Angela

A licensed independent clinical social worker (LICSW) in Boston, MA, Angela is about to welcome her first child. We chatted with Angela about connecting with other expectant parents using the app Peanut and the link between social media and mental health. 

Hi Angela! Can you tell us a bit about your experience with pregnancy & technology? 

When I became pregnant, I didn’t think I would really want different outlets to connect to other pregnant people. Being pregnant felt a little bit isolating for me, because I’m one of the first of my friends to begin this new stage of life. My friends are so supportive and excited about the baby, but I didn’t feel like I had people I could relate to on a personal level. I don’t remember how I found Peanut – maybe it was a targeted ad on Instagram, or someone mentioned it to me – but it functions like a dating app, only for pregnancy. You can use it to meet other expectant people or parents. I downloaded it and felt like, okay this is interesting, but I don’t know if I’ll use it that often. 

But I’ve really liked it. It’s been cool for me to feel like I’m meeting other people in similar stages of life who live in my area. Peanut shows how far along you are, your due date. So you can swipe, and if you connect, you get to have a conversation with someone. We basically talk about all things baby: How are you feeling? What are your symptoms? Have you been able to feel kicks? I connected with someone who was further along in her pregnancy so we talked about her birth experience and her needs postpartum. 

There’s a lot of fear about getting pregnancy “right”: get this vaccination. Eat this food, don’t eat that. Take these prenatal vitamins. There are so many decisions! It feels good to talk to other people who are also navigating that. Especially talking about anxiety with birth or postpartum, or navigating family dynamics with coming to visit the baby. 

Besides meeting people on the app, I find it nice to join the groups they have. For example, I’m in a group for those having babies in April 2023; there’s over 9,000 members in it. People post about different topics like weird rashes or morning sickness. It’s been so helpful to get advice and feel like these experiences are normal. I’m also in a few Facebook groups for parents in the area where I live. What I like about those groups is that there’s a lot of giving baby items away for free, helping parents find the things that they need. I’ve gotten lots of baby clothes through these groups because babies grow so fast that they only need the clothes for a few weeks.

That sounds like an incredible way to demystify what’s going on in your body – and expand accessibility for information about maternal health. 

Yes. Of course I read the books and listen to the pregnancy podcasts, but I really love to hear stories from other people; it makes it feel more real to me. Especially when I was in my first trimester, I was so sick. I can read that once I’m in my 12th week, the morning sickness will 

probably stop, but hearing other people tell me their experiences and what worked for them made me feel more connected – and like my symptoms were normal. 

As a social worker, what have you noticed about technology more broadly with the kids you work with? 

For around three years, I worked in a short-term, high risk inpatient program for children. Kids went for about two to three weeks if they were at risk to harm themselves or others. In this program, there were certainly cases where technology use was impacting our kids very negatively – I had a child who was significantly bullied on Tik Tok, his classmates were filming and posting videos of him with mean comments. Another challenge is that kids could go on Discord or Reddit and access threads about self-harm or suicidality – the encouragement of it, or learning certain tactics. 

I do know of an app that’s specifically made for kids who struggle with self harm, I think it’s called Calm Harm. There’s different activities you can do on that app, for example breathing exercises. There’s also a self-monitoring component where you can monitor if self harm is decreasing over time. 

Given your work, I’m curious how you’ve thought about parameters for your child’s technology or social media usage? 

I’m definitely thinking about it. If you work with kids, you work with their parents, right? So I provide a lot of coaching, guidance and psychoeducation to parents. With this, I think, what are the parameters for using technology? What is realistic? How much monitoring should there be? Knowing that [technology] has a big impact on kids’ mental health and well-being, don’t we want to be aware of what they’re doing online? I don’t know exactly what I’ll do because it’s a part of life, and it’s a part of a kid’s world. I don’t want to deny them technology but I think I want to be pretty mindful of it. Especially when the kids get older and have the ability to text and communicate, there should be specific parameters around that. 

Any last thoughts? 

Being pregnant is a gift and I’m so happy, but it’s also been really hard. If I didn’t have an app like Peanut I don’t know how I would connect with other pregnant women my age. Knowing that

I have people I can talk to in an unfiltered way has been really relieving for me. I’m looking forward to that continuing postpartum, where I’ll be able to stay connected with people that have kids around my child’s age.