Human (Māori) settlement in my country (Aotearoa | New Zealand; ANZ) around 800 years ago resulted in some burning of forests, inadvertent species extinctions, and introduction of flora and fauna that had not been here before. European colonisation some 650 years later resulted in massive deforestation, masses of unintentional species extinctions, and unfettered introduction of flora and fauna resulting in ongoing threats to native forests and birds.
European colonisation has also left injuries on those people who were here first – known locally as tangata whenua (people of the land). Colonisers showed complete disregard for patterns of traditional food gathering and land allocation, while actively suppressing Māori culture, language, and healing knowledge.
Descriptions of traditional Māori caregiving behaviours (Jenkins & Mountain Harte, 2011) align with those as defined within the Evolved Developmental Niche (Narvaez et al., 2013). Rather than the colonisers learning and adapting, these childrearing models were eschewed in favour of the enforced belief system of the Victorian colonisers. It was a time of ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’, where the difference between discipline and abuse may have simply been the frequency of physical punishments (Rayner, 2008).
While some of the hangovers of our colonial past have been redressed – for example, physical punishment of children is no longer legally allowed (Debski et al., 2009) – other tensions remain. For example, Census data reveals that merely 4% of the total ANZ population speak te reo (the Māori language); (Statistics New Zealand, 2024). Colonisation leaves a long shadow.
As if that were not worrisome enough, here I argue that there is a fresh wave of colonisation underway, of particular importance to infant mental health. The current technological movement – in which for-profit agents deliberately take our attention and harvest our data – can be understood as digital colonisation, recognised as a particular menace to those of us in the global south (Kwet, 2019).
People’s ubiquitous use of smartphones and their affordances have led to habits which have reduced our attention spans (Zimmerman et al., 2023), and contributed to a “cognitive miserliness” (p. 473) in which we outsource thinking to our devices (Barr et al., 2015). Our collective experiences with technology, especially social media, point to an uptick in mistrust of public health agencies and experts of all kinds (Schluter et al., 2023), and this perhaps includes such organisations as WAIMH. All of this is occurring within an extractive economy in which people and their families are the product (Birch et al., 2021). With these colonisers, it is not our slow-growth forests being pillaged, but our data, and our attention.
For parents of infants, the fracturing of attention means that smartphone use during caregiving is associated with reduced maternal sensitivity (Tharner et al., 2022). This lessens the likelihood of a parent’s ability to respond to an infant’s cues in a timely and comforting manner. Use of the smartphone during infant care is an example of ‘technoference’, a phenomenon in which technology use interferes with in-person relationships. For infants, parental technoference has negative associations for relational health (Golds et al., 2025), language development (Corkin et al., 2021) and socioemotional regulation (Lederer et al., 2022). The digital colonisers extend their influence into our every waking hour, without regard for whether infants are present or not.
In the case of new parents, whose need for support, information, and reassurance is both legitimate and understandable, the evolutionary mismatch being exploited by social media platforms (Sbarra et al., 2019) and the persuasive design strategies being used by big tech (Fogg, 2009) point to the scale of this challenge. For an individual family grouping, it becomes increasingly difficult to live peacefully without the influence of the colonisers – be they those arriving by boat in the 19th Century, or those traveling on undersea cables and wireless networks today.
Colonisers have long understood the need to assert influence in even the most intimate arenas, with writing from 1905 declaring it “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings that the strength … (of) first rate Imperialism … is ordained” (Macnamara, 1905, p. 248). Thus, it may be unsurprising that smartphone use during the intimate care routine of feeding is common (Nomkin & Gordon, 2021). This colonial overreach risks displacing opportunities for shared gaze, insightful wondering, and grooming touch, as smartphone use stills the faces of caregivers (Stockdale et al., 2020), creates a state of “absent presence” (Aagard, 2016, p. 223), and busies the hands of the parent during infant feeding (McCaleb, 2024).
Meanwhile, the very timing of that feeding routine may be predicated on the instruction of a parent’s smartphone, due to the rise of so-called ‘baby tracking apps’ (Pangrazio et al., 2025). These tell a new parent when to feed a baby, and when to put them to bed, inviting artificial intelligence (AI) to circumvent an insightful serve-and-return interaction. Tracking apps even tell a nursing mother which side she should use this time, risking a damping down of her bodily awareness, or interoception.
Given the relationship between maternal interoception and sensitivity to infants’ physiological and emotional states (Suga et al., 2022), the commercialised confidence as offered by tracking apps risks weakening a new parent’s emerging skills to join their baby in attuned, bespoke, caregiving choreography. This algorithmic imperialism poses risks to the optimal functioning of the dyad.
