I was watching TV the other day when I caught an ad for Amazon’s new AI-powered telehealth service. In it, a new mom is struggling with breast pain while trying to feed her baby in the middle of the night. She shares her symptoms with an AI bot on her phone and gets a diagnosis and a prescription for antibiotics without even waking up her husband, who is snoozing cluelessly next to her.
On the one hand, it’s great to see maternal health in the spotlight! But there’s something a little dystopian about this ad. The woman seems to be parenting alone, in a beautifully appointed room as sterile as a hotel, without anyone to ask about the pain she is having.
I also wrestled with middle-of-the-night pain while nursing my first child, and I also turned to my phone for answers. In fact, the internet was an essential part of my entry into motherhood. Back in 2009, when I had my first child, Facebook groups weren’t really a thing and Instagram and its influencers did not exist. Instead, we had Yahoo email list-servs, delivered as a daily digest of dozens of back-and-forth messages that you could scroll through. I joined a group aptly called the BoobyBrigade that counted thousands of members on the east side of Los Angeles. The group was always a hotbed of drama. Epic battles raged over sleep training, circumcision, vaccination, screens, plastics, cloth diapers, charter schools, and all the other evergreen stuff that riles up over-invested crunchy-granola moms. There were colorful characters, like the mom who insisted that her son not play with any toys with faces, lest their personalities compromise the development of his imagination (trains were fine, Thomas the Tank Engine was a no-go), the mom who hosted breathwork sessions in her herb garden, or the mom who was always posting about the antics of her “magically spirited” son named Wolf (or was it Tusk?), clearly a future serial killer.
When I suspected I might have mastitis, like the mom in the Amazon ad, I asked the BoobyBrigade moms and got a chorus of answers and suggestions. No question was too small for the BB. Why is this poop green? Who is the best pediatrician in the neighborhood? Are these onesies decent quality? Who can make a balloon arch for a baby shower? Why isn’t my baby crawling yet?
By the time I had my second child, list-servs like the Brigade had migrated onto Facebook, where the conversations continued in dozens of parenting groups, many localized to a particular city or neighborhood. The moderators of one of my Facebook mom groups affectionately called the resulting hivemind Moogle, or Mom Google. These groups had inevitable mean-girl drama, with spats and fissures, but they also served as a lifeline for thousands of confused new moms like me. They spawned real-life connections and friendships. Thanks to the BB, I joined a new-moms exercise group and a walking group and a breastfeeding support group and a babywearing group and a dozen other groups where I made friendships that endured long past the baby stage. It’s not an exaggeration to say that most of my parent friends came from asking stupid questions on the internet.
On the surface, the Amazon AI and the Yahoo or Facebook group look identical. In both cases, a mom is scrolling a glowing screen in the middle of the night, seeking an answer to a specific question. But the difference is that one mom is asking a group full of humans that she might actually know or meet in real life, whereas the Amazon AI mom is talking to a computer.
Of course, if I’d parented a generation or two before, I wouldn’t have asked a screen at all about my symptoms; I would have asked my mom, or a friend, or a neighbor. Asking a real life person would have deepened my closest relationships, but it would have required a phone call and possibly yielded bad advice. Asking a thousand women at once through a list-serv gave me a speedier, more crowd-tested reply and fostered a bunch of loose local ties, but still generated a bunch of answers to sort through, some better-informed than others. Asking Amazon AI gave me an instant reply and a lightning-fast prescription, too. If you think about climbing each rung on the technological progress ladder as a form of freedom from friction, it’s clear that better, faster, more optimized answers come as you climb. But there’s a richness that gets lost with each rung too, towards a lonelier and more atomized world. I picture the ladder stretching high above a messy sea of human faces, till we’re all alone in the Cloud.
I thought about loneliness and atomization when I dipped into the outsourcing-parenting discourse that raged recently here on Substack, because to my mind, this conversation is not just about working mom guilt. It’s also about what we gain and lose when we skip the friction that comes from relationships with other people.
To rehash the back-and-forth, which is already old news at this point (what can I say, I’ve been slow on the uptake this summer), the Wall Street Journal published a piece about parents who are so wealthy that they hire fleets of nannies to manage “low-joy tasks,” like what one mother describes as “repetitive play,” toilsome activities like “reading the same book five times or watching her toddler open and close a door for 45 minutes.” These nanny teams also manage children’s potty training, clip their toenails, teach them how to ride bikes, and cut sandwiches into star shapes.
Predictably, this article triggered the “mad-onlines” as Phoebe Maltz Bovy calls them, by triggering a whole bunch of hot buttons, from anger towards feckless moms to class resentment to hatred of Labubus. The mad-onlines reflexively dislike it, Maltz Bovy argued, when mothers make choices that make their lives easier. Cartoons Hate Her followed up on Maltz Bovy’s piece by arguing that it’s good to make parenthood more doable for people, pointing out the irony of telling moms that they can’t outsource a single component of parenthood while also exhorting people to have more children.
I agree with both writers that parents have outsourced the tedious parts of parenthood for centuries; according to a highly entertaining essay written by me, it’s long been a status symbol not to raise your own children.
But despite being a raging feminist who thinks daycare is good, I found myself creeped out by the “flotilla of nannies” approach championed by the moms in the WSJ article. (And yes, only moms got quoted in the piece. As Maltz Bovy pointed out in her essay, one of the weirdest parts of the article was the total absence of fathers, who seemed to be offstage in all the interviews, equally disinterested in parenting their children but shielded from the spotlight).
