monitors - good or evil?
We have been given a set of baby monitors by a colleague of him indoors and I have mixed feelings about them. Even now, before the little one is born, I am scared of the possibility of cot death. We are getting a new mattress for the cot and I’ve got one for the moses basket. We will be following all the guidelines for the baby sleeping in our room for the first six months and to be honest I think co-sleeping might be a good thing, at least they are right there with you, but I guess that has to be balanced with the increased risk of rolling onto them. I think you would have to be pretty tired or dead drunk for that to happen. I mean, how tired can you get with a new baby? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
I saw Billy Connolly doing stand up once where he talked about their baby monitor. He said they would put the baby to bed and you would hear them making all the usual baby noises and then suddenly it would go absolutely silent. It was as if the baby was holding it’s breath. He would then start to worry about the baby and as the silence continued the panic would rise and he’d get up and go towards the door to go upstairs but as soon as he got across the room they’d burble and the panic would be over. This would go on all evening but apparently the panic goes on for a lifetime! He tells it much better, if anyone knows of a link to the bit I’d love to know so I can add it here, it is very funny.
To cope with this parental paranoia the manufacturers have now come up with ubermonitors. They are mats that you put under the sleeping baby that can tell if your baby is breathing or not. This then fires a signal to a monitor which alerts the parents. Now I love the idea of this, but I also can see that it’s a noose around your neck. I can imagine parents getting web cams and setting them up as well as this monitor to make sure their baby is alive and breathing. They are clearly the same parents who hide webcams in teddies to spy on the nanny! It just feeds the paranoia but provides some peace of mind at the same time. The dilemma – if you did lose your baby to cot death and you didn’t have the monitor would you spend a lifetime regretting not buying it?
The information surrounding cot death is a bit of a nightmare for me. How many blankets? What if I use too many blankets? What if the room is the wrong temperature? Do I need a mattress made of natural materials? Will having a mattress covered with that material with silver in it to ward off germs be safer? What if I fall asleep with my baby on the sofa? (Highly likely it would seem.) No wonder parents to be look shellshocked half the time, all these questions and no real answers from the scientists. People dropping bombs of information into your brain and there is no way to evaluate it properly.
I think I’m going to stick with my traditional reused ears only baby monitor and keep everything crossed that I’m doing right.
More info on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome here.
