Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century

Mother Media Book Cover

Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century

Hannah Zeavin
Berkeley Book Chats
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In Mother Media (MIT, 2025), Hannah Zeavin (History) tells the complicated story of American techno-parenting, from the Greatest Generation through millennials, for an object lesson in how using technology in our most intimate relationships became a moral flash point.

Zeavin examines twentieth-century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. She 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. Mother Media lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how they relate to conceptions of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and the surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. 

Mother Media, winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology, argues that — far from being a recent concern — fear about what technology is doing to children has driven pediatric and social panics over the last century. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple contradiction: technology is judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family.

Zeavin is joined by Ramsey McGlazer (Comparative Literature). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.