In the first challenge, families have to go all together to a fine dining restaurant. Results vary—most successful are our New Age parents, a heterosexual couple from different religious backgrounds who preach tolerance and respect as the highest goods. Less successful are the Intensive parenting couple (the show runners narrowly avoid calling this pair of first-generation Asian immigrants “tiger parents”) who experience a problem when their daughter isn’t interested in the chef’s Italian seafood preparations. The situation tests how seamlessly their family can transition into an upper-middle-class social setting and avoid intruding on the other restaurant patrons.

In the second half of the episode, the couples are presented with another challenge: stranger danger. A paid actor approaches the front of each family’s house posing as a maintenance worker while the parents are away and asks to be let in. “Maintenance worker” here is just a disguise for a nefarious child predator attempting to separate family and child. In the parent’s absence, the children must be aware of the strict border between the household and the rest of society—a cornerstone of successful parenting is inculcating them against any intrusions into the domestic bubble. Here, when confronted with a worker, tolerance ends. As does parental cooperation; when the gay, Israeli couple (“Routine” style) featured on the show present their results for evaluation, they request that the network not run the footage. It becomes clear that their children let in the maintenance worker with little resistance. “I got to watch as my little boy opened the door for a predator who would take my child away,” laments one of the fathers. They feel so ashamed that their home might be a site of risk for their children, that someone might breach the containment of the home, that they can’t bear for the video evidence to live on in perpetuity on television. Despite the staged nature of the situation, the surveillance technology makes it real.

The Parent Test naturalizes several contemporary approaches to parenting that have in fact been ideologically cultivated: that ideal parents are those who keep their children safe from predation and emotionally regulated; that parenting is mostly a cultural style disaggregated from economic forces; that we can study infinitely variable situations in order to algorithmically optimize intimate relationships. Decades before American audiences saw these parent tests, a social scientific apparatus had been watching, and studying, the minutiae of parent-child interaction. Hannah Zeavin’s recently released Mother Media (MIT Press) takes up the intersection of media and mothering to understand how technology and the home collide in our most intimate relationships.

Zeavin is a steward of a renewed wave of interest in psychoanalysis as an explanatory framework for our contemporary chaos. Even for those who are not already readers of Parapraxis magazine (a publication for psychoanalysis on the left, where Zeavin is Founding Editor), it’s hard not to hear echoes of Freud in Trump and his followers’ assertion that he is a father, a daddy, a fertilizer. Parapraxis’s efforts towards promoting a psychoanalytic culture on the left echo deeply in Zeavin’s rigorous, labor-focused analysis of the role of the “psy-ences” (sociology, psychoanalysis, etc.) in the lives of households and mothers. While she maintains a clear respect and care for the psychoanalytic tradition,  she doesn’t shy away from a critical examination of her forebears.

Mother Media is an analysis of what Zeavin dubs “the media theory of mothering” and the “parenting theory of media”, each kicked off by an institutional wave of investment and interest in scientific mothering. The pursuit of the “science” of scientific mothering was driven by psychologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, and later, media theorists. 20th century social sciences refigured motherhood as a medium—both in the sense of being a mediating force between the child and the outside world, and in the sense of being treated as a technology for the delivery of information and culture—and, in tandem, the nascent field of media studies figured their objects of analysis as parenting techniques. This refiguration created mothers who were “encumbered by sociopolitical deputization and assistive devices”, putting them in a series of double binds—that their mothering be neither too hot nor too cool, that they provide constant presence but also work outside the home, that they employ technology to assist with motherhood while also being shamed for seeking outside assistance—and blaming them for results that didn’t match the political economic priorities of the moment. A distrust of human interlopers was cultivated throughout the 20th century by a scientific apparatus that encouraged expert-approved solutions. By their very form, these solutions, which depended upon the gathering of clean data, almost had this mistrust baked in from the beginning. The pressurized environment of the nuclear family isolated the child and tasked the mother with mediating the child’s access to the world under intense scrutiny according to racialized and classed standards.

In this approach, which first crystalized as the scientific mothering approach of the early 20th century, parents (mothers) had to learn how to parent by engaging with institutionalized knowledge that promised to make their children immune to the various threats of the moment. Throughout the century, children as socialized persons were increasingly a product of mediation by the mother; the mother became a medium of media.

