In 1946, the pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock published what would become one of the bestselling books of all time, a parenting guide called The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. As Jodi Vandenberg-Daves notes in Modern Motherhood, Spock’s book on child-rearing instantly became “a cultural phenomenon like nothing before it,” and made Dr. Spock a national celebrity. What was behind the unprecedented popularity of Common Sense? For one, the book arrived at the dawn of America’s postwar baby boom and the nation’s steady rise in suburban living, a lifestyle in which “many young mothers were cut off from extended kin networks” and in search of expertise for raising their children. But what made Common Sense stand out from other childcare guides of the time was Spock’s practical advice coupled with a congenial tone. Contrary to the norm for this genre, Spock advised parents against adopting strict regimens for their baby and instead encouraged them to trust their instincts a little more. The iconic first line of the work inspired countless parents: “You know more than you think you do.”
Common Sense has been regularly updated and is currently in its tenth edition, though the Spock brand no longer enjoys the ubiquity it once held. Leafing through the first edition of Common Sense today is a defamiliarizing experience: amongst the calming insights like bottle feeding and toilet training, Spock occasionally slips in an oddball theory of the human race. For example, he writes that as the child grows, they retrace “the whole past history of mankind, physically and spiritually, step by step.” While “a baby starts off in the womb as a single tiny cell, just the way the first living thing appeared on the earth,” by the six-year mark, they are “probably reliving that stage of human history when our wild ancestors found it was better not to roam the forest in independent family groups, but to form larger communities.” According to Spock, individuals at this stage of humanity “had to learn self control, how to cooperate with each other according to rules and laws, instead of depending on the old man of the family to boss them around.”
This strange theory, pitched somewhere between an earnest belief and an idle daydream, intimates that it is not only parents who should trust their intuition, but children too. Yet the story told here is spurious. On closer inspection, one can see the ideology behind Spock’s theory of instincts. Namely, the life-progression of the imagined “wild ancestor” which Spock supposes—from the father’s subordinate to agent in society—looks suspiciously like the model of the (male) citizen. The modern norm is thus naturalized in this moment—it is simply our nature.
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Parenting and childhood: whichever way you slice them, the two will always be political. The pair are inextricably bound up with questions of labor and authority; inflected often with sentiments of nostalgia, innocence, and purity. In her new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century (2025), Hannah Zeavin outlines the extensive professional terrain in which the social meaning of parenting and childhood was fought in America’s twentieth century. For Spock’s philosophy of instincts was just one prominent approach among many in a centuries-long tug-of-war between child experts in the new fields of pediatrics, psychology, psychoanalysis, and more. Some, like Spock, advocated for “unmediated mothering,” where the infant-mother bond was paramount, while other specialists were proponents of “scientific” or “augmented” parenting, where mother did not necessarily know best—the experts and the science did. Yet, despite the divergences between these two poles, specialists of all stripes built something in common: a new ideal mother. Zeavin’s work details how, across scientific, popular, and legal spheres, the mother was reconstructed in the first half of the twentieth century as the primary and exclusive caregiver to the infant within the nuclear family. This new framework would have monumental consequences— for both the mother and whoever or whatever substituted her. But this is only half of Mother Media’s story. To understand twentieth-century mothering, Zeavin proposes, one must also understand the social function that media (such as television, or even comic books) and technology (like cribs and baby monitors) played in the American home. In many ways, the new media and mediums were conceptualized in the national imagination as automated yet inadequate stand-ins for maternal presence, attention, and care. What haunts the American ideal of the modern mother, then, is a capitalist history of automated labor and living.
Mother Media covers an impressive amount of ground. Its concern requires close attention to three threads in twentieth-century American history: the rise of the “psy-ences” in the US (as institutions where new knowledge was produced, and as fields which held the public’s trust), the quantum leap in the production, consumption, and theorization of mass media, and shifts in familial arrangements (toward the nuclear family and the suburban household). And behind these threads stands the longer histories of American puritanism and slavery. Zeavin is certainly well-positioned to make this expansive and eclectic survey. An associate professor of the History of Science and New Media at UC Berkeley, daughter of psychoanalysts, and co-founder of The Psychosocial Foundation (and founding editor of its magazine, Parapraxis), Zeavin has dedicated her career to historicizing the various psy-fields. Mother Media follows naturally from her first book, The Distance Cure (2021), in which she argues that “the mind sciences in general haven’t frequently attended to the media by which they’re conducted.” The Distance Cure addresses this problematic by unearthing the largely hidden or ignored role of technology and middle-spaces in the practice of talk therapy, venturing into the history of call-in radio shows, teletherapy, and suicide crisis hotlines. Mother Media builds from this thinking but turns its attention to the material human history of the mind sciences’ theoretical research.
