Parenting in the digital world reflects a long history of maternal innovation, where tools once eased survival and now shape modern motherhood blending convenience with new pressures, expectations, and the constant presence of technology.
Early tools, like the 1970’s woven carriers, liberated women to freely multitask caregiving and survival work. Later, with the herald and welcoming of domestic technologies, such as refrigerators and washing machines, technology paradoxically raised standards for women instead of reducing workloads for women.
Today’s domestication of technology, by definition, compounds this paradox. Any parenting technology, like applications and wearables offer real-time developmental data and 24/7 parenting networks.
But for some, the facilitation through digital means in parenting technology is not enough – more accurately, it’s becoming a hurdle rather than a liberation for the mothers of the world. Parenting in the digital world, for mothers, means constant engagement demand, turning motherhood into a performance of measurable perfection.
The previously shared knowledge passed down through generations was increasingly replaced by “scientific motherhood,” a regime in which male professionals in medicine and psychology taught women about childrearing.
In itself, the very notion that males were the reference for women imposed a new degree of pressure and responsibility, as Rima D Apple explained, placing maternal care in science instead of communal experience.
Domestic technologies such as the refrigerator and washing machine were meant to reduce the workload at home but actually raised the bar and enhanced expectations. They did not reduce work as much as reorganized it.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan asserts that instead of lightening the burden, they “heightened the demand for cleanliness, nutrition, and domestic perfection.”
The rise of parenting in the digital world and data tools in the past decades has redrawn motherhood again. From apps for parenting to online communities, mothers now are networked all the time capable of calling each other up, monitoring a child’s sickness, and even tracking developmental milestones with wearables.
Yet, this hyper connectedness produces new problems.
Because of Technology More Parents Can Work at Home
The internet era has created a kind of “performative motherhood” wherein ongoing monitoring and internet sharing culminate in fretting and utopian demands. Mothers in technology world today are not merely care-givers but content-creators, technological users, and online health custodians.
At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to impact parenting through personalized recommendations and predictive analysis. While using technology to communicate with parents holds out the promise of convenience, there are also consequences in terms of privacy, inequality, and over-reliance on data driven decision-making.
Parenting in the digital world is at a crossroads between promise and pressure. As computer technology becomes more advanced, it promises flexibility and connectedness but only with the presence of substantial support systems. Childcare, family leave, and access to the Internet remain key to making technology work for all mothers.
To create a more perfect future, digital parenting and literacy must be on the agenda, not just for professionals, but for parents in and around the technology universe. As the psychoanalysts Shari L. Thurer said, “Culture constantly reinvents motherhood.”
Any reinvention today must embrace diversity, bid adieu to perfection, and value innovation over back-end support. Only then innovative technology can enhance parenting by truly serving, not to overwhelm.
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