The Quantified Baby: Discourses of Consumption

Holloway, Mascheroni and Inglis adopt critical discourse analysis to examine commercial discourses about baby wearables and find that advertisements use a “discourse of risk and responsibilisation” to heighten parental anxiety over their babies’ health. This discourse positions parents as having sole responsibility for their babies’ health, safety and development, and constructs the digital tracking of babies’ bodies as a virtuous parental practice. Such neoliberal responsibilisation also creates a discursive bridge between goods previously used only in the health care system and everyday parenting practices, in line with the medicalisation of childhood. Moreover, the authors find that while such parenting practices and their representations contribute to normalise commercial and intimate surveillance practices, they also intersect with I-pistemology, where personal (mediated) knowledge replaces expert knowledge.