Parenting in the digital age

Parenting today, I learned when I had my first child 16 months ago, reaps many benefits from the digital age. I order most of my diapers and supplies from Amazon, and they show up a day later. No more panicked night trips to the store. The Internet has made the pricing of all sorts of items very competitive. And I have instant digital access to my daughter’s medical records, immunizations and weight charts.
It’s tempting, then, to make the mental leap from “Hey, I can order diapers whenever I need them!” to “Technology can solve all of our problems!” And it’s just this kind of utopian thinking — that new gadgets can somehow soothe many of the most long-standing parenting problems and anxieties — that seems to be behind the latest wave of high-tech baby products that bring the “Internet of Things” into the nursery.
The result? Countless efforts to improve upon what is already good enough. Instead of diapers that leak less, companies create diapers with wireless-enabled moisture sensors or even those that — at a price 30 to 40 percent more than traditional disposable diapers — will test your baby’s urine for all sorts of health indicators. There’s the Baby Gigl, a bottle sleeve that monitors how much your baby drinks and tracks it in an app, alerts you if the bottle is clogged (though I would guess your baby would be the first to let you know that), and signals the proper angle to hold the bottle so your baby doesn’t gulp too much air, promising that this “prevents colic.” The sleeve, which will cost around $100 whenever it hits the retail market, compared with $6 or $7 for the low-tech glass bottles that used to be the priciest you could buy, is made to fit larger-than-normal bottles, and it needs three batteries to run. Then there’s the Pacif-i electronic pacifier and the Intel Smart Clip, which alerts you when you forget your baby in the car. These gadgets managed to drum up plenty of press coverage when they were shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
The merger of the Internet of Things with baby gear — or the Internet of Babies — is not a positive development. The mind-set of a first-time parent can be summed up as: terror. When you leave the hospital with a fragile newborn, all the horrible “what if?” scenarios suddenly seem very likely, and parenting books either don’t go far enough in calming those fears or they exacerbate them, naming hundreds of ailments your baby will almost certainly never suffer from. So you worry. In the first few weeks of our daughter’s life, her father and I fretted about whether her room was too cold or too hot, whether she was getting enough to eat, whether she had jaundice, whether she was wetting enough diapers (a lack of urine is a sign of jaundice!), whether she was pooping enough, whether the color and consistency of the poop was good or bad, whether she was breathing oddly. When she slept loudly, we worried that she wasn’t sleeping well; when she slept silently, we wondered if she had died.
The greatest source of stress, though, was SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome, which, for reasons unknown, kills about 3,500 sleeping babies under the age of 1 in the United States each year, making it the No. 1 cause of death for infants. The numbers have been halved since the 1994 introduction of the “Back to Sleep” campaign by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which laid out a few simple guidelines to make sudden death less likely. Parents are now routinely told by doctors and nurses to put their babies to sleep on their backs; don’t use blankets or pillows; don’t leave toys in the crib; make sure the room the baby sleeps in isn’t too hot. Of course, a nefarious range of high-tech baby products has emerged to stoke these fears. New parents, after all, are easy targets. Several manufacturers have devised pads to be placed under a sleeping baby to monitor his movements and alert you if he hasn’t moved for a while.