again in the interwar period around shifts in who and why people are serving
00:10:11.680in the role of the waged caregiver of child who is not mother. So the nanny is the term I use. But
00:10:19.280of course, there are all kinds of figures at that time. There's the nurse who lives in with the
00:10:23.920smaller children. There might be a governess who's with older children, lives in, lives out.
00:10:29.040I use the nanny as a kind of catch all, though I'm careful about it. And there's this massive panic
00:10:35.060about what nanny is bringing into the home. And of course, this is a panic of class and race.
00:10:41.680Right. And so all of a sudden, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping happens, which, of course, is this like horrific thing to say that it is the most famous kidnapping in the United States, even though we have endless kidnapping happening all the time all around us now.
00:10:58.680And and in fact, the history of the U.S. is predicated on all forms of kidnapping. But the Lindbergh baby in this classic, you know, crime paradigm is a white baby whose father is a very famous fascist, very, very wealthy, you know, pilot.
00:11:15.260And it's the height of, you know, it's the Great Depression.0.57
00:11:17.940And so there are very few, very wealthy families who are living on these kinds of estates.
00:11:34.420and the first set of people who are blamed are his nanny who is the person who discovers him
00:11:40.400missing and says to the mother and they've stolen our baby and the point i make in the book is that
00:11:47.400the minute the baby was gone there was no hour like there was no solidarity between mother figures
00:11:52.720um they interrogated both her and also a woman who is working as a maid the maid died by suicide
00:12:01.880you know from the extent of the questioning and the nanny repatriated back to scotland
00:12:07.940of course neither of them did it and immediately the move amongst a kind of very wealthy
00:12:13.860community is to make a media make a medium that will convey what a nanny would do it's to remediate
00:12:22.920the nanny oh well now we can do it ourselves and with this you know we know this one right like
00:12:28.580technology is neutral it will just do what we want it to do it works the way we want it to
00:12:33.860it works for us it's positive or whatever it solves a problem it's not you know i live very
00:12:39.540close to silicon valley and i sound like where i'm from that was already true in the 1930s and
00:12:45.000so thus the baby monitor came to be and it came to be in its first usage on a yacht at the height
00:12:51.060of the great depression so that a baby could sleep down one end and a mother could sort of
00:12:56.080attend to her other role as the housewife helping her husband play cards and hosts down the other
00:13:01.340end right and without having a baby monitor exactly and that's where a baby monitor comes
00:13:06.320from it's a ceiling of the nuclear family so this reminds me too the the Lindbergh kidnapping and
00:13:11.880actually just like discourse around Lindbergh is really central to a lot of panic around the rise
00:13:16.960of what was called personality journalism and like the 19 like around that era and people thinking
00:13:23.260like that the press was essentially like high journalism was being degraded by stuff that
00:13:28.880people wanted to read about. And so it just like it highlights to me like, oh, yes, this is a story
00:13:34.000that's a panic about mothering. But then like in all of these echoing ways, it's also about what
00:13:38.940is happening with media at the same time. Absolutely. Okay, let's take a quick break
00:13:44.300and then we'll get into our listener questions. Today's episode is brought to you by Birch
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00:16:30.540so let's get into our questions they're so good and complicated uh this first question comes from
00:16:39.940ellie and it's about how we talk about technology and parenting is technology just the new
00:16:44.940breastfeeding over the past few decades breastfeeding has become a really contentious
00:16:48.800parenting topic so first we have the introduction of formula and oh wow formula's great and everyone0.72
00:16:53.560should use it then came the backlash well breast is best everyone should breastfeed suck yourself
00:16:58.540dry triple feed six times a day just sacrifice yourself with the altar of your child but also0.99
00:17:04.040don't breastfeed for too long because that's weird and why should you get special accommodations for
00:17:08.240pumping and feeding then outcomes research showing that really breastfeeding only has
00:17:12.440minimal benefits over formula and then that gets backlash well how dare you not support women doing
00:17:17.740this magical thing now maybe there's somewhat of an uneasy truce now a lot of people breastfeed
00:17:23.320some do formula some families do both but somehow we all still feel bad and judge for whatever that
00:17:28.520decision was. I see technology as having a really similar path. At first, iPads in schools was going
00:17:34.260to be a revolutionary teaching tool, and now there's this big backlash. And all parents are
00:17:38.500using technology in some way, and we feel judged either about using it too much or in the wrong way.