In the 19th century and into the 1920s, nannies were conceived as adequate “stand-ins” for mothers—a proxy mother, or another caretaker able to temporarily embody the fungible executive role of “mother”. But with the concept of the nuclear family—first coined in 1924 by Bronisław Malinowski—hot off the presses ,the social boundaries regarding who was a part of the family and who was outside it were already shifting. Zeavin writes, “Families were told—by pediatricians, women’s magazines, and psychologists—that good families relied only on themselves.” This family isolationism, or individualism, both cultivated and was cultivated by a distrust of outsiders, as well as by the assertion that every caretaker was a medium capable of leaving impressions on the child—an assertion that in turn gave existential weight to every interaction with the child. The impressions left by outside caretakers were figured as a type of contamination that should be avoided. Instead, families began to use technologies in order to foreclose the risk of these interactions. This also performs the tidy work of class erasure—Zeavin notes that the nanny is an uncomfortable figure because of the way she blurs boundaries between work and love, and serves as a vector of class contact.

This anxiety at contamination is reflected in the scientific literature of the time. In the 19th century, Freud wrote of the nanny mostly as a figure who could mediate sexuality for the child through seduction and trauma, neither mentioning her waged relation to the family that employed her, nor any ambivalences that relation could create concerning separation, sexuality, or care. Later, as servants became less common during the Great Depression, nannies disappeared from the literature altogether. Mid-century figures like Melanie Klein and Jean Piaget never included analysis of how the nanny might figure into the psychoanalytic profile of their patients. Then, when it came to prescription, both behaviorist traditions (like that of John Watson and Rosalie Alberta Rayner) and psychoanalytic theorists of the time (notably Donald Winnicott) took divergent roads to end up in the same place: the mother and the baby must always be together, no waged mediation will do.  This call for immediacy, Zeavin notes, obscures that the dynamic is not “mother-baby”, but “carer-baby-technology”. The mother, then, is not just the sum of herself, but also of the technologies she employs to create what will be understood from the mid-20th century on as the maternal environment.

Surveillance is a hallmark of the maternal environment; as the US wartime economy geared up, mothers needed ways to split their time between never-ending presence and waged work all while keeping their children contained. The first ever closed-circuit television was intended for families to do just this; the ads for Radio Corporation of America’s “TV Eye” feature a couple surveilling their baby in the other room—the father adjusts the television set while the mother passively watches. This ad is a synecdoche for the developing rhetorical orientation towards mothers. Various assistive devices (self-rocking cribs, nanny cams, later the television) allowed certain maternal functions of attention and presence to be automated.

Many discourses on technology-enabled parenting feature a begrudging acceptance of the mother’s mediation of the child, especially the boy child. For example, during World War II, Edward Strecker gave lectures to hundreds of medical professionals that “bad momming” was the cause of men being rejected from the draft, asserting, “the maternal sin against the child was a sin against America.”  As philosopher Jacqueline Rose puts it, “The hate, we could say, is perfectly proportionate to the love, the intensity of the demand matches the deluded expectation, the veneration a cover for reproach.”

Hatred of the mother is not evenly distributed across culture, however—some mothers can strike a careful balance between home and work, can pay away certain kinds of problems, can evade the worst judgement by virtue of their skin color. One of the major strengths of Mother Media is that Zeavin resists an analysis of motherhood that only focuses on the white suburban middle-class housewife. Chapter 4, especially, focuses on “stability as a watchword for healthy childhoods” and how predictive models of parenting developed out of René Spitz’s work on Attachment theory in an American women’s prison.

Attachment theory, a remarkably adaptable and wide-ranging set of theoretical applications that seeped into clinical and non-clinical conversations in the 21st century, had its roots in Spitz’s experiments focused on infants separated from their mothers in hospitals and in prison nurseries. Many of these experiments were undertaken by videotaping infants and mothers and observing the minutiae of their behavior to attempt to predict later outcomes. This predictive videography allowed researchers to code the smallest of mothering behaviors as “good” or “bad”. By the 1970s, attachment theory had entered legal proceedings, and when the prison boom of the late 20th century took place “carceral computing further entrenched and exacerbated over-sentencing and mandatory minimums in the Clinton and post-Clinton era, [and] sentence duration became actively intertwined with legal definitions of ‘fit mothering’.”

Mothers need not be absent to be unfit. They need not even really be mothers. Zeavin argues that “media too were increasingly read as having the same qualities as a bad mother, and… media mothers became another site of intense scrutiny.” This scrutiny resulted in an entire industry of media research that aimed to identify, minimize, and even reverse media’s potential corrosive impacts on impressionable children. Television specifically, parked inside the home itself, was a technology the mother could utilize to keep the child contained. But perhaps it was too “hot”—McLuhan himself argues that the television was overstimulating and addictive. In the 1960s the supposed overstimulation took on the tenor of Cold War anxieties about “brainwashing”—children’s malleability was yet again a national security concern. Even if Marshall McLuhan’s theory of “hot” and “cool” media (paralleled in the language of “hot” and “cool” mothering) had a strong preference for cold media, mothering was still somehow always at fault no matter its temperature.

