July 25, 2025
Second Life, by Amanda Hess
I remember how, when I became pregnant with my first child in 2008, the internet was an oracle. Google searches: signs of pregnancy, how to tell if i’m pregnant, am i pregnant. I had no trouble getting pregnant at all, and yet still found my way onto forums where I learned acronyms like TTC, DH, and people talked about “baby dust.” (Not long after, a friend had a miscarriage, and found her way onto forums where people who weren’t very good at spelling talked about their angles.) And then once my pregnancy was confirmed, I’d signed up for Baby Centre updates, through which I received weekly emails with news about my baby’s development, all of this supplemented by regular google searches about what pregnancy symptoms I should be experiencing week by week, because everything about my pregnancy in the first half of it (when not being mediated by machines like the dopplar or by ultrasound scans) was incredibly hard to believe in.
Fast forward a decade and a bit, and this lunacy has increased exponentially, and now it’s wrapped up in capitalism in a way it wasn’t yet when I was cruising Baby Centre and didn’t yet have a smart phone, so there were still no apps. “First I had learned to track my periods, then my pregnancy, and now I was tracking my kids from a surveillance camera perched above their beds,” writes New York Times reporter Amanda Hess in her memoir reportage hybrid, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, which is less a parenting book than a book that probes the way we parent as mediated by technology, and it’s absolutely blown up since I was in the thick of it, for example I had no idea that Dr. Harvey Karp (of THE HAPPIEST BABY ON THE BLOCK fame, whom we named Dr. Douchebag at our house because we had the unhappiest baby in the universe) had invented a robot crib that performs his 5 S’s for you. Or that you can buy special socks that track your baby’s vital signs, preying on every anxious parent’s worst tendencies. And then there’s all the screening available in utero, and Hess’s experience of this is complicated by her own child’s prenatal diagnosis, and experiences with disability, prompting her to become curious about the free birthing movement and also the “medical mama” online phenomenon as a counterpoint, and the way that millennial parents deal with their children’s behaviour with scripts from online influencers like Big Little Feelings. All of it fascinating, and Hess is reflective enough to see parts of herself and her experience in the different kinds of parenting she explores in her work, even the absurd parts—though she draws the line at the chiropractor who advises her that her son’s disability was caused by her own experiences of “self-devaluation” during pregnancy, whose entire approach is born from an antisemitic conspiracy theory, slamming the door closed on that particularly rabbit hole entirely.
I kept talking about this book to my husband, whose phone was listening, and then suddenly I started getting ads for the very period tracking app discussed in the book, though I hadn’t mentioned it by name at all. The brave new world out there for pregnant people and parents is a wild one, and a book like this goes a long toward generating some vital and necessary critical thinking regarding just what this technology is all about it, and what it’s doing to us and the way we see the world—and each other.
