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Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century
An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology.
From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, Mother Media tells the story of how our contemporary understanding of what a mother is came to be and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media.
Growing out of her previous award-winning book The Distance Cure, which considered technologized care, the book lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how it relates to conceptions of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. The author offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (for example, Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (for example, the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family.
From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, Mother Media tells the story of how our contemporary understanding of what a mother is came to be and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media.
Growing out of her previous award-winning book The Distance Cure, which considered technologized care, the book lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how it relates to conceptions of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. The author offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (for example, Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (for example, the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published April 29, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 13, 2025
4.5
It slaps! Including a small list of why: contextualizing the creation and “predictive” use of attachment (or deprivation) theory in the carceral system, shining light on Waldorf’s racist origins and anti vax present, exploring the boundaries of consumption of stimulus as care, highlighting the morality of “present” motherhood, etc.
It slaps! Including a small list of why: contextualizing the creation and “predictive” use of attachment (or deprivation) theory in the carceral system, shining light on Waldorf’s racist origins and anti vax present, exploring the boundaries of consumption of stimulus as care, highlighting the morality of “present” motherhood, etc.
December 13, 2025
Is this Fiction???????
April 16, 2026
Such an indulgent post-partum read for me! Zeavin maps the whittling of mother and mothering, first into a medium of care and then into subsequent technological disambiguations of labor, performance, and gadgets. The charted course is a zig zag of legal battles and competition of the "psy-ences," infighting for social control and a stake in the cultural imagination, and other dramas of the capital- 'P' professions facing mothers as a category of intellectual conquest and capitalist exploitation. It's destination reveals how we got to this 21st-century incarnation of mother, and where the heck the snoo came from. It's juicy!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews