I spend a lot of time with my 9-month-old daughter, just the two of us. My husband works in an office and is sometimes gone for 12 hours at a time. I try to read aloud books to her; she is more interested in opening and closing them, her little fingers gripping the thick pages. We take walks; she in her stroller, me dutifully pushing it. She laughs and babbles and, only occasionally, cries. Though I have part-time child care, I spend hours every day in her world, and I am grateful for it. As the default parent, I am rarely alone — still though, I’m often lonely.
So I play podcasts. I play them out loud through my phone speakers or in my ear through one AirPod as we make our ways through days that feel, at once, magical and dull. My daughter has listened to podcasts about the daily news, the beef between Kendrick and Drake, and how private equity is reshaping American life. The voices of my favorite podcast hosts keep my mind occupied through the daily Sisyphean tasks of motherhood, reminding me that there’s a world outside, where people are thinking about things other than nap schedules and bedtime routines. They keep me company.
Then a few weeks ago I was hit with a fresh wave of the prevailing emotion of my motherhood experience: guilt. An episode of This American Life was playing as I handed my daughter a toy. She laughed loudly and drowned out the voice of Ira Glass; my stomach dropped. How could I want to hear any noise other than the ones she makes? Why wasn’t I suitably stimulated by the company of my sweet, cherished baby? And underneath it all, the question I couldn’t look away from: Am I a bad mom for listening to podcasts while I’m with my baby?
This one-sided conversation has been playing out in the heads of many anonymous parents on Reddit, too. I’d turned to the site to find answers, commiseration, something that might make me feel better. The question stretches across subreddits like r/Parenting, r/Podcasts, and r/Fatherhood, with anonymous posters confessing to the crime I was also guilty of. “I secretly listen to podcasts while playing with my kids,” announced one post. I read and reread the top comment, which had 1,100 upvotes: “Our generation is too hard on ourselves as parents. We seem to believe that by default, our children are entitled to 100% of our attention. You don’t need to feel guilty for listening to a podcast.” Another post detailed an anonymous user’s fight with her husband: He claimed she was a “crappy parent” for listening to a podcast in one ear while hanging with her child; she wondered if he was right. In r/ScienceBasedParenting, a parent wrote that listening to audiobooks while parenting was one of the few things that made her feel like she has an identity outside of motherhood. Some commenters wrote lengthy missives convincing themselves and each other — and me — that there was no harm done; others questioned if the attention of a parent listening to a podcast or audiobook is, by nature, fractured. I scrolled through my phone feverishly, searching for absolution I couldn’t fully find.
The hours that make up a parent’s life sometimes seem endless and when there are no other adults around, we can find ourselves searching for a life raft. One mom, who I’ll call Rachel, tells me she started listening to podcasts when her daughter was four months old, despite feeling the guilt that is a rock in my own shoe. “I felt this heaviness around not giving her every iota of my attention, even though she was perfectly content just enjoying her surroundings,” Rachel says. Jillian, a mother of three kids between the ages of 1 and 7, goes through her day with one headphone in. “I’ll pause if a kid needs me,” she explained. “Listening to books and podcasts keeps my mind occupied, which I believe makes me a more alert, yet calm parent.”
Still, I felt uneasy. Guilt pooled in the bottom of my stomach as I pressed play on the latest episode of The Daily. So I called Dimitri Christakis, M.D., MPH, a pediatric researcher and co-editor of the Handbook of Children and Screens. Maybe, I thought, he would even tell me it was good for my daughter’s language development to listen to podcasts, like the faceless parents on message boards assured each other. Instead, he told me I was asking a tough question. “Let me say this,” he said, and I felt my first sense of foreboding. “Babies want parents’ attention and they’re very keen on it.” Christakis explained that while parents consider themselves to be adept multitaskers, we’re less skilled at it than we believe. A podcast playing, even in the background, will distract the parent and make them less sensitive to their baby’s cues. “Now, is that disastrous?” he asked. I waited to be told it wasn’t. “I don’t think we could measure it, particularly if the parent is eagerly trying to answer their baby’s cues. But I don’t think parents should think that they’re fully attentive to their child if they’re listening to a podcast.”
I fell back on the arguments that had soothed me in my late-night searches: Wasn’t it good for babies to hear such varied language? No, Christakis said. The language — and the tonality of that language — is too advanced for babies to grasp. “They’re above a baby’s grade level,” he said. Listening back to the transcript of our call, I hear myself steering our conversation to what I really, deep down, wanted to know: Was listening to podcasts while I parent harming my daughter? Christakis balked — he didn’t want to be prescriptive, he said. But parents should consider — while listening to a podcast or audiobook, are they able to meet their baby’s cues? Are they giving their baby their full attention? “When parents are with their baby, they should try to give them as much of their attention as they possibly can,” Christakis said, pausing. “It doesn’t last forever. It feels like it does in the moment, but it doesn’t. They grow up fast.”
He’s right, of course. I feel time blurring as my daughter grows — it warps and speeds and even though she is not yet 1, I already find myself nostalgic for the early days of motherhood. I think I’ll miss this time, too. Still — and I don’t say this to Christakis, but I sit with it after our conversation — the loneliness of new motherhood is so thick it’s like a presence in the room. What am I supposed to do with it?
I call Jamie Buzzelle, a parenting coach, looking for an answer. “Parenting is really hard,” Buzzelle says. “It’s overwhelming. There is a loss of so much autonomy.” It’s no wonder, she continues, that myself and other parents find ourselves reaching for podcasts in the endless, lonely hours of parenting. I tell her about the conversation with Christakis and how chastened I felt after I hung up the phone. Am I a bad mom? I ask her. “No,” she says and the clarity of the answer is like a glass of cold water. “As mothers, we already have a lot of reasons to feel guilty.” Buzzelle doesn’t think I should add my podcast habit to my list of reasons. Plus, she says, there’s something soothing about the cadence of talk radio and podcasts. I agree — my own parents played National Public Radio throughout my childhood and I still find the introduction jingles to their favorite segments soothing. Maybe my daughter will likewise be comforted by the intro music to The Daily or This American Life. Maybe I’m not a bad mother, or at least not for this.
These are the things I know: that I love my daughter more than I thought it was possible to love another person; that, every single day, the vast majority of my energy and focus is centered around her; that I am doing my best to manage the demands and daily drudgery of new motherhood while standing in awe of the moments of absolute wonder. And if I use podcasts to manage, I don’t think that’s the worst thing. It has to be better for my daughter than having a mother who is overwhelmed by loneliness. And anyway, it won’t be long until we can listen together, like I did with my parents.