00:17:44.260Or maybe we feel like we're being overly superior if we're trying not to use it at all.
00:17:48.700It feels like technology is much like breastfeeding. There's this narrow version of the right way to
00:17:52.660parent, which is used as a cudgel to make parents, but especially women, feel bad and subjugated to
00:17:57.820their parenting choices. So I feel like I should just send Ellie a copy of your book. Like she
00:18:02.480just like wrote, like, this is the perfect reader. Yeah, absolutely. Give me Ellie's address. I'll do
00:18:08.380it. So thank you to Ellie. I mean, the first thing I'd say is like, this question is so excellent.
00:18:13.080And in part, because from a kind of history of technology perspective, we would see formula,
00:18:20.100we would see the bottle, we would see the breast as a form of techne, as a form of technology.
00:18:25.560so that's spot on and it really you know chimes with a lot of what i have in the book like the
00:18:30.920second chapter is about sleep and the you know with feeding too it's the same i argue that that's
00:18:36.820a fashion system we have sleep with your baby don't sleep with your baby and of course like
00:18:41.920what is being covered over and naturalized is that when we had a kind of scientific mothering
00:18:47.860that was pro formula and pro kind of standardization there was a lot of you know not
00:18:53.700just social but like medical political power really attached to that idea and then same when
00:18:59.920we have the backlash around breastfeeding right there's all the we have the same in sleeping
00:19:04.260right put your baby on its stomach says dr spock anyone who was raised post 1990 knows about the
00:19:11.220back to sleep campaign right where babies are put on their backs like you would never ever now put
00:19:16.800your baby on the stomach and of course spock but some you know historians of public health have
00:19:22.260argued that stock really contributed to a rise of SIDS as the most read parenting expert in the
00:19:28.200history of the world. So I think we have that kind of, you know, tension. I think you're right to
00:19:34.120bring it to screens, right? There is this tension between techno-optimism, techno-pessimism,
00:19:39.380and then just also the truth that when we can batch process children in this case,
00:19:45.280capitalism is going to want to do it, even if it isn't best. So there's this kind of boosterism
00:19:49.940around yes the internet yes the ipad yes whatever at the same time of course like screen time is
00:19:57.200exceedingly useful um i have a six-year-old he's not in the book i don't write about myself in the
00:20:03.580book i'm not very interesting in a way right i'm just like a mom who works and uh sometimes it goes
00:20:10.440well and sometimes it goes poorly and i have no advice to give but like i definitely use the
00:20:15.580screen. And I've watched, right? Like there's this kind of social attitude towards like my kid
00:20:21.320looking up iNaturalist, which is all he seems to want to do on the iPad, which is hysterical to me.
00:20:27.200I'm from California. I'm like, who are you? And, and like, you know, me on my phone and then
00:20:33.980seeing parents, you know, be like, oh man, you know, my child never is allowed. And we know
00:20:40.160which one is quote unquote better i'm i'm less good right well it's just that language and i
00:20:45.560think even when they like i don't like that you have to come up with this sort of armor around
00:20:53.060your screen use because like a justification in the way that you narrativize it because you know
00:20:58.580that whatever you're doing is actually not that great right yeah even though that's that we're
00:21:03.320just trying the best we can and this technology is available the other thing is that we know a
00:21:10.460little bit about what screens are doing to all of us it's the book is not like oh and therefore give
00:21:15.800your child 11 million hours of ipad right um but it's also to say like you know in ellie's question
00:21:22.280it's articulated there right there which is yeah all parents but especially mothers and my book
00:21:28.060shows why mother and it's not just because mothers are assumed to be the center of everything the
00:21:34.140book also shows why that is but also because at mid-century we opened this channel for slippage
00:21:40.300between moms and the media they deployed in the home and the kind of pathologies whether it's
00:21:45.520around autism which we can talk about you know whether it's about schizophrenia all the kind of
00:21:50.240social panics right now it's literacy in the 50s it was you know communism we can talk about those
00:21:56.780things too literacy versus communism um why not have both uh yeah this the last part of the
00:22:04.260question where she says that like all of this conflict also like it all serves to make mothers
00:22:10.500feel bad but also subjugated to their parenting choices absolutely can you talk a little bit
00:22:15.480about that i mean i hear that in two registers right which is one is to like be at the altar
00:22:21.660of one's parenting choices and commitments um and the other is of course subjugation more broadly
00:22:27.960in society through parenting its limits in you know in the u.s context the book is only about
00:22:34.900the united states um i'm in other books i work more transnationally we have such a kind of
00:22:40.480particular history here that that you know the comparative book would have been twice as long
00:22:45.140Yep. And mothers are variously, unevenly, really exposed to scrutiny at the level of social and political power. You know, thinking about Dorothy Roberts' work, you know, and so that's also part of it. There is this double sided both like I will die on the hill of Montessori because I have decided to die there, but also like the actual real pernicious overreach of the state. And both are featured in the book variously.0.51
00:23:11.920I'm really interested in this discourse around Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, which is everywhere. And he, it's just, it's so fitting that this dude is the mouthpiece of it. And all of the people I see wringing their hands about like, I have read this book, I need to change the way that I'm parenting. It's all women.
