Like every other American parent, I have used a baby monitor.
We also used the other kind for the twins, the ones that monitor heartrate and breathing, and notify you when your little one is turning blue.
If you want, I can give you a short course in that happy experience, including the joy of middle of the night false alarms.
I used one and loved it, not only because I could hear her if she needed me and I was downstairs, but also because I loved listening to her coo and sing.
I still do listen, but she’s louder now so I can hear her well from the living room.
Kid’s got pipes I tell ya!
The Butlers have one for the Butlerette.
We use it mostly when the baby is upstairs in her room, and we’re downstairs doing something else.
Very useful, as it’s easier to get the baby before she’s been crying hard for 20 minutes trying to get our attention. Much less soothing required to comfort a just woken baby, as opposed to an upset baby.
That is really fun. I remember when DangerGirl was learning to talk and we could hear her practicing in bed…“Mommy Daddy apple apple Grandma!”
We use one with our 3 month old daughter. For the first 4 weeks after she was born, we were staying at my in-laws house and had her sleeping in a bassinet in our room. She kept us awake with every little murmer and grunt through the night (and we probably kept her awake by forever picking her up to comfort her when she probably didn’t really need it.)
Back in our own house, she sleeps in her own bedroom. We can’t hear her until she is into full cry so we use the monitor, which was a gift from a family friend. The monitor is not so close to her that we can hear her breathing, but we can hear her waking up and getting grizzly before she is too distraught.
Since we’ve been in our own house she has been sleeping between 8 and 12 hours through the night. One of our theories is that it’s because we aren’t keeping each other awake all night. Another is that she has just settled into a nice sleeping routine because she is older.
The McNewlettes are 2 and 4 and we still have one in each of their rooms, and use them every night. We keep the receiver units in the kitchen, one level down from their bedrooms and 2 levels up from the TV room. It helps us hear them when we’re down there watching TV, in case they’re calling us, or coughing/puking/choking/crying, or whatever. When we go to bed, we can hear them better through the monitors than we can through the door, even though our rooms are right next to each other. It’s comforting to hear their two different breathing/snoring patterns when we’re falling asleep.
And in the morning, we love listening to them chattering away to themselves or their stuffed animals.
That’s a different kind of monitor, an apnea monitor. Basically, it keeps track of the baby’s breathing rate and oxygenation level (and sometimes heart rate) and an alarm goes off if they fall below a preset level.
Problem is, they give a LOT of false alarms, and more and more false alarms the bigger and wigglier the baby gets. The hospital WhyBaby was in hardly ever sends parents home with apnea monitors anymore, because the false alarms cause too much stress AND the monitors cause complacency - which both lead to worse patient care in the long run.
I thought for sure we’d get one for WhyBaby - she stopped breathing a lot. Dozens of times a day, her monitors were ringing in the hospital, to the point where we no longer ran to her side when it went off, we’d just wait a few seconds and see if it stopped. Still, she was legitimately not breathing several times a day and needed to be stimulated to breathe again. When they told me no monitor at home, I freaked out. They assured me she would “grow out of it” before she was sent home. And she did. One day, the tide just turned and no more not breathing. Three days later, she came home with no monitor! It was a brain stem immaturity thing. When her brain stem matured on schedule at 37 weeks “gestation”, she no longer had apnea.
(We spent the first few nights awake, staring at her and poking her to make sure she was still breathing.)
In answer to the other question, yes we used a monitor for WhyKid when we lived in a split-level ranch and his room was in the basement. We have a monitor now that travels with us to other houses, but we don’t use it at home in our teeny apartment. It’s great for parties, though, where I can put her to bed in a friend’s spare room and be social without worry.
The only thing I wish I could find is a monitor where **all **the units run on batteries, for camping. All the ones I can find are AC on the baby’s end. Anyone know of one?
I have never used a baby monitor for my kids.
I did, however, have the opportunity to mess with someone who has. One fine day in an Army post very near Hinesville, GA I was performing a routine system check on my collection & jamming radio gear. Did some scanning and picked up a baby crying. On the radio. Crying & crying & crying. My partner & figured it must be a baby monitor. And where the hell was mamma with the baby crying like that? As a joke, just in case she was listening and ignoring the kid anyway, we broadcast a brief intrusion on the same frequency suggesting mamma come in here and check on this kid. A few seconds later we could hear mamma calming down the baby. Another domestic victory against child neglect, all thanks to the US Army.
We had just bought a used monitor at a yard sale about 30 minutes before I went into labor with our first child. It was definitely the best $5 (or maybe $10–but this was in 1991) we ever spent.
We lived in a small one-bedroom apartment at the time, but had already signed a contract for a larger two-bedroom apartment. After we moved, we found the monitor very handy for times when the baby was asleep, but we wanted to sit out in front of the apartment to read or study. We also had next-door neighbors (in the same hallway, and not any farther away than a room in the same house) that we would have dinner with sometimes, and the monitor let us listen for the baby when we weren’t in the apartment.
When we finally moved into a three-bedroom apartment, the monitor was VERY nice to have. By that time, we had child #2, who was VERY quiet and virtually never cried. We needed the monitor to pick up the small noises that he did make when he woke up in the middle of the night or at the end of a nap. When he was three, he broke his leg and ended up in a body cast. The monitor let him call us when he needed us, regardless of where we were in the apartment.
We also brought the monitor with us to grandparents’ houses, so that we wouldn’t have to keep climbing up and down stairs to check on the baby during naps.
We used baby monitors for both The Man-Cub and The Fem-Bot. In addition to living in a two-floor apartment ( how cool is that?? ) , we used to love sitting out front in the warm summer evening air. If one of said kids was asleep, why the battery-operated monitor did the trick nicely.
As pointed out, it also helped when the t.v. was on. I saw one once, after our kids were kinda past that stage, that had two LED’s on them. The smaller one was red, when the unit was on. The larger one flashed when it detected sound. Cool- a visual monitor for when the t.v. is really cranked up. Or for hearing-impaired parents, which I suspect was the original intent. Cite
Make sure you can switch channels. Like a cordless phone that lets you listen in on the neighbor boy’s love-talk with his paramour, the only thing more distressing than hearing your own baby cry is crossing channels and hearing the baby two doors down crying on your monitor.
Cartooniverse
I used ours for about two nights after our son came home.
I could hear every gurgle, burp and fart through that thing and didn’t sleep.
I returned it to the store and I can still hear the kids snore and talk in their sleep (which is why I, the near mono eared person, sleep with a pillow on my head.)
I think the more technology invades our parenting lifestyle, the more paranoid parents become and don’t trust their instincts.
My dad bought one for us when my son was born. We used it more as an intercom system and to mess with the dogs than for its intended use.
I mostly agree with this. I guess I can see it’s usefulness when you’re so far away from the baby that you can’t hear them wailing. I however, was not fortunate enough to have an apartment that big. We lived in each other’s laps for the first year.
I’d have to be pretty damn far away to not be able to hear a screaming baby, though. REALLY far. That size place is simply not in the budget for this middle class family.
My kids are 3 (girl) and 5 (boy), and I use a ‘baby’ monitor.
One receiver is in the basement (which is living space) and one is in my bedroom. My house is quite large, and if I were in the basement, I’d never hear them.
The occassional nightmare…or illness…it helps to be able to hear nothing sometimes. Just knowing they are okay, and not choking or coughing violently.
