My baby was born when I was 28 years old. I guess it’s normal for every first-time parent to realize how much things have changed from when we were children to when we had our first kid. As the days go by, it’s impossible not to think about my own childhood. Many things are the same and, of course, many things are different. It’s neither there nor here to say which of the two was or is better; times change, and nobody can choose in which to live. But there is a stark difference between these two worth discussing, and that is technology.

Of course, technology has advanced significantly in a lot of fields and a lot of ways, but two advancements have impressed me because of how much they have changed the day-to-day of a family in general and specifically the day-to-day of a baby: 

1. How immediate communications are today, and 
2. How integrated our phones, little audio and video recorders, are to our daily lives. 

These advancements have, of course, changed everyone’s day-to-day, not only the one of new parents. But the difference becomes very evident and thus impressive when you see how it affects a baby’s life today as opposed to three decades ago.

The first advancement, the immediacy of communications, has, in a way and to illustrate my point, expanded the household. Or rather, it has erased its limits. Through the video calling app or service of your choice, you can have anyone in the world inside your house at any point in time. If you have electricity and an internet connection, as most households have today, you can have an aunt, a grandfather, a friend, a cousin, in your house digitally at any moment. Seeing family and friends has existed since time immemorial, but now it’s different. 

Before, to see someone, to hear them talk, you had to meet them in person. And when we had to visit other people physically, we were subject to some restraints. If the weather was harsh, too much rain or snow, for example, we might have had to cancel our visit. We had to plan them according to what we all thought were regular hours to visit other people, meaning you could not come up to ring someone’s bell at whatever time you fancied. Even within those accepted hours to visit other people, there were further constraints. You would not show up at someone’s house at lunchtime, for example, unless they were really close to you, so as to not force an awkward invitation to join them.

Now, the barriers to visiting someone, again, even if digitally, are non-existent. Everyone has electricity, everyone has an internet connection and everyone has a phone with a microphone and a camera. There is no complexity to starting a video call and they can be very short or very long, you can speak for two seconds or two hours, so there’s really no “cost” in starting one. There’s no limitation as to where you can read a text message or an email, so you can also expect to get an answer to what you write in a relatively short amount of time, which at the most, is measured in hours. 

The change goes even further as it is so easy to take and send a picture or a video or an audio message that we no longer need to meet each other simultaneously. We can just write, record, or take a picture of what we want to let the other person know, and they’ll answer when they see it. You could think that that is great, that it has optimized how we communicate with each other, removing the non-essential, ritual-like parts of communicating with one another. We no longer need to decorate or clean our houses, we no longer need to prepare food, we no longer even have to get completely dressed! You take your phone and in a few taps, you already have the other person’s face on the screen and you are communicating. Isn’t it great?

Well, I’ve come to realize that it’s not as great as we might have thought. All the cleaning and decorating, the preparing of food and the getting dressed to receive people in our house helped us limit communicating and in general interacting with other people. It required time and effort to be ready to welcome someone into our home, so we couldn’t do it all the time and we couldn’t do it at any time. Now, with all that gone, the only reason we are not communicating with other people is either due to some unforeseen circumstance (our power goes out or our internet connection is lost) or because we do not want to, which is not a widely socially accepted reason.

Right now, we expect to be involved in each other’s day-to-day almost to the point of living together, and even more. From sharing what we are wearing, what we are eating, what we are reading, what we are watching on TV, to what we are buying, who we are seeing, how we decorate our houses, to what we do to clean ourselves! It might have fancy names, like “skincare routine”, but in essence, it’s just that, we suddenly have the need to share even what we do to clean ourselves.

Since the only limit to communicating is because of some ill-fated circumstances, which are thankfully uncommon, I’ve found people expect to be part of the day-to-day life of our baby. Family and friends want to see pictures and videos of the baby regularly. Closest family members, like grandparents, at some point during the first weeks even wanted to get pictures and videos daily. 

When you think about it, we have all grown used to it, baby or no baby, from influencers on social media to our own close relations. Some people volunteer more information, especially if it is their business like in the case of influencers, but we subject each other to a degree of exposure that was not the case when I was growing up. 

It is as if reality is no longer enough. Living it just doesn’t cut it anymore. We need to live it and while we are living it, we need to record it, for our own sake and to share it with the world. Social media, primarily Instagram; group chats on instant messaging platforms; video communications platforms; and the good old phone calls. We are just ready to make sure someone else sees and hears what we are seeing and hearing, at all times.