Further, in an example of the power of digital colonisation, I cite an otherwise excellent working paper recently co-published by the Australian Government titled “Baby Apps: Mapping the issues” (Langton, 2024). While it raises salient points about data security, feminist tensions, and digital childhoods as relates to menstruation, fertility, and baby tracking apps – it is silent in considering the impact of such apps on the subjective experience of the infant, on parent-child relationships, or on child development. I suggest that even those of us with concerns about the unfettered use of baby apps also live under a system of digital colonisation and cannot account for every issue – let alone map them all.
The popularity of baby tracking apps is just one example of technochauvinism, a term coined by Madeleine Broussard (2019), which describes a belief that a technological solution is superior to an analog – or human – solution. In this case, the confidence and assurances as projected by a baby-tracking app are sold as being preferable to learning to read an individual baby’s cues for tiredness and hunger, and responding to them.
This move toward parenting a ‘datafied’ child (Lupton & Williamson, 2017) creates opportunities for the digital colonisers to commodify parental vulnerability. In one example, a new mother describes being inundated with advertisements following an online search: “…sleep doctors and this sleep guru and this is the system and they’ve all got a price tag to it” (McCaleb, 2024, p. 195).
Meanwhile, those who use period trackers are participating in a so-called ‘FemTech’ industry (McMillan, 2024), said to be worth more than US$50 billion by 2025. Gilman (2021) writes, “these profits do not flow to menstruators, rather, they enrich private businesses” (p. 101 ), another example of extraction by the offshore digital colonisers. Further, such apps can predict a pregnancy and share this information with third-party advertisers even before the app’s user knows they are pregnant (Mascheroni & Siibak, 2021). Thus, they may be targeted with promotion of products and services for pregnancy and parenthood even before they have lived experiences of either stage. This may include free versions of the aforementioned tracking apps, even as such apps can “contribute to feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt” (Hall et al., 2023, p. 1).
This is not the only way that technochauvinism impedes on new parenthood. Babies can be rocked by mechanical swings which are cued by the sounds of babies’ distress (Kumar et al., 2022), while elsewhere researchers describe an “automated carer room” (Srividhya et al., 2023, p. 412) doing away with the apparent inconvenience of infant care altogether.
The digital colonisers seem to see babies as a problem to be solved, and as such seem to disrespect the social synapse – the relational space between people (Siegel, 2020), or as we in the South Pacific may call it: the va (Muliaumaseali’i, 2020). The problems that trackers, rockers, and automated carers set out to solve with purchasable commodities and downloadable solutions are only problems because of the loneliness and isolation of so many new parents.
It is an unfortunate irony that the ways people lived in this country before European colonisation (collectively, where a new mother would be surrounded by kin and non-kin, helping her as she became used to her new role) would have made them less susceptible to the wiles of today’s digital colonisers. Non-western knowledge systems are not the only thing at risk in a system which uses algorithmic asymmetry to tilt thinking, with the code underpinning the tech we use every day written within a “tech bro culture of mirrortocracy” (Nguyen, 2021, p. 17).
The colonisers’ enactors – those who write the code and enforce the imperial algorithms that keep us distracted (Thomas & Wilson, 2024) – are overwhelmingly male, and by no means represent all the cultures of the world. Americanisation of media and technology leads to children affecting accents during play, and word processing software which longs for me to use this spelling: decolonization. Further, given that they enforce a business model which demands attention above all else, while requiring no ethics training from their coders (Dash, 2018), biases are inevitable, and undeclared.
Those of us who understand the value of responsive caregiving on infant mental health must take seriously our role as the filter between the extractive economy of the digital coloniser, and our babies. For us lies the challenge of attempting to embrace the useful aspects of the colonisers’ offerings (be they hot running water or rapid communication) although we cannot control the negative and unavoidable effects on the other side of the ledger. Such negativities include historical examples like influenza on an unexposed population, as well as contemporary challenges such as technoference. Today’s families must raise their babies in an era of normalised smartphone use, where they encounter gameified and addictive affordances on a daily basis. Infant care occurs under the gaze of the shiny overlords held in the palms of our hands, where the developmental stakes are high, and the distraction is deliberate.
Such a climate is especially challenging for the altricial infant, who is especially vulnerable to the harms of colonisation. Writing in 1820, before mass settlement by British colonisers, the missionary Samuel Marsden observed: “There can be no finer children than those of the New Zealanders. Their parents are very indulgent, and they appear also happy, and playful, and very active.” (Marsden & Elder, 1932, p. 283). Knowing the injustices inflicted on Māori by the Victorian colonisers, and the challenges foisted upon all of us by the digital colonisers, it is questionable whether such descriptions would still apply.
Note: The author is a Pākehā New Zealander, of European ancestry. The author identifies as tangata tiriti, that is: belonging to this land because of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840).
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Authors
McCaleb, Miriam
Aotearoa | New Zealand; ANZ
