
Mother Media
Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century
Hannah Zeavin(Author)
MIT Press
Published on 29. April 2025
Book
Hardback
312 pages
978-0-262-04955-9 (ISBN)
Description
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 contradiction: 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.
Reviews / Votes
"Hannah Zeavin's Mother Media [...] examines the heavy hand that social scientists have taken in the nursery."-Harper's
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge (Massachusetts)
United States
Publishing group
MIT Press Ltd
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
18 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUS.
Dimensions
Height: 232 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
566 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-262-04955-9 (9780262049559)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
04/2025
MIT Press
€33.99
Available for download
Person
Hannah Zeavin is Assistant Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkely. She is the author of The Distance Cure (MIT Press) and Founding Editor of Parapraxis. In 2021, she cofounded The Psychosocial Foundation.
Content
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Analog Kids
Introduction: How Mother Became a Medium
Part One: The Media of Mothering
1. The First Technology is Human
2. Out of the Cradle
Part Two: Predictive Mothering
3. Hot and Cool Mothers
4. Screening Mother, Coding Baby
Part Three: The Mothering of Media
5. Screen Parking
6. Future, Tomorrow, Dream, Smart
Coda: Where AI Babies Come From (Or, How Baby Became a Medium)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Analog Kids
Introduction: How Mother Became a Medium
Part One: The Media of Mothering
1. The First Technology is Human
2. Out of the Cradle
Part Two: Predictive Mothering
3. Hot and Cool Mothers
4. Screening Mother, Coding Baby
Part Three: The Mothering of Media
5. Screen Parking
6. Future, Tomorrow, Dream, Smart
Coda: Where AI Babies Come From (Or, How Baby Became a Medium)
Notes
Bibliography
Index