To keep track of Mother Media’s various threads, Zeavin structures her historical study through an elegant double-claim: throughout the twentieth century “the mother-as-medium paradigm emerged in parallel with the conception of media as proxy mother.” The first part of this argument, “mother-as-medium,” describes the transformation of the ideal of the American mother (typically a white, cis-gendered, middle-class housewife) into a “total, irreplaceable environment” for her infant’s care. That is, by the mid-twentieth century, the mother had become the assumed exclusive figure to meet the infant’s needs. Anything less reflected a fault in her performance as a woman—though too much care was also a potential defect of her character. In Zeavin’s recounting, the mother-as-medium paradigm was constructed by the nascent European and American institutions of child development, child psychology, child psychiatry, and child psychoanalysis (as well as other human science fields, like sociology, anthropology, and education). The paradigm crystallized in the 1930s thanks to theorists and practitioners, and it became increasingly popular over the next four decades through the circulation of child expert advice in newspaper columns, parenting books (like Spock’s), radio shows, high-profile legal hearings, and national policy.
To an extraordinary degree, this new paradigm—mother-as-medium—regulated and pathologized real mothers and other caregivers. It not only made the mother the “total” environment (or medium) for the infant, but it also viewed her duties in highly functionalist and predictive terms: the mother’s levels of “attachment, presence, absence, and affect” practically turned into a dosage for the baby. Mothering became a matter of “inputs and outputs.” This rationalization is evident in the frameworks of early-twentieth century behaviorists like B.F. Skinner and John B. Watson, and reached new heights in the postwar era with the advent of attachment theory. Attachment theory’s myopic “if-then” logic, where rates of maternal presence and absence are used to forecast child outcomes, is startlingly aligned with “carceral forms of algorithmic behavioral prediction,” Zeavin argues.
The second part of her argument—“Media as proxy mother”— is essentially about children being raised by technology. That is, various forms of media and appliances, from the baby crib and the baby monitor to the television and tablet screen, began to replace aspects of childcare that were seen to be maternal duties. This second paradigm was not the exclusive product of mind scientists and child experts; by providing overviews of research by the Payne Studies in the 1930s, the relevancy of Marshall McLuhan’s postwar “hot and cool” theory of media, and the work of “futural architects” of the smart home, Zeavin shows how this new model was also precipitated by the first few generations of media theorists as well. To outline the development of this paradigm, Mother Media provides an in-depth study of the move from cradles to cribs in the 1920s household, the invention of baby monitors and similar surveillance tools in the 1930-50s, the promises of smart home living from the 1930s onwards, the rise of educational programming in 1960s television (including Sesame Street!), as well as a sequence of moral panics over movies, comic books, television, and tablet consumption from the mid-century to the present moment.
Importantly, these appliances did not, in the eyes of many child psychologists and media theorists, simply replace the mother. Rather, many researchers believed that these technologies functioned as deficient proxies for parental care— new media (especially screen media) were therefore perceived in public and professional circles “as having the same qualities as a bad mother.” By the 1960s, this idea lurched into a series of public panics over delinquent or pacified youth, compromised parenting, and “scary media,” fulfilling the book’s axiom that “the impossible logic of purity” that has underwritten the norm of American mothering “always leads to mediation panic.” In tracking these events, Mother Media provides more than a history of modern parenting; it outlines the sociopolitical forces and theoretical background that fuel the regular anxieties— regarding child screen time and educational programming, baby cams and nanny cams, balancing paid work and parenting, or finding suitable childcare— which contemporary parents experience.
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What does it mean for mother to be depersonalized into a medium? For media to be personified as mother? First, it means that notions of mothering and media tend to bleed into each other. Zeavin argues that because the mother-as-medium and media-as-mother paradigms were developed through a shared set of objects, terminology, and network of thinkers, they became nearly indistinguishable by the second half of the century. This imbrication is how we get, for example, the stereotype of the “refrigerator mother” or the “helicopter parent.” Secondly, taken together, these two paradigms should be seen as regulatory and normative. That is, they provided a useful means of controlling the domestic sphere for a capitalist nation in which the white nuclear family was seen as the incubator for its ideal citizens. While historically new, this form of social control still has obvious forebears in the annals of America: Cotton Mather, the Puritan clergyman of colonial New England, once proclaimed that “families are the nurseries of all societies” and that “well-ordered families naturally produce a good order in […] societies.”
