Feeding
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Read more »The 2am feed is one of the loneliest hours in a household with a small baby. The lights are off, the partner is asleep, the baby is latched, and the parent on duty has thirty to forty minutes to fill while staying awake and reasonably alert. The phone is the obvious companion, and what new parents do on that phone has shifted in the past two years. Scrolling Instagram is still common, but a meaningful and quiet segment of the new-parent audience now spends part of those night feeds on random video chat platforms, talking briefly to strangers in other time zones who are also awake at hours no one else is.
This is not a moral judgment. It is a description of what is actually happening on the user base of major random video chat services after midnight. The platforms have known about this segment for years and have started designing around it. The new-parent audience is older than the typical user, calmer than the typical user, and more likely to use the platforms for brief conversation rather than anything more elaborate.
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Read more »Becoming a new parent is filled with many joys, yet it also brings new levels of exhaustion. Those early days with a newborn are a tired blur of feedings every 2-3 hours, round-the-clock care, and seemingly endless diaper changes.
