[C4EMD] Chapter Five

[Note: This is the fifth chapter of my 2017 book, Cybertraps for Expecting Moms & Dads. It is available to paid subscribers of The Cybertraps Newsletter. The Introduction and Chapter One are available to all readers.]

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that in the year 2014, there were 3,988,076 births in the United States. [5.1] That’s a pretty impressive number. But spend some time researching trends in technology and sexuality, and you really do begin to wonder exactly where all of those babies came from. There is nothing headline writers love more than to declare in bold letters that “something” has “ruined sex.” Among the leading culprits these days are: Netflix, “Game of Thrones,” binging on box sets, Spotify(?), your dog, porn, sugar, Instagram, and of course, your smartphone.

It’s a miracle we have any children at all.

The evidence is unequivocally clear that the seductive combination of technology and sex has a dark side; well, several, actually. Any one of the following tech challenges can pose problems for expecting moms and dads; taken together, they raise interesting sociological questions about the willingness or, in some cases, even the ability of millennials to choose parenthood over the endless pursuit of new Twitter and Instagram followers and rare Pokémon Go characters.