{"id":16142,"date":"2013-07-11T18:21:13","date_gmt":"2013-07-11T22:21:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=16142"},"modified":"2013-07-12T09:35:23","modified_gmt":"2013-07-12T13:35:23","slug":"quantbaby-the-birth-of-a-datababe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/07\/11\/quantbaby-the-birth-of-a-datababe\/","title":{"rendered":"QuantBaby: The Birth of a Datababe"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Image<\/a>
Credit: author, age 6<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For many people, moving\u2014especially to another city, state, or country, instead of just across town\u2014is an opportunity to sort through (and likely, discard) possessions, in hope of making the impending relocation process less of an ordeal. I did this when I moved back to Massachusetts from California last February; I actually gave away more than 65 percent of my worldly possessions (by volume) before trading a two-bedroom house in West Oakland for a one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge. This pales in comparison, however, to what my parents are currently undertaking: After 28 years in the same house, they\u2019re preparing to move across state lines next month. For them, July has so far been all about sifting through the accumulated sediment of so much time in one enclosed space; since this is the Internet age (and since my mom has access to a scanner), for me July has been all about a steady stream of emailed highlights from rediscovered family\u2014and personal\u2014history.<\/p>\n

Now, don\u2019t get me wrong: I save stuff, and I have for a long time. Initially, as a prepubescent kid, I’d wanted to make sure that who-I-would-become would have a way to access who-I-had-been; I was afraid that, from the ignorance of forgetting, my adult self would fail treat her own someday-children with compassion. Over time my concern has shifted from, \u201cWhen I am an adult, I will not remember what it was like to be a child,\u201d to \u201cWhen I am senile, I will not remember what it was like to be me,\u201d but both fear of losing my empathy and fear of losing my identity have made equally effective documentary drives. Among the things I dragged to California and back again<\/a> are small boxes of ticket stubs, received letters, old journals, longhand rough drafts, scrawled-on paper scraps, filled-up notebooks, the occasional school assignment, and paper photos from back when lab prints were the default, among other things. If informally and in a disorganized manner, I have through these artifacts documented at least some aspects of what my experience of being in the world has been.<\/p>\n

What I didn\u2019t think about until recently, however, is that I have only captured my existence from my own perspective. In contrast, you know who has a very different curatorial eye, and direct access to a whole lot of material?<\/p>\n

Yeah, that would be my mom.<\/p>\n

\"Author<\/a>
Author and her mother, 1998<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And holy crap, you guys: my mom\u2019s got archives. My mom has saved stuff I don\u2019t even remember making, artifacts created by a creature so tiny I can\u2019t remember inhabiting her body without digging up a book with a tarnished lock and the word \u201cDIARY\u201d embossed across the front. There are things like preschool art projects, things I probably gave to my parents, but also things like stories scrawled on legal pads that I have no idea how my mother ever came to have, other than perhaps through some magical, panoptic parent voodoo. There are other things I vaguely remember writing, but that it never would have occurred to me to save (such as a particularly tongue-in-cheek rejoinder to an automated response from the email system at my mother\u2019s place of employment, after my enthusiasm for swearing<\/a> tripped a newly-installed spam filter). I have no idea where they were keeping all this stuff, but as my parents keep going, the scans keep coming\u2014and those documents of documents are kind of amazing. Though I was only dimly aware of it at the time, it\u2019s now quite apparent that my parents (mostly my mother) were engaged in a documentary project that paralleled my own, but that captured a notably different piece of my life.<\/p>\n

To a lot of people\u2014or at least, to a lot of people who are vaguely near my age and who share a roughly similar class- and cultural background\u2014this is not particularly unusual. Saving Stuff From Childhood is just what parents, and especially moms, are supposed to do (or so we\u2019ve been told); though the practice doesn\u2019t have a name, we know what it is and we more-or-less expect that it takes place. Viewed through another lens, however, we can frame parental archiving as something else: as a kind of child-tracking. Some commonplace child-tracking practices are direct and quantitative, like a collection of report cards in that one kitchen cabinet, or a doorway with dates and dashes denoting height; other practices are more informal and qualitative, like a collection of stories over which one can watch my handwriting slowly solidify, and my spelling slowly become less \u201ccreative\u201d (to use my mother\u2019s term). Far from being the exception, then, the parental tracking of children and childhood seems almost mundane, the expected norm.<\/p>\n

