One of the speakers in The Symposium, Plato’s great dialogue on the characteristics of love, makes the point that what is “done well and rightly” is beautiful, and what is not rightly done is ugly. The proposition has more predictive power than we’d like to admit. Elite urban parenting, for example? Hideous. This makes no sense, given the resources involved, but so it is.
Be honest: you’re filled with uneasy loathing at the sight of expensively dressed adults bored together on the morning playground, or by the sound of the patient-voice as gentle-parenting Mommy explains something, or when you cross paths with the attractive woman virtuously biking along with her cute kid in a big child seat on the front of the bike, as I did in Brooklyn this week. What’s repulsive is the combination of upper-middle-class safety-ism and faux-spontaneity: kids rocking their supposed individuality with wild hair, a year-round Halloween costume or Daddy’s favourite-band T-shirt.
A new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century, by the cultural critic and social historian Hannah Zeavin, provides some striking context for the phenomenon by examining one of the most significant changes in modern parenting: the unprecedented penetration of media and technology into the American home.
Author and the book are both scholarly, focusing not on the great issues of the modern era, such as how much screen time is too much, and how to protect your children from porn — but on the underlying cultural and social structures that govern our relationship to parenting and technology. She focuses on a transformation that crystallised in the Fifties, when mothers, she says, became “media” — meaning, they started being viewed as a kind of dehumanised, information-bearing “technology” that could influence the child, for good and ill, and which required expert and scientific intervention to regulate. If “mother” and “media” are the same, Zeavin proposes, a comparative discourse will be illuminating.
And so it is. Zeavin argues that the mother was originally a networked figure who might have been aided by a wet-nurse or servant. But with the rise of new labour-saving technologies and the demographic shift to the nuclear family, she became an isolated individual, concerned about dangerous outside influences on her family, and feeling pressure to do everything herself.
Zeavin illustrates such changes by analysing the marketing for such items as an early “smart house” or a baby-monitor made by Zenith and displayed in the Whitney Museum in 1939. What she finds is a vicious cycle — the technologies replace human labour, allegedly creating a safer and “purer” home fully controlled by a liberated mother. But the emphasis on purity makes both mother and technology suspect, blurring them together and fueling panics that can only be assuaged by more technology and more mothering.
In this reading, panics are really “about” family purity. Take the Satanic Panic of the Eighties, which cast suspicion on childcare workers as Satanists or possibly cannibals. Or Shaken Baby Syndrome, also a demonisation of both mothers and childcare workers, now largely debunked. Such episodes serve to usher in new technologies such as nanny-cams hidden in teddy bears. They also put ongoing pressure on women to perform intensive one-on-one parenting to protect their children from the imagined danger.
Zeavin is more concerned with the past, but a present example of such a panic might be the scandals that erupt from time to time about the iPhone babysitter. (For anyone unfamiliar with this trick, you establish a call between two parents’ phones, leave one in the room with your sleeping child, and go out nearby with the other one; it works like a long-distance baby monitor.) When TikTok influencers Matt and Abby Howard posted about doing this while having dinner on a cruise in 2024, all hell broke loose online. Other parents have been arrested for the practice. Whether it’s actually illegal or even dangerous seems unclear, but the hysterical character of the debate fits with Zeavin’s theory.
Mother Media draws many conclusions, but one is that the abstract demand that a mother be a kind of protection-and-surveillance machine for her child sets her running on the treadmill of purity and contamination, requiring her to be “infinitely rechargeable and always on”. I am a mother in this demographic, and I find the representation compelling — if I were a robot who didn’t need sleep, my life would be much more manageable.
“The ‘best’ mothers also now track their child’s location through their phone and practice surveillance.”
The book is also especially interesting when she addresses the wider purity-and-danger issues we’re all now routinely responsible for, such as providing our children with organic food, vaccinating them (or protecting them from vaccines), policing environmental toxins, and, of course, guarding kids against technology itself. The best mothers, supposedly, have screen-free kids and wooden toys. The ‘best’ mothers also now track their child’s location through their phone and practice surveillance of their text messages and social media, a development that seems ripe for further analysis.
The book is less convincing, however, in its attempt to target the nuclear family as the source of the problem. Zeavin approaches the subject from a typical Left-feminist perspective, and another thrust of her argument is that “motherhood is a white bourgeois concept” that depends for its existence on the “carceral system” oppressing people of colour. This argument works well enough within Zeavin’s parameters. But it leaves too much out — what is nonwhite, non-bourgeoise motherhood, for example? All those low-income mothers of colour are doing something, and surely they’d call themselves mothers. And it also seems to rely on a slight of hand between the ideal and reality.
What Zeavin calls “the exceptionalness of the family at midcentury” doesn’t make families, in reality, exceptional. Parents and their offspring of all races and social demographics have been a fundamental building block of households since long before the 20th century; neither they nor their “privatisation” is really new. The monogamous two-parent family — arguably the most private arrangement of all — has been the standard in Western culture at least since Christendom. And the urge to split off into smaller and more autonomous dwellings has been a force in Western social development since premodernity.
Other cultures may arrange things slightly differently, but to suggest that these practices erase the “possessive” parent-child bond or the family as a unit is its own form of idealisation. If a toxic ideology has grown up around the nuclear family — which is only part of its story, anyway, or one theory of it — we must look elsewhere for the explanation of society’s ills. Perhaps to the actual new thing: the technology.
I suspect Zeavin’s various ideological commitments render her silent on an another point that seems worthy of discussion. The transformation to mother-as-media requires a transformation from something — and she’s awfully quiet about what that might have been. We mostly have to extrapolate that motherhood was less intensive previously, less sentimentalised. Families were more likely to employ servants or live in intergenerational homes. And we don’t learn how non-Western societies parent differently, in the past or now. These are urgent questions if we want to stop the treadmill.
I’d propose that while there are many families that look ugly — the hovering parents on the playground, the child contained in the giant, almost comical wooden-purity-box — there are ones that look beautiful, too. Usually, the ones that make your heart ache or make you wish you had more kids are those manifesting a kind of visible care for the children, not in a superficial way, but in a real one. Panic and anxiety-driven behaviors aren’t the same thing, and it’s palpable. At the same time, modern parenting is full of new and real dangers, from the effects of screens to the flood of porn. Responding, somehow, with an openness to impurity, ideological and otherwise, is the best idea I’ve heard yet.