00:23:33.640yeah absolutely i mean to quote my husband's favorite line it's the oldest gendered story
00:23:40.200in the book um and it is a book you know that's that's part of the advice industry um it's
00:23:48.580partially why i'm really anti-advice that also has to do with other commitments i didn't want
00:23:52.920to put myself in the book as i said for this reason and there was interest six years ago or
00:23:57.620whatever and like well then have it be advice and it would end up just being like do what you can
00:24:03.980that makes you feel okay while also privileging the safety of your child thanks and yeah and you
00:24:11.180know like with real exceptions where I'm like very strongly believe in things like vaccines
00:24:15.900but um you know which I have to say now in year 2025 but like this marketing has always picked up
00:24:23.020on what is the panic and we are worried about what screens are doing to kids and like it's not
00:24:29.460to say that we shouldn't be but if we're not conscious of what we're also importing which is
00:24:34.140the pathologization of mothering the pathologization of a mother working and the pathologization of
00:24:39.720children then it's a problem for me and that kind of also ableist language is all over the place
00:24:46.220especially around the ipad and what it quote-unquote does to a child so this i think tees
00:24:52.200up our next question. Well, this is from Kate. I'm curious if the surveillance tools and technology
00:24:57.400we give parents actually provide more peace of mind for parents and give more independence to
00:25:01.720children, or are these tools actually exacerbating anxiety of both parents and children by implying
00:25:07.620that children must be under constant surveillance to be safe? And how much of these surveillance
00:25:11.920tools are actually just performative, meant to show other parents that you are watchful
00:25:16.100slash not a careless parent without actually offering real increased safety? And what price
00:25:21.220you pay for not adhering to the pressure to monitor all the time. I'm mindful that which
00:25:25.860kids get to be, quote, free range, unquote, versus which kids would just be considered neglected is
00:25:30.760very contingent on socioeconomic factors. For some context, I'm a mom to a two and a half year
00:25:36.040old, a six month old, and I interact with many parents of older kids at our local playground.
00:25:40.560I'm wary of having my children think being under constant surveillance is normal,
00:25:44.220but I also already have felt pressure about this. I noticed that it starts young with having a video
00:25:49.480baby monitor as well as other cameras around the house and then checking them all the time even
00:25:54.260when the parent is supposed to be out and getting a break from child care. I've had parents be vaguely
00:25:58.900horrified that my husband and I don't have a video baby monitor and instead just use a radio. With
00:26:04.120older kids like nine and ten year olds I have seen quote free range kids still be required to wear a
00:26:09.380tracking watch by their parents. The kids often take it off once they get to the playground. Is one
00:26:14.220even free range when they are required to be under surveillance and would a watch that can easily be
00:26:19.080removed even provide more safety so for me this immediately brings us back to this like
00:26:25.300pathologization of the child which is that like the child is inherently unsafe always the
00:26:31.820surveillance stuff starts really young and of course it also starts on multiple fronts like
00:26:37.640if the parent is out supposed to be having a break from kate's question right who is home with the
00:26:43.560child who's also being co evilly coincidentally and big scare quotes surveyed. It's whoever is
00:26:49.620with that child. And I think that's from where the impulse starts. And so you having the radio
00:26:54.980means that you actually have to place trust in whatever's happening in your home to leave your
00:27:00.240home. And there are a lot of parents and that goes back to the kind of nanny panic that I talked
00:27:04.680about, which reemerges, by the way, in the 90s, when we start having nanny cams, which are the
00:27:10.560same thing as a baby monitor no joke same technology redescribed yeah i think that's
00:27:16.080really important um that's kind of capturing that so that's the first piece the second piece is like
00:27:21.840no i don't think you can define children as free range if they're being surveilled although like
00:27:27.000it is different to walk yourself to the playground than to never be allowed to walk to the playground
00:27:31.620yeah again about this stuff i think it's really hard the technology exists now it didn't exist
00:27:37.940when i was growing up i'm turning 35 on sunday you know what i mean like it didn't exist when
00:27:44.980my brothers who are variously younger than me were growing up now parents have this option
00:27:50.000and you can understand i'm always on the side of like why are people doing this let's be really
00:27:55.420compassionate and it's easy in this case parents are worried about their kids and they've been fed
00:28:02.280a century of social panic about their kids ever since viviana zelitzer describes this change the
00:28:07.920child became priceless. And we have to worry about all kinds of things that parents didn't