Or so you\u2019d think. Earlier this week, Slate<\/i> published an article titled, \u201cI Measure Every Single Thing My Child Does<\/a>,\u201d which is about exactly what you’d think it’s about. Here, the child-tracking practices in question look a lot more like the kind of highly quantitative self-tracking that takes center stage in media coverage of Quantified Self<\/a>, and a lot less like my family\u2019s disorganized salvaging of early artistic endeavors. There are spreadsheets, and detailed measurements, and subjective observations coded as Likert items<\/a>, some of which begin well before the titular child (a daughter) is actually born; notably the author, Amy Webb, is also the author of the book Data: A Love Story <\/i><\/a>(so this is a family, or at least a couple, whose collective enthusiasm for \u201cdata\u201d is likely greater than that of most other American parents). While I don\u2019t know if Webb has ever been to a Quantified Self event, the story she tells in Slate<\/i> does resemble what I\u2019ve come to see as a classic QS narrative: \u201cI track, and though my data I come to know myself better, and through this self-knowledge I\u2019m able to be better\u201d\u2014a better (more healthy, more productive, happier) version of myself, or perhaps a better worker or a better partner. Webb\u2019s story, however, has an interesting twist in the identity department: the thrust of her essay is, \u201cI track, and through my daughter\u2019s data I come to know my daughter better, and through this knowledge of her I\u2019m able to be a better parent.\u201d Webb therefore implicitly captures what I\u2019m finding to be an increasingly fascinating question with respect to Quantified Self: where exactly does \u201cself\u201d stop, and \u201cother\u201d begin?<\/p>\n

\"Credit:<\/a>
Credit: author’s maternal grandmother, 1953<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Several friends and colleagues sent me Webb\u2019s article when it came out (I love it when that happens), and there was a discussion about the piece in my Twitter feed as well. Overall, reactions from within my circles tended toward the negative: some wondered if the article was a satire<\/a>, while others posited that, \u201c[the] experience [of tracking] enables activities that begin as caution to transform into absurdity<\/a>.\u201d To be fair, Webb does acknowledge that her child-tracking practices \u201cmight seem obsessive, ostentatious, or just plain weird”; though she offers an argument for how such practices have benefited her family, she doesn\u2019t exactly go out of her way to make them seem any less abnormal. My own first thought, however, was less about normalcy (or lack thereof), and more about “this isn\u2019t exactly new\u201d\u2014although a sociologist saying, \u201cThis isn’t new\u201d is just about the least-new thing that there is. Instead of stopping at \u201cthat\u2019s not new,\u201d then, I want to spend the rest of this post thinking about why<\/i> Webb\u2019s child-tracking practices aren\u2019t that new. I threw out the term \u201cQuantBaby<\/a>\u201d on Twitter in part as a joke and in part as a piece of character-saving shorthand, but if we consider \u201cQuantBaby\u201d to stand for the detailed, quantitative tracking of one\u2019s child and one\u2019s child\u2019s development, what preconditions have laid the groundwork for QuantBaby to be A Thing?<\/b><\/p>\n

To answer this one, I think you have to back\u2014back before the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century, when three key things were happening: a decline in infant mortality, the shift to an industrial economy, and the coalescence of institutional medicine.<\/p>\n

\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Credit:<\/a>
Credit: author’s maternal grandmother, 1952<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Consider the baby book, one of the oldest mass-produced tools for child-tracking. Baby books first started to emerge in the late 1880s<\/a>, which historian Janet Golden<\/a> credits in part to a decline in infant mortality<\/a>: both the experience of raising a child and the child itself seem altogether different things once it\u2019s more certain than not that the child will live past childhood. And yet, the mass-market baby books that appeared slightly later reflected something else as well: the shift toward an industrialized economy. As one author puts it, \u201cBusinesses discovered that babies are a wonderful excuse for consumption<\/a>.\u201d Consumer goods need consumers in order for an industrialized economy to work, and the early baby books printed by companies such as Borden\u2019s and Carnation helped to create consumers for baby products in two important ways: first, by serving as a convenient vehicle for advertisements; and later, by helping to recast children not as something one created out of obligation (or a need for farm labor), but as a source of emotional fulfillment. From the beginning, baby books structured \u201cgood parenting\u201d as something that involves a lot of metrics; this was due in part to the popularity of the Child Study movement<\/a> at the time, and was also probably not unrelated to advertisements for rentable baby scales<\/a>. Later, as both \u201cchildhood\u201d and \u201cthe family\u201d were reconfigured in the postwar era, baby books\u2014along with new experts like Dr. Spock\u2014prompted parents to record developmental milestones as well as raw quantitative metrics. Good parents still tracked, but now they did even more tracking\u2014at least, in theory; even a hundred years ago, oldest children were much better documented than were their subsequent siblings. (As Golden points out, third or fourth children are rarely documented at all.)<\/p>\n