While panics around media have been stoked by actors across political lines, isolating the child to the nuclear family is central to the political project of far-right parents rights groups intervening in our current media and educational landscape. “We do not co-parent with the government.” is the tagline of Moms For Liberty, a hate group that targets LGBT-inclusive school curricula and trans children. “I raise my children. The government does not. We do not co-parent with the government. And there are certain sensitive subjects that we would like to be directing the conversation around for our children” said Mom For Liberty Tiffany Justice in a CSPAN interview.

Justice’s comments rely on a false, nostalgic image of the mother’s role in the family that took hold in the early 20th century, and a concomitant distrust of outsiders cultivated by the nanny panic and, later, the Satanic Panic. If in the past it was nannies and nurses who were reconceptualized as potential contaminating agents, today it is largely teachers , often figured as lesbian-coded single women in the legacy of the Satanic Panic, who are castigated as the medium for the “contagions” of queerness and transness. A significant amount of political energy on the right is consumed by attempting to strictly monitor and control these teachers—a part of a larger strategy of cultural restructuring and union-busting for which parents act as the main wedge.  Parents, the argument goes, should hold the keys to any and all information with which their children interact —mothers conscripted to enforce patriarchal norms as conduits to institutions like the church. The teacher must be purified through total surveillance by the mother, or destroyed. Of course, we never hear in Moms for Liberty’s prolific social media presence of parents who might love and accept their trans kids, or whose goals might align with an inclusive LGBT curriculum. These mothers are elided and erased in service of shoring up a white, straight, cis, middle-class mother whose fitness as a mother relies on keeping her children contained.

Beyond K-12 education, Mother Media can explain rhetoric surrounding the recent anti-genocide student encampment movement, now facing some of the most public repression and surveillance of the Trump administration. Since at least the 1980s, “first-generation college students” have been the object of ambivalent parental resentment, reflecting wider fears of mediating (mothering) influences from outside the household. These college-bound students, especially women, were put into a resented “over-educated” bucket that branded them as alienated from their families and out of touch with their responsibility to the nuclear family—whether that meant remaining a dutiful child or starting a family of their own. College professors were undergoing a rapid feminization and casualization of their profession, and, like teachers and nannies, received intense accusations of contaminating and nefariously reparenting these impressionable young people.

When, in the spring of 2024, students across the nation mobilized to take over their campuses and demand that their universities divest from Israeli companies, anti-Palestine media on both the right and left asserted that students didn’t actually understand the genocide. Deploying Zionist rhetoric that paints apartheid as an endlessly complicated ancient conflict illegible to anyone who doesn’t collect a yearly sum from AIPAC, students were rhetorically transformed into brainwashed sleeper cells fashioned through reparenting by university professors. This in turn became a driving force behind federal action against universities. Children (though of course most of these students are legal adults) in this configuration are supposed to  be shepherded from delinquency by mothers, and any interloping, waged parental force is punished, repressed, and surveilled in service of maintaining the Palestine exception, another phenomenon on which Zeavin has written.

The final section of Mother Media, a short coda, focuses on parents who are “doing it themselves.” She digs into the founding of Waldorf schools and anti-technology schools. These schools, she argues, set up a system where “parents safeguard the teachings at home, while the teacher issues them” and focus heavily on preserving the purity of childhood. This includes anti-technology and anti-interloper positions that aim to preserve each family unit exactly as they wish to be.

The flip side of this model of a “policing family” is the family that is policed.  The scholarship of Dorothy Roberts and media and advocacy at the US-Mexico border have drawn attention to how Black and Latino families are separated from their children and/or put under intensive surveillance regimes, recast by the state as incapable of parenting on their own as unfit mothers.

Mothers of all stripes are tasked with mediation, but some refuse to take on the state’s deputization of mothers. MAMAS, a Chicago-based group of abolitionist mothers, actively invite interlocutors into their family; they use a radical mothering framework that acknowledges that “when state violence–like police and prison violence–targets individuals, it also targets their loved ones, caregivers, families, and communities.” In Nadine Naber (MAMAS’ Research Director) and Stacy Austin’s account of their project Parent University (featured in the abolitionist parenting anthology We Grow the World Together), parents themselves are the experimenters and try to enact “collective parenting”.

These abolitionist feminist approaches to mothering are a gesture towards mutuality that rejects the capitalist frameworks of mothering that have dominated our culture. This framework resists the isolation and alienation that facilitates the endless double binds of contemporary mothering, and rejects the hierarchy of knowledge that has been in place since at least the early 20th century. As Zeavin showed us, mothers have been taught that they are at best a mere medium for authoritative sources of knowledge, themselves only a source of instinct and closeness, never a discerning or intellectual stakeholder in parenting. Mother Media invites an intellectual reappraisal of the history of technological mothering and casts much quietly accepted knowledge in new light; it opens the door to experiment.♦