Affective Engineering: A Theory of Digital Infant Surveillance

Baby tracking apps and devices promise that they will optimize every aspect of baby care for today's parents. However, these benefits come at the cost of an increase in digital labor. This paper presents a qualitative content analysis of popular baby tracking smartphone apps available in the United States. We argue that these tools perform affective engineering on parent users: a promise to make the job of parenting calmer and more rewarding through increased data work and greater surveillance of parenting tasks. In the process, baby tracking tools present users with normative expectations about correct child behavior, especially regarding sleep, and about the affective disposition of good parents. While previous scholarship has looked at how digitally tracking school-age children may violate children's privacy and shape the parent–child relationship, as well as how digital self-tracking among adults extends neoliberal and biopolitical logics of population governance, the politics of baby tracking apps has been undertheorized. Considered through a feminist STS lens, these apps represent a technological quick fix for deeper social problems and add an additional burden of digital labor to the lives of busy parents.