00:28:14.56030 years ago, in the sense that like our urban spaces have totally changed. You know, the suburbs
00:28:20.800are, you know, their own problem spatially. And as you say, with CPS overreach, you know,
00:28:27.840the question of who is merely free range and who is neglectful is an incredibly fraught one. I have
00:28:33.760one brother who works as a family defense lawyer in brooklyn and you know this is the the the site
00:28:40.160of his work again to reference dorothy roberts at the same time i have friends too who are parent
00:28:45.240older kids and you know they when the kid goes to college and they turn the tracker off and it's
00:28:50.380really hard because they're just having this constant feedback loop of my kid is safe i'm a
00:28:55.560mom having my child means my heart exists in my hand outside my body i don't have a rib cage let
00:29:02.120alone skin and i have to like deal with anything that comes to him as ruining my life i get it um
00:29:09.040but i think that all of these factors just allow us to like make better decisions who is getting
00:29:14.500caught in a surveilling dragnet what does that mean about our anxieties anxieties you know are
00:29:20.520not to say that the thing is happening precisely not so let's really sit with them and figure it
00:29:26.740out um and also really talk to kids about the fact that that you know they are being tracked
00:29:32.920and how kids feel about that like they should be part of that conversation if not the author of it
00:29:38.380well and I also think about how like when you're so thoroughly surveilled and you're so thoroughly
00:29:43.620like you can feel the eyes you can feel like your parents reference to you like I checked your
00:29:49.180grades today where is that assignment like I saw you where were you like at this time when I checked
00:29:55.280you're like where you were on find my like all those things they internalize that surveillance
00:30:00.300right and like you act as if you are always being surveilled and how like how is that connected to
00:30:06.120I think feelings of anxiety feelings of like that just the development of self of creativity of like
00:30:14.120oneself apart from who their parents like envision them to be vis-a-vis surveillance it's really
00:30:21.160complicated and it's really a psychoanalytic question too right like which is how do you
00:30:26.400separate both the parent from the child and the child from the parent and that is understood to
00:30:32.280be like the cornerstone of development and we are you know we are changing it i also think at the
00:30:38.140same time i was really interested in the book and even those kinds of notions of like the
00:30:42.520pathologization say of the helicopter mother which grows right out of the very same paradigms from
00:30:49.160the 1950s of like the refrigerator mother right both appliances yeah can you what is the refrigerator
00:30:56.200mother so this is like the third chapter of the book it's it's adorable we're moving right in
00:31:00.740order without trying to the third chapter of the book is called hot and cool mothers and it tries
00:31:06.240to tell the story of how a kind of both pathologization of the white mother middle
00:31:10.360class mother as over educated and frigid emerged alongside the pathologization of black mothers as
00:31:16.500overpowering dominant etc and so this had huge impacts on child psychiatry what could be wrong
00:31:24.180with the child was determined by what could be wrong with the mother i tell the story of you
00:31:28.280know dorothy groomer for instance is a black mother trying to get her child diagnosed with
00:31:33.240autism and being told she couldn't and she says quote unquote i couldn't be a refrigerator mother
00:31:38.620the irony of it all you know and so like i tell that story but i look at its its travel through
00:31:44.960to things like the helicopter mother the snow plow mother the tiger mother and all of these
00:31:50.340new maternal pathologies and so it's you know part of that is to say like we get sold you know i'm a
00:31:56.820college professor i'm inundated all the time with this fantasy that there are parents overreaching
00:32:02.000into my classroom or something in my experience it's never happened once you know um but we have
00:32:08.920this fantasy that there is this kind of parental overreach. On the other hand, you know, we have
00:32:14.780also this really new and very tempting technology. And it has all these meanings, but we can also
00:32:22.460make our own with them. I'm with you, Anne. This is a side note. But one of the most interesting
00:32:28.620parts to me of like your ability to do this research and to look at what was happening
00:32:34.080historically is that during these formative periods like 30s 40s 50s there were an abundance
00:32:40.280of kids who had different family arrangements in part because of the war in part because of deaths
00:32:46.040like so there was an ability to essentially like study kids who didn't have moms study kids who
00:32:52.700were with only moms like study kids who were orphans and then come up with ideas right or
00:32:59.600wrong about what role mothering, fathering, family, like the role of that in the child's
00:33:26.100and there are all different kinds of you know psi psi scientists working on that question
