Unlearning with Lindsey T.H. Jackson
Media Illiteracy
Hannah Zeavin with Mal Ahern
Techno-Parenting: How Technology Shapes Motherhood and Family Life
The first baby monitor, dubbed “The Radio Nurse,” was released in 1937. This new technology completely changed parenting, bringing peace of mind to the stress of caring for children. One might say it technologized parenting. Just like the advancements in baby monitors since then, techno-parenting has grown quite complex. To understand it, Hannah Zeavin, a professor and leading historian of psychology, examines this twentieth century phenomenon.
Zeavin, author of Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century, tells the story of our understanding of what a mother is and how “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. She highlights the pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms that technology has created around mothering. From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, she charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the attempts to remediate the mother through technology and screens.
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Zeavin lays bare the incongruity of techno-parenting, pointing to things like “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. She’s come to a simple contradiction: technology is seen as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, while it is also a saving grace, like the baby monitor, in the unending labor of raising a family.
Hannah Zeavin is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure (MIT Press) and Founding Editor of Parapraxis. In 2021, she cofounded The Psychosocial Foundation.
Mal Ahern is an assistant professor of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Washington, specializing in media technology and visual culture. Her research explores the intersection of media theory, mass production, and artistic labor, with a focus on how errors and automation shape culture. Ahern’s work has appeared in diacritics, Discourse, and World Picture, and she is currently writing a book on automation and bad copies.
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