Now you can know everything about your baby at any time. An expectant parent of a certain type – who has money and has used benzodiazepines, or maybe just restless – will be dazed with the options.
Consider the $300 “dream sock,” back on sale after a hitch with the FDA, that latches onto your baby and transmits numbers to your smartphone — numbers like “110 beats per minute” seen from baby’s small heart and “97% average O2” for air inhaled by baby’s small lungs and distributed into baby’s small bloodstream. You can rent the Snoo, a popular crib that sparkles when your baby beeps, with different intensities depending on the nature of that beep. It transmits other health tracking numbers to your mobile device; Snoo rocked my child with level 3 vibes for 25 minutes last night, you will say to yourself, and seriously too. Many parents will use an app to analyze the color of poop (you can usually rest easy, even when it’s green) and a smart thermometer that stays affixed to the armpit for up to 24 hours.
And any modern parent worth their salt in stress ulcers will buy a baby monitor to keep an eye on the nursery. A far cry from the radio gear you might remember from your own childhood, many of the most popular models now connect to cameras and come with a standalone display; some have artificial intelligence that will recognize when your baby’s face is covered by a foreign object or when the baby has coughed. (“When the cough detection alert is on,” the one-brand app explains, the monitor “will send alerts with a short video of the baby coughing.”) As my wife and I approached the arrival of our first child in February, we decided to keep this technological intervention at least modest: Just night vision and live video for us, thanks.
Anxiety followed, of course the tide pulls the sand. A baby camera demands attention, even when nothing is happening, and that attention leads me to spot little things that could be wrong. Is my baby breathing or not? I can’t see his arm; could he have fallen into Merlin’s magical sleepsuit? My mother told me a story, hopefully apocryphal, that my grandparents put my uncle in a cold oven when he cried as a baby, to minimize the noise. Now I worry when my nine-month-old son hasn’t changed his position on the video feed enough. Between their generation and mine, television was invented, and I have a small portable monitor with the most engrossing and unnerving show ever.
Maybe no one asked for this advancement, but the market has a funny way of getting things done. The personal computer has entered our homes, which have become networked; then came the cell phone. Consumers have become accustomed to increasing amounts of knowledge. Nanny cams arrived for the most knowledgeable worries, and abuse news segments they captured gave everyone else an itch they wanted to scratch. Soon after, the economy supported relatively affordable cameras and displays, so companies put them together in the name of your baby’s safety. In a 2011 financial statement, VTech announced the arrival of a baby monitor capable of transmitting nine video frames per second; even its $35 budget option far exceeds that now.
I wouldn’t recommend buying, necessarily, but I’m not sure everyone really has a choice in the matter. Like many innovations sold to the anxious consumer, the baby camera presents an option you don’t really want to say no to: if you box check your sleeping baby with a quick glance, why not you? Caring for a newborn can feel like trying to keep a wad of soaked paper towels from tearing, and that’s under ideal conditions; many parents face great challenges and should not be denied any help.
Experiences will vary, of course. Romper ran the headline “Yes, your baby monitor is making your anxiety worse.” In the new yorker, Karen Russell writes: “Perhaps the most frightening thing is how quickly I got over my discomfort; I got addicted to live streaming plotless footage of our baby. And author Megan Stielstra wrote for Ruckus more than ten years ago about the baby cam as a kind of portal. A rougher example of the technology, his camera switched between two frequency channels and was thus able to connect, unexpectedly, to a neighbour’s unit of the same model: “Whenever the baby would fall asleep, I would watch his Day-Glo body on the monitor, making sure he didn’t choke – or levitate or explode or whatever horrible thing I imagine – then, assured of his safety , I’d change the channel to see how this other mother was doing. Here she found a connection that helped her through the gloom of postpartum depression, the symptoms of which, she said, can be ” as varied as the flowers in a greenhouse”.
But there is still a lingering problem with these things. Baby cameras, like any monitoring or tracking technology, provide information against which the user is wired to take action. They’re based on the idea that something could go wrong and you’ll only stop it because the device showed you the right thing at the right time. As Brian Lin, CEO of AI baby monitor company Cubo, said The Washington Post in 2020, “Fear is the fastest way to get people’s attention.” You don’t buy a monitor because of what you want to see (a baby sleeping peacefully): you buy one because of what you’re afraid to see. My colleague Adrienne LaFrance once called this new infant tracking paradigm “the nursery as NICU.”
In this context, the image of a sleeping baby can be an invitation for a wandering mind to ward off disaster. I know my baby’s arm wouldn’t just fall off, under normal circumstances. But sleep deprived, and with my attention divided between the video feed, my screaming cats and a botched enchilada, I really thought it had happened. What else could I think? Our baby camera displays the temperature of the nursery, which introduces another nerve-wracking question: If the ideal temperature for a baby’s room is between 68 and 72 degrees, what should I do with a reading of 75? My wife and I took a break The great British pastry fair to discuss exactly that for 20 minutes on Saturday night.
No parent needs the added anxiety. “Nine out of 10 times you don’t really need to do anything,” Craig Garfield, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University and a physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, told me when I called. to ask about the anxiety that can be generated by these devices. He also talked about hypervigilance, a state of constantly scanning your environment for threats and a common trait among new parents, which he says manufacturers are likely to exploit. Some things have made life better – knowing, for example, that a baby belongs in a properly configured crib, without blankets or soft things, and not in a sock drawer – “and then there are some things, I think, that made it a little more stressful…and the companies that create these things kind of play into that,” Garfield said. “Technology entering the lives of parents today often provides a excessive information without too much context or health.”
Even so, no successful business releases supply where there is no demand. For parents, fear is a certainty. You can try to overcome this fear with a device; you’ll probably just make it worse. The thrill of panic is a good reason not to buy a baby camera, and it’s exactly why you will.
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