The medical profession, too, has played an important role in the rise of parental child-tracking. The professionalization of medicine was gaining momentum at the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century, and pediatrics itself was emerging as a medical specialty (the American Pediatric Society<\/a> was formed in 1888). All \u201cexperts\u201d need a field of expertise, and this new class of experts\u2014pediatricians\u2014staked their claim to authority not just in matters of childhood sickness, but in \u201cinfant feeding<\/a>, child hygiene, and disease prevention in well children\u201d as well. Up until this point, institutional medicine had considered childhood illnesses to be within the purview of obstetrics, which was itself still in the process of wrestling authority away from a long tradition of midwifery; accordingly, the establishment of pediatrics as a profession was doubly-dependent on the assertion that pediatricians hold some sort of \u201cspecial knowledge\u201d unavailable to lay practitioners or to parents themselves. As sociologist Eliot Friedson argues in Profession of Medicine<\/a><\/i>, institutional medicine draws its power in part from a state-sponsored monopoly on defining what counts as \u2018normal\u2019 as opposed to \u2018abnormal,\u2019 \u2018sick,\u2019 or \u2018deviant\u2019; if one\u2019s area of practice is children and their growth, how better to delineate \u201cnormal\u201d from \u201cabnormal\u201d development than through tracking individual children and comparing their numbers to aggregate data sets?<\/p>\n

For many parents (who have access to medical care), child-tracking therefore begins in the pediatrician\u2019s office, with or without a baby book. None of my friends who have children have tracked their children QuantBaby style, for instance, but all of those friends could tell you during their children’s infancies where their children fell in \u201cthe percentiles.\u201d (As one friend explained, it was fine that her child was below the 20th<\/sup> percentile for both length and weight; as long as that stayed consistent, there was no cause for concern. While a dramatic shift in percentile placement could indicate some kind of problem, my friend’s daughter was simply \u201cpetite.\u201d) When we recall that \u201ceducating\u201d (socializing) parents into their roles-as-such was among pediatricians\u2019 initial institutional goals, is it any wonder that parents\u2014especially those with access to pediatricians\u2014might associate child-tracking with fulfillment of their parental duties? (And similarly, is anyone that surprised that Webb\u2019s pediatrician was irritated when she brought her own spreadsheets, rather than automatically accept his professional authority and the authority of his discipline\u2019s metrics?)<\/p>\n

\"Credit:<\/a>
Credit: author, age 8<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But what else might lead present-day parents track their children, and why might they do so at the level that Webb has? Some of it, undoubtedly, is due to the affordances of available tools: a print baby book with blanks to fill in encourages certain types of observations, whereas if what you have is an Excel spreadsheet (and we do know Webb loves spreadsheets), \u201cevery single thing\u201d might start to look like a numerical value. Tools and affordances, however, are only the beginning. Start with the availability of digital child-tracking tools, which\u2014like print baby books before them\u2014will shape and structure \u201cgood parenting\u201d in different ways, according to the end goals and values of whoever has produced them. Consider that pediatricians similarly socialize parents into child-tracking generally, and into quantitative child-tracking specifically, through the use of percentile comparisons and normative expectations for developmental milestones. Remember that (for many people) tracking is an expression of agency, an attempt to gain control\u2014or at least, the feeling of control\u2014over something that is vast and unknowable and possibly frightening, and that to first time parents awash in modern risk rhetoric, a helpless infant is pretty unknowable and frightening (or so I hear).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot at stake in a present day child, especially if she\u2019s the only child of somewhat older upper-middle class parents (as Webb\u2019s daughter is). Such a child is not just a person, or a person-to-be; she also reflects on the person or people who created her. As Barbara Katz Rothman<\/a> points out, the commodification of children has led privileged parents in particular to feel anxiety about producing \u201cblue ribbon babies\u201d; where a \u201chealthy\u201d baby once sufficed, now only an overachieving, exceptional baby possessed of \u201cdesirable attributes\u201d will do. Privileged parents are far from the only ones to feel these anxieties, however; you can observe any parent\u2019s internalization of developmental norms (for example) in the pride they take when their kids do something \u201cearly,\u201d and in their embarrassed justifications for when their kids do something \u201clate.\u201d (In my family, for instance, my mother will tell you that I started walking \u201clate\u201d because I started talking \u201cso early,\u201d and so had figured out how to make people bring me the things I wanted; my brother, on the other hand, walked \u201cearly\u201d and talked \u201clate\u201d because I \u201cdid all the talking for him.\u201d) Parents want their children to be successful not just because they love those children and so want them to succeed, but because they themselves cannot be \u201csuccessful parents\u201d without raising \u201csuccessful children.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Credit:<\/a>
Credit: author, age 8 (and one day)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This, then, hits upon my final point, which is the complicated interplay between a parent\u2019s identity and her child\u2019s identity. We tend to put more emphasis, I think, on the way parents shape their children\u2019s identities, but in truth a parent\u2019s identity is equally shaped, if not defined, by her child. Children \u201cfail\u201d or \u201csucceed\u201d according to a complicated interplay of factors (not the least of which is how \u201csuccess\u201d and \u201cfailure\u201d are defined), and yet inevitably, we blame or credit parents\u2014mothers, especially\u2014for the actions and achievements of their children. How often have you heard someone speak of a troubled child by asking, \u201cWhere are the parents?\u201d How often do you hear the phrase \u201ca good family\u201d in the same breath as mention of a child\u2019s laudable accomplishment? Even \u201cgood parents\u201d of \u201cbad kids\u201d are accorded pity, not respect; if adults want status as \u201cgood parents,\u201d they have to produce the appropriate child or children as proof.<\/p>\n