To me, the problematic part wasn’t that moms were finding ways to save time. It was the premise, implicit throughout the article, that when you clear all the hard hassle-y annoying stuff out of parenthood, you get more of the fun magical bonding times. As one of the moms tells the reporter, “Every hour I’m not bogged down with the doing is an hour I get to show up fully present with my kids.” (Not at all coincidentally, this mom runs a “company that uses AI to help families manage their homes.”) This sentiment is echoed multiple times by the moms quoted in the article, including “three-hour mom” Emma Grede, who says, “If getting help with the logistics means I can spend my time focused on the moments that really matter with my children, I don’t see that as outsourcing parenting.” As Jessica Winter put it in a great New Yorker essay about AI technologies that help with household management (the less-fancy person’s analogue to the nanny team), the AI tech promises to relieve mothers of their mental load, and yet “the end goal of this liberation movement appears to be a more intense brand of intensive parenting.” (I actually would have liked these moms better if they had just said something like, “I don’t like children very much and prefer not to spend time with them.” That would have felt more honest).
Because what, really, are these “moments that really matter”? What does “showing up fully present with my kids,” in the absence of actual domestic activity, actually look like? For Grede, it’s “high-impact, core memories” like, as she tells the reporter, “vacations with her children.” Vacations are fun, but when we turn parenthood into a highlight reel, what message do we send our kids? The mom who hires a nanny to clip her children’s toenails or watch her child open and close a door for 45 minutes seems to be showing her children that dull or daunting moments are best avoided. But like Ivana Greco, who told the WSJ that the “most meaningful moments I have with my children are completely unexpected,” I find that I connect best with my kids when we’re doing the boring, unphotogenic stuff, like driving to Target or waiting in line at the pharmacy.
Greco has written about the drawbacks of prizing efficiency over care. In an essay on teaching her children, she poses a thought experiment: “What would life be like if we had super advanced AI and robotics that basically eliminated the need for us to do anything?” She concludes that life would lose much of its meaning, because “Many of the most enjoyable parts of my life have come from doing stuff.” In contemporary life, she writes, we’ve privileged consumerist leisure over productive work. “Our ubiquitous Advertising Regime, which has infiltrated basically every part of daily life, is going to heavily suggest to you that the best family bonds are formed by consuming things, like going on a 7-day Disney Cruise or buying your small daughter a Deluxe Barbie Dream House. And these can be fun and wonderful things! But I want to make a pitch for the family bonds formed by producing things together,” from gardening to making applesauce to learning how to ride a bike. Producing things can be annoying and messy but it is also effortful and satisfying. After all, when Freud was asked what people need for a satisfying life, he said “Lieben und arbeiten”: To love and to work. He didn’t say “To love and to go on vacation.”
I think Greco is right, and this is why I see the promise of a friction-free family life as a hollow one. Whether it’s a telehealth bot that talks to new moms, a nanny team that takes the tedium out of parenting, or an AI-powered “family executive assistant” that promises to absorb the mental load, we should be clear-eyed about the bargain we’re making. Convenience is great, and we should want moms and dads to get speedy healthcare treatment and fast answers to their questions and support with the logistics of parenting. But human relationships are inefficient. In a market-based economy, human care will rarely look like an optimal use of anyone’s time.
Coincidentally, I just got to chat with the inspiring Patricia Zaballos about this very topic at her Storytime for Caregivers event in Oakland last week. Patricia posted a piece today about the roots of parental intuition, and she mentioned our conversation about how parenting changes men’s brains. As she wrote, “What’s most interesting to me is that these changes come from the fathers’ interactions with their babies. Experience with kids is what changes men to make them more effective fathers… “Looking at ‘expert’ advice on a phone won’t do that.” Repetition and practice is what creates change.”
Repetition and practice is what builds our village, too, and neccessity: bonds form when we lean on each other. It’s hard to optimize your way out of time in the trenches with other people. But the messy part is frequently the good part. It’s the human part. The friction, in other words, is the stuff of life itself.
MUSIC RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK
Past recs (Playlist link!): Broncho // Alvvays // Capitol Years // The Cairo Gang and Hard Quartet // The Beths // Ballerina Black // James Mercer // Playboy Carti & Car Seat Headrest // Weyes Blood // Matthew Sweet // Fontaines D.C. // Elvis Costello Spanish Model // Lily Allen // Geese // Olivia Tremor Control // Beulah // Rosalia // A$AP Rocky // Dirty Projectors // Mitski // Foxygen // Teenage Fanclub //Aimee Mann // Nick Lowe // Mary Timony // The Pretty Flowers // Night Moves // Guided by Voices // Beach Bunny // Archers of Loaf // Dolly Parton // Kelley Stoltz
WEDNESDAY
Although I was in the Bay Area for a few days last week, I missed the Mosswood Meltdown music festival where Pavement played (and John Waters emceed)! However, I had a few friends who went, so I got to hear about the line-up, including the opening band Wednesday, a North Carolina band that just released a new album, Bleeds. Here’s a song from the album.
And here’s a tune from their 2023 album, Rat Saw God.
Did you know that I wrote a book, that it’s good, and that if you order it, you get a free six-month paid subscription to my Substack? Redeem this offer here!
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