Below is an edited version of the remarks that Stephanie H. Murray originally delivered in Rochester on September 18th as part of a breakout session on “Care Work” at the 2026 Women’s Convention. We will be publishing remarks from Ivana Greco later this week. Nadya Williams’ remarks are available here. A full, unedited video of the breakout session can be viewed here.
I tend to think of myself as someone who writes about relationships. Over time, though, I’ve come to accept that to write about modern relationships is to write about technology. Whether you are talking about fertility, or intensive parenting, or the sex recession, or population aging, or potty training, when you pull the thread, you’ll find some sort of story about technology lurking behind the scenes.
I was asked to speak about how women can integrate motherhood with other forms of work. And just like every other relational topic I explore, I find I can’t get very far without running into the question of technology and what sort of role it ought to play in the matter. So I figured: let’s talk about that.
One reason I wanted to discuss this matter is that I find ongoing cultural discussions about it to be incredibly fraught. I am increasingly convinced that a lot of the fiercest arguments that break out online about things like formula or breast pumps or Snoos are driven by a certain existential anxiety these technologies provoke.
It often feels like these arguments are standing in for a much bigger question about whether mothers are replaceable. In our rapidly evolving technological environment, there seems to be a very real fear that we’re hurtling toward this highly technological future in which babies are gestated by machines and cared for by AI-powered nanny robots. And against that backdrop, formula looks like a kind of societal gateway drug to maternal obsolescence. Outright rejection of technology functions as a means of defending the necessity and singularity of motherhood.
Now, I haven’t quite figured out where I stand on the proper role of technology in work-life balance. On one hand, I am someone who has trouble getting worked up about formula. On the other hand, I do have concerns about the way technology is or will be incorporated into our system for allowing women to continue their participation in society. There really are people who think that whatever challenges women have in that regard are on their way to being solved by technology. And it’s not just motherhood. It’s eldercare, too. There are people banking on our ability to outsource care to robots or machinery of various sorts. I am both wary and skeptical.
My goal today is to attempt to explain how I managed to resolve some of my ambivalence about technology without rejecting it outright and to offer my vision for what a good use of technology in the service of work-care balance would look like.
To start, I think it’s worth pointing out that mothers have been relying on technology to manage work-life balance for a long time. Some of you may be familiar with the writer Elena Bridgers. She’s responsible for getting Substack obsessed with hunter-gatherers. I learned from her that some anthropologists think that the first tool humans created was actually a baby sling. I guess that back when humans started to walk upright, human baby feet lost their clutching capacity. If a baby can’t actually clutch onto the mother anymore, then the mom has to hold the baby constantly, which means she’s limited in her capacity to forage. To solve this problem, prehistoric moms used various sorts of organic matter to create contraptions to strap their babies to them, thus allowing for more effective foraging.
I think there is something actually quite profound about the fact that the very thing that set off the chain of evolutionary developments that led humans to diverge from apes—walking upright—also essentially created this work-care balance issue that we then solved by inventing baby carriers. What I choose to take from this is that figuring out how to effectively deploy the tools available to us for the purposes of making care compatible with other forms of work is part and parcel of what it means to be a human mother. I think this is one reason that modern motherhood is particularly difficult. We have so many tools available to us, and discerning how to use them well is hard.
What’s more, I think that it is okay for mothers to adapt this decision-making process to the availability of new technologies. I reject the idea that good mothering is something trapped in amber from the Stone Age. The existence of formula means that the calculus that goes into whether and how long to breastfeed is likely to yield different answers than it did for much of human history. The stakes of that decision are legitimately different now. If we actually created a robot nanny, its existence would indeed inform any number of decisions. I don’t think we can escape the reality that what “good” parenting looks like in any given scenario is to some extent a byproduct of the broader technological environment.
But then, where I find myself agreeing with the more naturalistic and tech-wary voices in modern parenting discourse is that I simply do not think that there is a future for any society that leverages technology primarily to make it possible for mothers and their children to be apart. I don’t think the system we have now—wherein extended separation from one’s children is often the price women pay for continued participation in society, and exclusion from society is the price women pay for proximity to their children—is working terribly well. It very clearly has limitations—ones that I do not think even an abundance of AI-powered nanny robots can overcome. And there are a few reasons that I feel this way.
One is that I think the maternal bond is simply too strong for it. Any work-life balance system that relies on mothers’ separation from their children is facing an uphill battle. I’m not saying that moms need or even want to be with their babies 24/7, but there are very clearly limits to how much time parents, and in particular mothers, are willing to spend away from their babies and children. I think that the popularity of remote work, and the fact that its emergence has coincided with a rise in maternal employment among moms of young kids, essentially proves my point. When it comes to facilitating work-life balance for moms, you can only get so far as long as participation in work requires separation from one’s kids. When you lift that as a requirement, then you get more mothers interested in paid work.