00:33:32.220and that's why this kind of like over attention to mother which twins with the economic material
00:33:39.320history of like the fantasy of the family wage and keep the woman at home and someone's with0.86
00:33:43.460the kids and someone's with the domestic work and this pressure to not disperse it would be
00:33:49.760the term of art through the nanny through the grandmother suburbanization was a bill of goods
00:33:54.380sold to people like move away from your families separate yeah and you know now we always complain
00:34:00.000like well why or I complain too why do I live 3,000 miles away from my parents you know and
00:34:05.880all of that is tied up in this history I always think about the house I was just like very fixated
00:34:11.360on this vision of the the 50s housewife and how that relates or has trickled down into trad wife
00:34:16.900ism but like the the fact that so many families it was still so out of reach for so many families
00:34:22.580but that it still was like a desired norm like it was like if i'm a working class family
00:34:28.360i will be made respectable if my wife can stay at home absolutely you know and his story you know
00:34:35.740historians sociologists have really detailed that like the fantasy the perniciousness of it
00:34:41.980and yeah so i think that you know we see that re-emerge with the trad wife stuff yeah like the
00:34:50.400what i don't follow this stuff super closely because it really upsets me um but i know there's
00:34:56.260like there's one trad wife who has seven children or so and has a big ranch and she's like considered
00:35:01.860the ballet or the ballerina farm i can tell you all about her and there was a beautiful essay in
00:35:08.240the baffler about it i think it's like the best on the trad wife and you know of course the whole
00:35:14.400thing is that she's massively supported by her husband's fortune airline money yes but also on
00:35:20.540top of that a huge staff who are disappeared from all the content absolutely disappeared like in an
00:35:26.620uncanny way like they don't even have anyone helping on their farm but they do absolutely
00:35:31.140they have people helping on their farm but that is completely disappeared yeah it's wild it's the
00:35:37.440fantasy of like you and your husband and your eight children can run a massive cattle operation
00:35:42.280and a social media operation as well um let alone reproduce yourselves and and for him do the
00:35:48.260productive work so like i think that if we can see how false that image is we should basically
00:35:53.220import that feeling back to what we were told is the natural setup or the dominant setup which
00:36:00.240again it wasn't and the the sort of really great and as i told my students not the most scintillating
00:36:07.180demography shows us. That work is essential, right? It's just not the most scintillating
00:36:12.800reading. But I find it actually to be the crux of the whole damn thing. Yeah.0.97
00:36:18.100So this next question is very important to me as a former nanny. So I am very eager to talk
00:36:23.360about this. It comes from Natalie. I've just found out through a Facebook mother's group that I'm in
00:36:27.700that apparently it's a common thing to have surveillance cameras in daycares now. I don't
00:36:32.320know whether it's just because I'm Australian, it's not something I've encountered here,
00:36:36.020or because I've only experienced three different daycares for my kids that definitely didn't do
00:36:40.740this but I was horrified when I found out that parents can access the cameras at any time of
00:36:45.240the day via an app and check in on what's going on at their child's daycare. Surely that's not
00:36:50.140only a violation of the kids privacy but also of the typically female staff. Having the technology1.00
00:36:55.720to be able to keep an eye on our kids all day every day is one thing but should this be something
00:37:00.980that we do? Have we taken helicopter parenting too far? I appreciate that Natalie actually
00:37:07.060thinks of something like the kids' privacy or the childcare workers' privacy, because I think
00:37:12.520that's often wholly discounted in these conversations as like parental rights trump
00:37:17.100all of that. Yeah, I mean, I'm so with you. So that was also the impulse between making that
00:37:22.360chapter on wage care beyond the home, in the home, part of it. I mean, we know about the
00:37:29.200antecedents here are probably more likely than the earlier stuff because of the satanic panic
00:37:34.220and how much kind of weight it still carries and richard beck's excellent book on it you know and
00:37:40.200i also want to say that like it's absolutely correct that the panic is not so much about
00:37:46.420what's happening with child but who is taking care of that child so we have the nanny cam in
00:37:51.380the home which then trickles down to the the sort of daycare worker cam at daycare it's always
00:37:58.100cutified and I did I do get it like one of Mally's preschools did have like a photo at the end of the
00:38:05.580week of the kids doing cute stuff and I love that like put that into my veins but a photo is so
00:38:12.560different and they were curated and also by the way we had to log on and say we would never
00:38:16.960disseminate them because there are other children in it but Mally didn't consent to have his photo
