You Can't Raise a Baby Online

Before I had a kid, a huge part of my life happened on the internet. I was working remotely on a fully distributed team of people living in 70+ different countries. My spiritual community logged into our weekly Zoom call from a few different continents, and if I was looking for an interesting conversation I usually opened Twitter. I ordered food through an app, read all my books on Kindle, and bought most of the things I needed online. My husband and I travelled for a few months every year, and we rarely had to think much about what to pack - almost everything we needed was on one of a few small devices.

I only realized how unusual it is after my daughter was born. For the first year she was only interested in screens or books as yet another thing to be thrown around and put in her mouth. I live in a world of ideas, which includes the ideas of other people talking to me from a distance - but in the beginning my kid lived entirely in a world of things. What is this for? How does it taste like? How does it feel like when I touch it? What happens if I lift it or toss it to the ground? Either it was something she could smell and touch at the moment, or it didn't exist.

Everything in a baby's life is tangible and real

I talk to people online much more than I talk to anyone in person. I spend a significant portion of my time exchanging thoughts with people I've never actually met in real life. How could I possibly introduce them to my baby so that they can become part of her life too? Even if she sees them on the screen, she won't be able to spend time with them in any way that matters to her.

Through my Twitter conversations I made a bunch of parent friends all around the world. Their values are much more aligned with my vision of parenting than any of the people I meet at our local playground. And yet, until we travel halfway around the globe for our kids to hang out together, it's the kids in our local playground and their parents who are actually a part of my daughter's life.

Even for people who are already a part of her life it's really hard to maintain relationships from a distance. My kid loves her grandparents with all her heart and asks me to call them every day, but whenever we actually make that call, she gets bored after just a minute or two. She doesn't want to hear a disembodied voice of her grandpa talking about some abstract things, she wants to build a tower with him, count colorful buttons together, hug him, and crawl in his lap.

When you're a baby, nothing can replace physical presence

This sounds so obvious it shouldn't even have to be said, but it was anything but obvious to me until now. For the last few years I didn't care much about making friends with people who live in the same city - why restrict yourself to just one arbitrary location when you can have friends all around the globe?

Only now I see that it matters a lot where I live, how my neighborhood looks like, what spaces I spend my time in, what things I surround myself with, what people I meet in person or even just cross my paths with. To my daughter, this is literally her entire world.