If a baby cried and no one was there to hear it, did it make a sound? Whether or not you’re into ethical conundrums, there was a time before baby monitors when cries went unheard, and baby was alright.

This was before parenting and technology met in 1937 with the invention of the first baby monitor, prophetically named “The Zenith Radio Nurse.” The monitor, designed by Isamu Noguchi and revered in the art world,  is said to emulate an “abstracted human head, the eponymous surrogate nurse.” Almost a century later, baby monitor tech has far exceeded the Zenith receiver-transmitter set-up (like a wireless intercom), but the idea of the surrogate nurse endures.

One devastating event in 1932 led to the monitor’s invention, when an aviator’s 20-month-old son was abducted and later found dead. A parent’s nightmare brought to life, this story caused Eugene McDonald, President of The Zenith Radio Corporation to commission the first baby monitor for his own daughter's protection, to be installed in her room.

The monitor has come a long way since. NYMag’s top 7 baby monitors merely skim the surface of what’s now available on the market. There are monitors that include biometric tracking, sleep tracking based on respirations per minute, two-way audio, night vision, camera panning and zoom capabilities. These SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) methods of tracking and sensing are then interpreted into analytics and results, and delivered to the absent parent’s smartphone. All information is delivered immediately, in real time, screen to screen. The systems, like the Zenith radio nurse, substitute a parent’s presence.

As indicated by this 2022 Vantage Market Research report on The Global Baby Monitor Market, “Increasing Digitalization and Increasing Use of Advanced Technologies Drives the Market” - that’s why we’re seeing a surplus of robotic nurse products that are far beyond the scope of the 1937 transmitter / receiver Noguchi model.

The online blog My Baby Nursery calls the monitor a “life-saving device that can pass off as an assistant robotic parent.” There’s obvious bias as this blog is a site for parents, but language like this shows us how tied monitoring has become to parenting, “the baby monitor has become a device in which parents are practically expected to own,” the blogger states.

For those like me who aren’t parents, the way parents talk about monitors, at least online and in the media, feels creepy. With clickbait headlines like “Mum urged to 'call a priest' after daughter's creepy behaviour on baby monitor” and Buzzfeed’s “7 Creepy Baby Monitor Stories that Will Terrify All Parents,” baby gear seems Orwellian; not the products themselves necessarily, but the ways in which parents watch like Big Brother. Black Mirror’s ‘ArkAngel’ episode is an extreme yet imaginable scenario of what can go wrong with too much parental supervision. The show, like Orwell’s work, frightens us with the possibility of dystopian surveillance culture becoming the reality of tomorrow. Or today? Technology blurs that timeline.

In a 2014 New York Times article, writer Jennifer Saranow Schultz critically examines the over-watchfulness of monitors. According to Dr. Judith Owens, Director of Sleep Medicine at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, “‘if children ‘are old enough to recognize that they are being watched on the video monitor, then it’s probably time to stop.’” When searching for the recommended age to stop using monitors, the answers and ages are inconclusive. In this way, blogs like My Baby Nursery prove more prolific than research-driven reports. One of the only comprehensive non-parenting blog sources, was this Huffpost article which right away tells you “there are no hard and fast rules” citing nurse and pediatric sleep consultant Katie DiMonico of Bee Wise Sleep Consulting who throws out the age of 4 as the cut off, adding ambiguously, “at least until they’re old enough to leave the room for assistance during the night if they need it.” Maternetie.com also lands on age four, when the child is “aware of being watched at that point” or “[has] fully adjusted to sleep in their own bed.”

Many parents keep on monitoring far after their children become ambulatory. At that point, you can’t even call it a baby monitor, it’s just a monitor.

Online blogs and market analyses are largely biased and industry-driven to push products. I turned to the reddit communities r/babybumps and r/beyondthebump to hear opinions about monitors from both sides - those who monitor and those who don’t. Within a few hours, I had 100 opinionated parents’ responses from very divided camps - “the wifi users and the non-wifi users,” “audio only vs. audio/visual,” etc. Many parents talked about the comforts of having an eye and ear on their baby at all times. One commenter shares, “it’s nice to be able to sleep comfortably knowing that I will hear her if there’s something wrong. There’s also a ton of cute moments I got to see on the monitor, mainly different ways she sleeps & when she starts standing up & listening to her talk to herself.” The undercurrent of many comments was that most of the time, the monitor is for the parent’s peace of mind or entertainment, not for the baby.