When you stop to think about it, that\u2019s an awful lot of personal identity performance riding on someone who isn\u2019t actually you yourself. And yet, it\u2019s hard to get around it: many parents take their kids very, very personally. Webb, for instance, relates an interaction with the mother of another student in her daughter\u2019s ballet class, and it\u2019s plain that their conversation has nearly nothing to do with the two little girls on the other side of the classroom mirror. The other mother boasts about her daughter\u2019s physique, and expresses \u201cconcern\u201d about Webb\u2019s daughter\u2019s facial expression, but the comments are far more about Webb\u2019s daughter as an extension of Webb herself; similarly, Webb puts the other mother back in her place (at least, in the article) by judging the other daughter\u2019s demeanor. Presumably without knowing much about the other mother\u2019s parenting methods, Webb presents the contrast between the two girls\u2019 moods after class not just as evidence that her own parenting methods are superior, but that she herself is a superior parent. Alternatively, one could also consider the clich\u00e9d image of parents who are over-invested in their children\u2019s sports games, and who scream at coaches and referees. Both types of interaction reflect competition between adults projected onto their children, and both are rooted in the same underlying assumption about parental status and identity: \u201cMy kid is or does, therefore I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps we shouldn\u2019t be surprised, then, if some child-tracking practices are starting to resemble some self-tracking practices. Children are in many ways cast as extensions of their parents\u2019 selves, both emotionally and socially; how much of child-tracking, then, is tracking one’s child\u2019s development, and how much is tracking one\u2019s own development as a parent? Similarly, children are vulnerable, and parents can never control their children to the extent that they\u2019d like; child-tracking might therefore seem to offer the possibility of accessing hidden power-knowledge<\/a>, of gaining greater protective control, of somehow warding off the unknown yet terrifying inevitable. Children themselves can be strange and unknowable beings, both before they develop a capacity for language and perhaps even more so after; given that parents have already long been encouraged to track their children, it makes sense that some parents would move to help their children \u201cspeak through the data.\u201d Is it that big a leap from recording a list of made-up words to filling out one of Webb\u2019s spreadsheets, at least while we\u2019re still talking about infants and toddlers?<\/p>\n

\"Words\"<\/a>
Credit: author’s mother<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I do wonder what will happen, however, when Webb\u2019s daughter gets older and wants to speak for herself\u2014as in speak with her words, not through her data. (That assertion of independent, individual identity happens with all Western children, or so I\u2019m told.) Perhaps as Webb\u2019s daughter gets older and gains a greater ability to speak with words, her parents won\u2019t feel they need \u201cdata\u201d as an intermediary; perhaps \u201cthe data\u201d will come to reflect that Webb\u2019s daughter finds the tracking distressing, and the Webbs will decide to stop. Perhaps Webb\u2019s daughter will rebel by skewing \u201cthe data,\u201d and engaging in some database vandalism as an act of resistance; perhaps the answer will be \u201cnone of the above.\u201d In any case, Webb\u2019s child-tracking will become less self-tracking and more other-tracking as her daughter becomes her own self, and I wonder if\u2014and how\u2014 that will be reflected in the numbers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whitney Erin Boesel has so far escaped her mother’s curse that she give birth to three daughters just like herself. She does have a cat though, and a Twitter account: she’s @phenatypical<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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