Mother Media historicizes a set of norms, then, that continue to profoundly shape and maybe even predict our culture today. To be sure, Zeavin focuses on highly class-specific ideas of childhood and parenting—a cis-hetero married couple living in a single family home, where the father is the breadwinner— but always with an eye toward how these ideas were imposed on a wider populace (or produced through the exploitation, via scientific experimentation or rhetorical scapegoating, of disempowered groups). In providing such a rich genealogy of our received, governing ideas of mothering and media, the book keeps both its own theory of the psyche and its vision for alternative modes of child-rearing relatively close to its chest. But its own viewpoint can be discerned from what, to my mind, is its most startling and enduring claim: the American mother is haunted. For, in Mother Media, the mother is continually shadowed by two of her proxies, the nanny-figure and the assistive device. In the prescriptive constraints of the two mothering paradigms outlined, the American mother is vexed by these two entities that could aid her with her care work but could also undermine the “pure” bond with her child. Whichever way she turns for additional help with the baby, this mother is vexed by a series of compromises and double binds: “It turns out that the fictive nuclear family cannot reproduce itself without external assistance, and that assistance’s nature, human or mechanical, is always a problem.” Within this sociopolitical arrangement, there is no right choice for mothering.
While this idea is first introduced in an early chapter of the book, it hangs over the rest of the work like a ghost. This is the idea that, at the turn of the twentieth century, the ideal mother desired and repelled the nanny. Yet, as the nuclear family and the ideal of “pure mothering” concretized in the first third of the twentieth century, the nanny would fall out of favor as a middle- and upper-class standard. (Of course, the nanny has not been totally outmoded—plenty of parents who can afford to do so hire nannies or similar workers—but Zeavin’s account tracks the shift in class norms and ideals). Moreover, Zeavin argues that the nanny’s demise was aided by the invention of scientifically-tested commodities, like the playpen, the highchair, or the baby monitor. In doing so, these new technologies allowed the elite home from having to confront their own classism and racism, which spiked when nannies (or similar figures before, during, and after, like the enslaved wet-nurse, the governess, the nursemaid, or the babysitter) were present in the domestic sphere.
But the automated assistance which new parenting devices promise, in Zeavin’s view, still imply a nostalgia, on the nuclear family’s behalf, for a time when the nanny or other extra-familial worker seemed like an option. Thus the “the specter of nanny-as-medium”—a sort of nanny-complex—not only haunts the twentieth-century ideal of the mother; just as importantly, the nanny’s banished presence reappears, in disguised form, in all the commodities and devices that replaced her services. (That the father of the nuclear family is not even an absent presence in this psychosocial arrangement is a serious indictment on men). What this fascinating nanny-complex underwriting the entirety of Mother Media’s analysis reveals, then, is an intimate and spectral history of automation in US domestic life. Automation—where a machine (in this case, a commodity) replaces some human labor and standardizes the remainder—is at the heart of the nuclear home, as is an uneasiness in recognizing childcare as labor.
This history of haunting and automation, in turn, illustrates that the concept of “pure,” unmediated mothering is a fanciful top-down illusion that, in failing, produces its own demons. How to exorcize the specters? Ultimately, Zeavin’s work shows that the mother needn’t be enough for the child’s care. The nanny-complex at the center of Mother Media’s history demonstrates that relationality is ever-present, and the purity of the mother-infant bond a mirage. Extra-familial help has been a blessing much maligned. At the same time, however, the “extra” help offered to some mothers through the “freedom” of the labor and consumer markets has only reinforced a historical dynamic it was supposed to alleviate.
Capturing something of this maddening situation, in her book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, the writer Jacqueline Rose declares that “mothers in the home are expected to manage more or less on their own … but the one thing a mother cannot possibly manage by herself is mothering.” Mother Media adds texture and specificity to Rose’s observation. Zeavin’s book tracks the various ways that American mothers have been pathologized as “more” or “less” than the measured standard as prescribed by the psy-ences. And in doing so, she questions why the “total” or “pure” mother should be the standard at all.
Omid Bagherli
Omid Bagherli is a cultural critic based in London. He holds a PhD in English from Tufts University.