Humanity also “got by” with high rates of disease and infant mortality.
Reducing real risk— keeping kids safe-- matters. There are degrees to this, of course, and people will disagree about what is reasonable, but just because the species has survived up to this point is a dumb way to shame people for being careful and observant.
Baby cameras are amazing and apparently something you haven’t given much thought to since you’re glomming them into a group with motion sensors (huh?) and wipe warmers (wtf?). When my daughter wakes up in the middle of the night crying, I can check if she’s puked and needs some help or if she’s just a little upset and needs to calm herself down. It’s a convenience, sure, but it’s also a tool for helping me to help her be more self reliant.
If I didn’t have an (audio-only) monitor sitting right next to the bed, I wouldn’t be able to hear my kids when they wake in the night, even though they’re right down the hall. Even sleeping with both our door and their doors open.
How do you know they haven’t had this monitor since the kid was a baby, and have just continued to use it since? We keep the monitor in our 3 year old’s room right now, because she is too scared to get up and come into our room in the middle of the night, so this way we can actually hear her when she wakes up.
I tried, I really did, to tell the difference between types of cries for both of my kids. I never could get the knack for it, despite other people saying they could do it with their kids.
It’s not just “I don’t want to get out of bed” in many cases - if you’re trying to teach your kid to be better at self-soothing, and you can’t tell the difference between cries, a video monitor actually would come in handy (because going in means that they’re not going to self soothe. They’re going to want YOU to soothe them instead, as soon as they see you). I wish I’d had one with my eldest, simply because he was a vomit machine, and would often make himself sick. So trying to figure out if he was crying but would self-soothe, or if he was crying and had caused himself to silently vomit everywhere, would have been greatly helped by having a video monitor.
tl;dr version of my post: hey, everybody’s parenting styles are different. Who the fuck cares?
Well I type corrected… and feel very lucky I have always been able to wake right up for certain noises and doubly lucky the kid never woke up in the night for vomit…
RatWoman is roughly six weeks pregnant. And roughly is the right word. She always gets a lot of morning sickness, but this time she’s a puking machine.
We gave one of those Teddy Ruxpin robotic teddy bears to our Niece. Eventually the plastic covering on the snout came off and the fur was peeling off. Revealing the metal terminator like infrastructure, the eyes also rolled back inside the head… The cassette player that controlled the voice and movements started sticking…slowing down and speeding up.
So, teddy would do this demon voice and mouth the words with it’s exposed steel snout and eyeless blinking eyes.
My Sister told me about this when she found Teddy in the closet covered with clothes— “Teddy Scares me now”.
What exactly is your objection here? That there’s a use of technology that makes parenting small children a little easier and helps parents get some sleep at night?
Are you raising your kids with cloth nappies and sleeping in a yurt or something?
Us too. The 3 yo is the youngest of our three. Currently they are all sleeping in the same room because they like it, and if one of them wakes up we can get in there like ninjas and extract them before it becomes a party.
Amen to this. RatBoy the Elder (4.5 y/o) is very apt to wake up his younger brother if he’s awake and bored. It’s even worse when my grandson stays over, as he often does. And once they’re all awake, we may as well get up and make the coffee, 'cause sleepy time is over. None of them ever goes back to sleep, they’ll be cranky the next day, and nap time is no fun at all.