There is also a spatial component to caregiving—whether you are talking about eldercare or parenthood or just helping out a neighbor—that I don’t think any technology can overcome. Working parents don’t so much hop back and forth between the domestic and employment spheres as straddle them. You never really get to plant both feet in one realm. And as the metaphor implies, straddling those spheres is harder the farther apart they get.
Last year, I wrote a piece combing through what is now a large body of research suggesting that commuting distance explains quite a bit of the variation in maternal labor force participation rates. In U.S. cities and abroad, the longer the average commute time, the less likely a mother is to remain employed. This is direct evidence for my thesis here, which is that even in our highly technological age, a mother’s capacity to participate in productive work relies on proximity to her children. Childcare doesn’t solve that. Formula doesn’t solve that. Cars don’t solve that. Robots won’t either.
I also have some doubts about the capabilities of the technology. More than anything else, what I’ve learned over the years is that the manner in which technology impacts parenthood is not at all straightforward. For one thing, so far surveillance technology for children has largely ramped up, rather than diminished, expectations of what sufficient childcare looks like. That’s what’s happened with baby monitors. That’s what’s happened with tracking technology like Life360.
For another, I think people drastically underestimate how hard it is to create anything like a real care robot. I did some reporting a few years ago about ongoing efforts in that direction, though mainly for eldercare. The main takeaway from that reporting was that we have essentially no evidence that these robots actually reduce work for the human caregivers, because the robots themselves need quite a bit of care. A lot of these robots were pretty useless, but even where they were useful, the need for human caregiving didn’t so much disappear as change. The caregivers wound up sort of managing the relationship between the elderly and these machines.
Some of this had to do with the physical risk involved when you bring large machinery into a care home full of fragile elderly folks. Caregivers have to closely monitor the robots, because otherwise they might hurt the residents, or vice versa. And a lot of times, getting residents to actually engage with these robots required human assistance. But even without those problems, the caregivers ran into issues.
One of the more effective robots was a pet seal called Paro. It’s soft, so residents can handle it safely. And it’s meant to help soothe them, such that they require less attention from staff. In one care home that trialed Paro, a lot of the residents apparently weren’t really interested in the robot, but one woman seemed to develop an unhealthy fixation on it. She’d take any opportunity to take Paro back to her room, where she’d put it to bed like a baby and often cry while talking to it. She refused to take meals or go to bed without Paro. Eventually the staff ended up just putting Paro away because it was too much of a hassle to monitor. I think the lesson here is: just because you have created a piece of technology that elderly people or children find very engaging does not mean you’ve created an actual caregiver.
We already have highly engaging technology that keeps kids occupied. It’s called a tablet. The very thing that makes it such an effective means of keeping kids occupied while cooking dinner is also the thing that forces us to closely oversee our kids’ relationship with it. It’s very, very easy to see how you might run into this problem even with a very agile or articulate robot. And it’s a really tricky problem to solve. Because underlying the decisions that the caregiver or parent is making—to take Paro away even though the resident desperately wanted it, or to tell a kid that tablet time is up—is our capacity to go against the will of the person we are looking after.
Many of the most important parts of care require the ability to fill in someone else’s blind spots. To anticipate needs that they don’t. To say no when they want something that we don’t think is good for them. In other words, it is our capacity to not function as a tool that allows us to effectively look out for someone’s wellbeing. As long as the robots we are creating remain tools, they cannot actually replace human caregivers.
The final thing that I want to say is that sometimes in discussions about the potential for technology to play a role in caregiving, we get sidetracked, because we are thinking about care in general and parenthood in particular in an unhelpful way. When we think about what parenthood is, and what sort of responsibilities it involves, we tend to focus on the short-term goal of keeping the child alive and fed and clean. Sometimes we also consider the longer-term goals of ensuring that children build the necessary skills to earn a living and contribute to society as adults. But I think both of those tasks are really subcategories of what parenthood actually is: a system and process for social integration. To care for someone, whether a child or an ailing relative, is to play a particular role in tethering them to society.
I think our current system, in which so much of care is siloed, actively works against this goal. It’s ironic: care is deeply relational work, but the price of doing it in modern society is often isolation. To use technology to create an even more siloed version of caregiving doesn’t make any sense to me. Currently, the development of care robots seems oriented toward a goal of making it possible for the elderly to satisfy all of their needs in total isolation. If we ever actually achieved that, it would not actually be care, because it would be failing this fundamental aspect of what care is. Atomized care is a contradiction.
So from my perspective, for technology to play a positive role in helping to combine motherhood and caregiving with other types of work, it must help to facilitate social integration. As for what that might look like, I can’t say. But I think it will be conceptually similar to a baby carrier. Because if you think about what the baby sling actually did for mothers, you’ll see it served two purposes at once: it made it easier for a mother to be with her child, while also allowing her to keep up with the group.