Parents are not an unbiased audience. They apply their own thoughts and judgments to the baby scenes they behold, and it’s human nature, when perceiving, to lead with judgments. Yet in moments that might have been private, like when babies begin to “babble,”  there is now something detecting that sound and conveying it to the (always) listener. A noise, or babble, suddenly attaches itself to meaning. Although monitors are meant to aid and assist, like the initial Zenith robotic nurse, they seem to function as more of an alert system more than anything else.

Baby babbling, — an actual term used to describe the stage in infancy when babies experiment with language acquisition — is a different kind of baby talk which is often decoded. Do we always need to extract meaning? Couldn’t these sounds just be passive noises, needing no attention at all? Not every meow indicates a need, not every babble is a signal. With babbling and squirming, it seems there is room for misinterpretation and false alarms.

Reddit-er HailTheCrimsonKing disagrees with the idea that there is something to “interpret” when you monitor, “You don’t really interpret [baby noises]…There isn’t really different cries for different needs. There is no space for misinterpretation. They all do the same job: alert parents when baby is crying.”

You can spend a lot of time and energy trying to understand what something or someone means. Monitors, for many parents, fulfills a very basic purpose, one that seems fundamental to parenting - to know what’s going on. The devices provide incessant analytics, notifications, alerts and pings. These are meant to help parents be “better” parents by keeping watch and preventing harm.  But it seems like communication, understanding, and agency are missing from many of these conversations in product reviews, reddit forums, and parenting blogs. You can’t rely on a monitor, Walkie Talkie or Bluetooth robot to be a good parent, being a good parent might have a lot more to do with understanding than surveilling, and considering the ubiquity of baby monitors, it seems we are mistaking parenting for surveilling.

A few commenters swear by the CuboAi smart monitor products, ranging from $200-$500.

The CuboAi is mainly a tracker, with motion detection, sleep analytics, 18+ hour playback, temperature humidity detection, and built-in lullabies featuring the recognizable “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” alongside generic ringtone-like options like “Gentle Music Box Medley.”

A feature called “Danger Zone Detection,” is enough to invoke fear in anyone. On CuboAi’s site, this page is dedicated to “Babies Saved by CuboAi,” featuring images and stories of baby’s faces being covered, risking airway blockage. Here’s the fear-mongering language and imagery that fuels reddit comments like, “Overprotective? Yes. Overpriced? Yes. Do I care? No. She's my only child and I want her safe.”

Although there are many enthusiastic baby gear proponents that may as well double as brand ambassadors, I was surprised to find many “no tech zone,” parent enthusiasts too.

“I’m generally of the mentality that if our grandparents didn’t need it, we probably don’t either,” comments BB_Forever. Parents like this bring us back to the issue of surveillance and privacy. For some, weariness of monitors is more about a fear of hackers and privacy than anything concerning their child’s health.

“Mine & my husband’s big concern about the other audio/video monitors is that someone will be able to hack them & watch or talk to the kids that way,” shares Alley9150 on the same reddit thread.

Another commenter shows that many parents lie in the middle of these extremes of pro- or anti- baby tech, “We did low tech in general. We were just trying to avoid all the gimmicky consumerist crap we didn’t need. We did use a monitor, but it was one of the old school $15 audio monitors.”

From a behavioral standpoint, it’s helpful to look towards neuroscience and psychology to understand links between development and technology. Yet I was hard  d to find studies available online that demonstrate the links between SMART baby monitors and child development, particularly in the early-stages of language development. You will find posts with concerns about hacking and the effects of electromagnetic exposure and radiation, but no conclusive accessible reporting on long-term lingual or health effects, yet. It will be interesting to monitor how the scientific field chases increasingly SMART baby tech. As usual, technology, bolstered by marketing and consumerism precedes and overshadows science and fact.

The question remains, does the “surrogate nurse,” then in the material form of Noguchi’s bakelite and cellulose acetate, now in the “smartened” form of plastic (hidden in the product specs of models like the CuboAi), do a good job? Does the soothing of a device’s radio transmission, in lieu of a parent’s touch and croon, succeed? And succeed in what? In terms of monitoring, yes. The surrogate nurse checks all the boxes, but has baby monitoring, framed as a “necessity” by much of the parenting corner of the internet, become an excessive compulsion at the behest of paranoid parents? Remember, Zenith’s Eugene Macdonald, commissioned the first model out of fear, so as these devices become smarter, are they feeding off of parental instincts of fear? Until more research is conducted and publicly available linking child development and SMART baby monitoring, the product will continue to appease (not necessarily resolve) the parental instinct of fear. It remains to be seen, if monitoring every babble and breath, is the most beneficial to the market, the parent, or baby.