00:38:21.720taken was my point you know and so like I think about someone like Madeline Lane McKinney who's
00:38:27.040working on you know child liberation and children's rights as being really essential
00:38:31.840to that kind of conversation but then also you know i've had many many many emails from a nanny
00:38:38.780union from you know people who had worked as you know veterans of that work in daycares etc
00:38:45.520being like oh my god this part about the book because it's been weirdly the most circulated
00:38:51.220part is the work on the nanny cam and i get that because i think it impact you know it's such a
00:38:55.460clear example but it also like really impacts so many people and they say the same right which is
00:39:00.700that it's a massive violation that now has become the condition of work um i've only been filmed in
00:39:06.380an archive once you know while i did my work and it was a horrible feeling horrible and i wasn't
00:39:12.600trying to do anything right even the feeling changes the nature of the labor and it's very
00:39:17.400different if you're interacting with paper than with a child obviously you know where you know
00:39:22.220the stakes and you know the pressure and you know how the film will be read. And so I detail that
00:39:27.280whole history, right, like of shaken baby syndrome becoming this massive panic because of the nanny
00:39:32.940camera rather than the other way around. I actually, I wrote an essay for The Baffler,
00:39:37.920interestingly enough, about being a liberal arts nanny, essentially, like the privileges that were
00:39:43.840allowed to me because I was a liberal arts graduate who was like just doing it for a little
00:39:49.580bit before I went to grad school that I was given much more freedom with the children and more trust
00:39:56.240like and part of it I think it also assuaged some of their feelings about leaving the home they were
00:40:02.320like well if they're with this smart lady then it's okay which is messed up um but I also resented
00:40:12.000fiercely any time that they decided that they were gonna stay home and work from home because
00:40:17.780I felt like I couldn't do my job with any sort of autonomy. And so many worker surveys like about
00:40:24.360happiness on the job really come down to like your ability to have autonomy to do the job
00:40:30.080the way that like feels right. And that that doesn't mean that like you parent that kid the
00:40:35.080way that you would parent your own kid necessarily. Like you're still operating within the confines
00:40:38.740of what you and the parents have talked about in terms of practices. But it does mean like
00:40:43.580I don't have to feel weird when I like go to the bathroom or go get food or like there's just
00:40:51.040there's so many different ways that you change and self-surveil when you feel like someone is
00:40:55.940watching you even out of the corner of your eye and the advice that I've always given to other
00:41:00.000people who are hiring someone is like as much as you can if you have to be in the home separate
00:41:05.520yourself like actually separate yourself in really meaningful ways even if it would feel more fun for
00:41:11.600you to be able to come and say hi to the kid every once in a while right yeah and that oftentimes
00:41:17.100that separation whether it's in the home or like actually leaving the home like that is the
00:41:22.460difference between making that caregiving job a good job or a horrible job absolutely i just think
00:41:28.700about like how mad some of these parents would get if like they happen to check in and like their kid
00:41:35.220was crying and someone didn't immediately go and pick up that one-year-old like it's surveillance
00:41:41.280without context like what if there were four other babies that also decided to start crying
00:41:45.580right in that moment right yeah like and like yeah like there's so many ways in which you're
00:41:52.820just watching in this way that I think just regiments the people who are being watched like
00:41:58.360and also I think it could be like you can judge your kid too like why isn't my kid playing with
00:42:02.920the other kids that sort of thing yeah yeah so it's over surveillance of of everyone and you know
00:42:09.600now it's standard in many nanny contracts you know i was researching that that there should be
00:42:14.660no surveillance no air tag in the stroller which is now very common some informants told me um
00:42:22.220you know no nanny cam at home and then the question you know if it's violated that the
00:42:27.240right lies with the nanny to violate the contract to end terminate the contract without violation
00:42:32.720and you know i think we'll start to see that more standard but there is that selection bias i want
00:42:39.100to send my kid to a school that has an open stream i want to be able i want to add one more part of
00:42:45.120this which is that the expert one of the things that's happening there is anxiety that punishes
00:42:50.640the people in the other scene the caregiver and the child but on the other hand there is something
00:42:56.520else to be said too which is that this mother who's trying to surveil also feels it's her job
00:43:02.100to be both mother and worker at once at some level and we know that's a double bind right
00:43:08.120Like, you actually can't watch a stream and do your job at the same time, per se.