I was born in the mid-90s, so much of the technology we use today already existed but was in more primitive stages. We had phones, computers, and the internet, but they were stuck in a single place in the house. For a while in my childhood, if someone was using the phone there was no internet connection. The means to communicate were significantly more accessible and more readily available compared to earlier times still, but it was not like it is today. Our smartphones and laptops have integrated everything into a single, easy-to-carry device that we have on us at all times. We’ve reached a point where the futuristic, sci-fi dystopian scenario where humans have chips plugged into their brains that allow them to connect to the internet would be really no different than what we do today with our phones or laptops. We are connected, creating and consuming content all the time.

You can probably already sense from my tone that I think these are crazy times we are living in. And yes, your senses are correct. I do think the way we interact with technology today is hell for a baby. I’ve seen so far two very negative consequences: the first, is that we are putting a barrier between us and the baby, which is the smartphone and the digital world which it opens; and the second, is that we are robbing the baby of their right to privacy.

The smartphone is a barrier in at least two ways. The first is because we literally put it between us and the baby repeatedly. For example, I remember once my sister was talking to the baby very close to her face, the usual way to talk to babies, and the baby smiled and laughed at her. My sister was so excited! And the first thing she did was to take her phone out to record it. My daughter, her niece, immediately stopped laughing. And it was so clear, she was smiling and laughing at having recognized her aunt. Not as her aunt, my sister, with all the conceptual complexity that entails, but as another human being, like herself, who was close to her, being nice to her. The moment abruptly ended when the phone came out.

And that’s a very physical way technology puts a barrier between us and the baby. There’s another one, more subtle, that comes from the incessant use of the phone or laptop throughout the day. Our attention is divided between the real world, where our baby is, and the digital world we are ever putting ourselves in. As adults, we can acceptably deal with the duality of the two realities at the same time, but babies cannot acceptably deal with the divided attention of their parents as they try to live in both worlds at the same time. I now understand why keeping screens away from children is becoming harder and harder and people are giving their kids access to them at younger and younger ages. It’s the only solution to end the tension of having someone living only in the physical world.

The second consequence of the incessant use of technology is that we are constantly taking pictures and recording our babies. Since we share everything on social media or to our family’s or friends’ group chat, when the baby comes along, we also share them. Her body, her reactions, her likes and dislikes, her temper… Everything gets recorded in some way and shared with the world. When you think about it, it is no different from what influencers do sharing every single detail of their baby’s life on social media. Maybe the reach of the influencer is potentially the entire world, meaning everyone who is on the platform they are using. But we also reach our entire world. All of the people that my baby is related to, my wife’s family and friends and my family and friends, know a great deal, if not all, of the details of her life. Where did my daughter’s privacy go?

When I compare it to how it was when I grew up, it’s radically different. I have one or two pictures of intimate moments like taking a bath when I was a baby and a kid, and I have some other pictures and videos of other non-so-intimate moments of my childhood but it’s just that, a little sample of it. In no way were cameras or video cameras back then interfering in the everyday interactions of people, nor were they the door to a parallel world where everyone was uploading every single thing they were living through. They were also most definitely not as ubiquitous as phones are now, so the vast majority of my childhood just lives in my parent’s memory. They can of course talk about it, but I don’t have hours and hours of videos and thousands and thousands of pictures that recorded it.

And the above are just two of the most immediate, apparent consequences. As the current babies grow into children and then adolescents and then adults, I am sure we will see more, still hidden from us because they do not show immediate signs. For example, full-grown adults talk for hours and hours to their phones as they record themselves to share it later on social media. We’ve all seen them. My guess is that those people do it more because they are obsessed with their own image, like Narcissus in the classical Greek myth, than for the need to actually communicate something. If adults have fallen down that bottomless pit, what will be of children and adolescents, with their own self-image and self-esteem still being formed in their minds? How will that constant seeing of their reflection in the pool of pixels affect them in the future?

For now, my wife and I have set the goal for ourselves of being fully present when we are with our daughter, and not to try to live both our real-world and digital lives simultaneously. We also want to try to give her privacy by not recording or taking pictures of her every move. We hope these decisions will create a space where she can grow up with the difficulties that technology presents reduced to the minimum possible, which is the same chance we had in our childhood.