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Offline with Jon Favreau

Momfluencers, Baby Gadgets, and the Perils of Parenting in The Digital Age

Offline with Jon Favreau

Crooked Media

Society & Culture, News

4.72K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Are we surveilling our children too much? Do we need fancy gadgets to track their sleep? Should we be taking so many pictures of them? Longtime New York Times culture critic Amanda Hess joins Offline to discuss why the optimization of childhood may just be another empty promise of the information age. Amanda's new book, Second Life, follows her digital identity crisis as she grapples with her newborn baby's rare genetic disorder, traversing the Facebook groups, Reddit threads, spy cams and momfluencers she and other parents use as a 21st century substitute for a proverbial village.

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:24.0

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0:27.0

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0:29.5

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0:34.0

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0:37.0

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0:39.0

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0:46.1

And they had a really nice duffel bag, too. Like an overnight bag. Yeah, no, they have great,

0:50.2

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0:55.1

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0:58.7

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1:05.7

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1:11.2

We really have absorbed this neoliberal idea that, like, everything can be made a market

1:18.9

and everything can be assigned a value, and that's, like, the best way to, like, decide what's good.

1:23.6

So even when you are looking at your baby, who, like, of course you want to be successful, of course you want them to be good. So even when you are looking at your baby who like, of course you want to be successful,

1:30.3

of course you want them to be good. You want them to be like a good baby to be like the best

1:34.2

child that they can be or whatever. I at least found that I was just like uncritically in some ways

1:40.9

like applying this system that when I think about it, I find quite horrifying

1:46.1

actually, like, to my child where, like, if I got a data set from him from sleeping,

1:52.3

I used a crib that would tell me, like, the hours and minutes that he slept.

1:56.6

And I saw that he slept 20 minutes more than he did the night before.

2:02.1

Like, I would be so happy about that number that my literal baby has no idea what that is.

...

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