As a Montessori school director and a mom, I know an app can’t replace a village
The author (not pictured) sees how parenting apps don’t replace a village and can alienate new parents.
Nearly 12 years ago, I found a rudimentary app that helped me track how often and for how long I fed my baby. I told my mom about it, excited to share how advanced things had gotten since her days of feeding babies. My mom responded matter-of-factly, “Honey, you don’t need all that. Just let the baby nurse when she’s hungry.”
Annoyed at her dismissiveness, I asked a seemingly obvious question, “How will I know when she’s hungry?” She replied, “Babies are pretty good at letting you know things like that.”
It turns out she was right. I ended up deleting the app after realizing my baby was an expert at making her needs known. In addition to relieving myself of data collection, I was lucky to have my first seed of skepticism regarding parenting and technology firmly planted in my mind. I went on to have three more kids, and while I surely Googled things from time to time, I stayed out of the whole baby tracking wave.
My friends tell me about all the apps they use
Recently, several of my friends have had babies. They tell me about the apps they use to track developmental milestones, nap schedules, duration of those naps, every ounce of liquid that goes into the baby’s body, and every bit of excrement that comes out.
These friends, all new moms, seem to have a love/hate relationship with their baby-tracking apps. On the one hand, they feel validated and reassured to have all this data in their phone — irrefutable evidence of attentive parenting. On the other hand, they know something feels off about the whole thing.
In most cases, the app knows more about their day-to-day existence and that of their baby than their own partners. They wonder aloud if their apps are providing them support or an unhealthy sense of isolation and high-stakes thinking. As a mom and an educator who began teaching before the iPhone was invented, I don’t wonder quite so much.
Parents are more isolated
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was optimism that technology in the form of household appliances would reduce the heavy burden on homemakers. However, the net effect of conveniences like washing machines, vacuums, and electric irons was not all ease.
As Nicholas Carr, author of “The Big Switch,” says in the book, “The psychic price of the new tools and the new roles they engendered was sometimes high. Adding that “for many, electrification brought a new sense of alienation and loneliness into the home.”
I can’t help but notice the recent proliferation of social media and app-based technology in the parenting sphere has had a similar impact on parents. The elusive promise of more ease and free time for social connection has instead led to more isolation, less community support, and increased societal expectations.
Take, for instance, apps that don’t just help parents track the minutiae of baby care but rather track the practice of parenting young children. Some apps promise to guide parents toward raising well-adjusted kids through the use of research-based best practices. Other apps come with expertly vetted scripts that parents can use to speak to their children should they hit, bite, or say, “I hate you.”
These apps remain largely focused on how parents can appropriately respond to their child and their big feelings. While marketed as parent-support, most parenting apps are child-centered to the extreme, using the parent as a conduit to deliver a particular parenting approach. While some might find this helpful, others might interpret this level of prescriptive guidance to mean that parenting is a practice best outsourced to experts in the form of palm-of-your-hand guidance.
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to raising kids
But my collective years of raising and teaching children have shown me there is no one-size-fits-all approach, nor is there a magic bullet for the relentless nature of attuning to the ever-changing needs of children.
Parenting can be tedious, labor-intensive, baffling, and mind-numbing in equal measure. Of course, the same could be said for washing clothes by hand on a washboard.
Parents are motivated to seek ways to ease the burden, and experts are motivated to offer them. But it’s important for parents to examine whether their perceived solutions to the difficulties of parenting are isolating them from their own inner knowing and from one another rather than bringing them closer to both.
In my case, my mom’s candid advice taught me two things: I could trust myself to read my baby’s cues, and I could turn to other moms for free, no-nonsense support.
Apps may be chock-full of information, but they’re lacking in what has made household work, including child-rearing, more palatable for centuries. Things like connection, community, and a reasonable acceptance of the imperfect nature of family life are the intangibles that may not offer immediate solutions but perhaps offer something even better: the space and support to find our own solutions.
