Hi Mama! Daycare apps and the mediatization of parenting and care work

Abstract

Daycare management apps – marketed to care centers as a way to streamline operations and improve parent-caregiver communication – have quickly moved from relative obscurity in 2016 to near-omnipresence in center-based childcare. These apps mediate the work of caregiving and are thus a growing aspect of the nexus of cultural anxieties about how to manage reproductive labor, parenting, and gendered expectations of mothering. In this paper, we engage in a close reading of five major daycare apps in the US – Brightwheel, Lillio (formerly HiMama), My Bright Day, Procare, and Tadpoles – to investigate how they structure the experience and labor practices of both parenting and non-parent caregiving. As such, we read the app interfaces as material practices through which parents and caregivers grapple with the contradictions of the care crisis and contemporary conditions of parenting. Throughout this article, we attend to the ways that the technological imaginary unfolds in a specific site within the broader context of caregiving in the United States, ultimately arguing that these apps reflect and reaffirm caregiving practices that align with practices of so-called intensive or transcendent parenting.