00:43:13.460And so I also think, like, that's, again, one of the symptoms of the kind of mother media thing, which is, like, she's supposed to be everywhere at once.
00:43:20.600Or we have a sociologist who coined the term, like, always on mothering.
00:43:24.560Well, what if half, you know, eight hours of the day you're at your job and two hours of the day you're in the car going to and from it?
00:43:29.960For those 10 hours, that always on-ness is, you know, like Arlie Hochschild says, a second shift.
00:43:36.220but she couldn't imagine those two shifts happening at the same time technology has made
00:43:40.380that possible right and so you're worse at your job and you're worse at parenting yeah and feel
00:43:45.640you feel worse at your job and feel worse at your parenting well also you just like have been given
00:43:50.040too much by society to do and and also it harms the people who are also at their job watching your
00:43:57.600kids and possibly your kid but again trying to think about like what motivates it is also
00:44:02.980important to me because it's a kind of obvious pain and fear for that other parent who's also
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00:46:34.120this last question i think brings everything together comes from ashley how have advancements
00:46:44.840in technology and media impacted parenting instincts my mom will sometimes poke fun at
00:46:49.920my parenting anxiety when i ask her if she struggled when her kids were little she'll say
00:46:54.240you just have to do the best you can with what you have i think that is a big generational gap
00:46:59.040we have the illusion of everything every answer the perfect product the perfect routine it's all
00:47:03.800out there somewhere and we just have to find it. I don't use Instagram anymore because I can't
00:47:08.140handle all that advice. There's an overabundance of information regarding both parenting and the
00:47:13.280terrible things happening in the world. It seems to outpace what previous generations have been
00:47:17.480exposed to. What are the pros of all that information? What impact is it having on
00:47:22.360parenting confidence? How do experts imagine these changes in parenting style will impact
00:47:26.760child development? Where do you want to start with this? There's so much there. I mean, the first
00:47:33.140thing i wanted to say is about that scene that the question raises between mother and daughter
00:47:39.060thinking about grandchildren and one thing we see there is that like i'm gonna guess that your
00:47:46.300mother whether or not literally or it was in the water is a spock person that's what i was just
00:47:52.420gonna say and so that kind of trust you know spock starts and i i i tarry with this i'm not so sold
00:47:59.080on it but spock supposedly starts a parenting revolution when he says page one of his best
00:48:04.880selling book trust yourself you know more than you think and tonally it's a revolution the question
00:48:10.040is why do you need about 500 pages after you say trust yourself you know more than you think
00:48:14.080and that's a kind of continuation of a form of scientific mothering that's been rebranded
00:48:19.480yeah but your mother had a bible right that she was subscribing to that told her to trust herself
00:48:26.380Again, whether she read it or it was sort of fed to her through the pediatrician or her community, that was kind of the number one.
00:48:33.740There were competing schools in the 70s, right, but none that had that reach.
00:48:38.100So if you became an attachment parent early, you know, something had sent you down that mode.
00:48:44.880Now we have both like what I call in the book neoscientific mothering, which is like I need my child on a nap schedule and the child has to be fed at these hours.
00:48:53.600And also I'm using, say, something like Wonder Weeks to track development.