For every parenting problem - real or imagined - there's now an app or gadget that's supposed to help.
But for journalist Sophie Brickman, parenting devices did just the opposite: "I found that they just kind of ramped my anxiety up to 11.”
She contemplates the collision of technology and parenthood in the new book Baby, Unplugged: One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age.
Photo: Hessam Nabavi
Photo: supplied
Sophie tells Jesse Mulligan that she came across some outrageous gadgets during her research for Baby, Unplugged, including designer breast-pumps and self-rocking bassinets
Paediatricians she spoke to were sceptical about the need for any of these, including devices that monitor a child's vital signs.
“I got very close with my kids' paediatrician over the course of this book, he's actually a character in it. I called him up when this [monitoring device] went off. And I said 'should I be monitoring this kind of stuff?'
“He said, ‘look we wouldn't let your baby out of the hospital if we needed to monitor these types of vitals'."
“The idea of strapping sensors onto your newborn, so that you can learn intricate things about their sleep patterns, it just seems like something taken out of an Onion headline.”
When Sophie got overwhelmed by the volume of ads spruiking babycare devices, her paediatrician again put her right.
“I asked him 'what's the single best piece of tech out there?' which is what I asked many, many people I spoke to.
"And he said 'If I went to the best minds in the world and I asked them to create something that would make kids more social, and more pleasant and more resilient and more successful later in life, they would come back with a book ... you cannot improve upon a book and sitting down and reading with your kid.”
This was a comfort to Sophie.
“[Children] don't need all this input that tech gives them and actually it's much better for them to be in a quiet environment reading, playing with analogue toys, that's the real good stuff for them, that's where the magic happens.”
Social media has also unleashed a torrent of parenting information that can be overwhelming to navigate, she says.
“I became a member of a Facebook group for mothers before I had my baby. And it was very interesting to watch, I never had the balls to participate, but I watched a lot.
“And there's a lot of information out there. And the best piece of advice I got about that was from a friend of mine, who has kids that are slightly older than mine, so she's just a little bit ahead of the curve to me, and she said ‘just pick a rabbi’.
“And what she meant was pick one person, two people, to go to for your information.”
Just as there are plenty of electronic devices available for parents, children’s toys, too, are going hi-tech, Sophie says, and these are best avoided.
Baby, Unplugged focuses on kids aged zero to five, and at that age simple toys are best, she says.
“You can see kids telling you this when you agonise over what toy to get them for a birthday gift, and then all they want to do is play with the box that it came in.”
Parents do well to encourage this simple imaginative capacity in their children, Sophie says.
“Their ability to turn a box into a spaceship or a Ford or just sit in it and pretend … that imagination is really, really critical to childhood development.”
