The Internet, Friend or Foe?

A while a go I was in conversation with my mum when she remarked on how that, when I was born, there was no daytime T.V. I knew that of course,but I had not really thought about it, and I was very aware that the blurry days of breastfeeding when my partner was back at work had been made bearable by the likes of ‘Come dine with me’ keeping me company. I was a September baby so her fourth trimester with me took her into the depths of winter. How on earth had she managed? The more I thought about it the more I found myself contemplating a more terrifying idea; the television was one thing but how had she navigated parenting without the internet? She told me she had a neighbour with a child of a similar age, and they used to go for walks together., she told me she coped by crying down the phone to her aunt who would sometimes come and relieve her, she told me she had a big black medical ‘bible’ and that her friends would call and ask to look up their symptoms. She managed by nurturing and relying on relationships.

We are aware that our relationships with our partners change when a baby is born but our relationships with our smartphones change too. They become our connection with the outside world, a source of information and app after app exists to try to support us to parent better. Do they become our friends? Not long after my second child was born, I sat in the bath with handfuls of the hair that I was shedding and a huge desire to reach out to my friends to ask about their experiences of postpartum hair loss. I didn’t, partly because I knew that it was normal and partly because I knew I could find any answer I needed on the topic on the internet. But I didn’t need the answer, what I needed was for my friends to know I was feeling a bit fragile and that losing hair was making me feel ‘other’. I needed connections, relationships.

I would never go so far as to suggest my mother was lucky, I would not want to face the consequences. I do think though that in a world where AI threatens to take over, we should remind ourselves that the internet is brilliant as long as we use it to serve our needs and that the biggest need of all when parenting (other than sleep) is the desire to feel less alone and that can only be met by other people.

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