I stopped using a baby monitor after my second baby. It gave me anxiety.

The author worried about her first baby dying of SIDS and kept a close eye on the monitor.

Technology can be a blessing and a curse. For me, a baby monitor was more of a curse.

My friends said having a high-quality monitor with a clear picture and sound was crucial for parenting. My husband and I spent hours reading reviews and debating different models before selecting one for our first daughter.

We positioned it in her nursery so that we could clearly see her as she slept or rolled around in her crib, and the monitor became a pseudo-safety blanket for me.

I would constantly check the monitor even though I could hear her cry from anywhere in the house. At night, I would leave the volume turned up high so that I could hear every rustle of her diaper and every cough, whimper, or wail despite her bedroom being mere feet from mine.

My obsession with the monitor was probably a coping mechanism due to postpartum depression and anxiety. After starting antidepressants and becoming further removed from the newborn days, I started to see that all of the checking was just fueling my anxiety and was not productive.

When my second daughter was born, I only used the monitor for a few months

I didn’t purposely set out to stop using a baby monitor with my second daughter, but I kept forgetting to charge it. As a tired new mom of two under two, it felt like too much of an effort to go up a flight of stairs to get the charger.

For a while, I used the monitor when I remembered to charge it and didn’t when I had forgotten. I felt guilty at first that I couldn’t see my youngest on the camera, but I reminded myself that my parents’ generation had relied purely on audio monitors and that I could always hear her cry. As the weeks went by, the balance of time that I had the monitor vs. not slowly dwindled until it was rare to have it on.

I realized the monitor wouldn’t help prevent SIDS

Part of my obsession with the monitor was worrying that one of my babies would die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or SIDS. I thought if I was constantly watching the screen I would be able to detect a change in my sleeping baby and be able to prevent anything bad from happening.

My husband and pediatrician helped remind me that SIDS is a silent killer. Unfortunately, babies just stop breathing, which meant unless I watched the rise and fall of my daughter’s chest every second, there would be no way to help prevent a tragedy.

With their reassurance, I realized having the monitor volume turned up at night was only negatively affecting what little sleep I was getting and contributing to my heightened anxiety, which helped me let go of my reliance on the tool.

Babysitters are baffled, but not having a monitor works better for us

When we have a babysitter, they’re always baffled that we don’t have a monitor. We always assure them that they’ll be able to hear our girls if they cry out, but we’ve had a few tell us that they were so worried without the monitor that they made several trips up to the girls’ room over the few hours that we’re away to check on them.

At this point, I haven’t seen the charger in more than six months and my girls pretend the monitor itself is a phone. My husband and I still get woken up plenty without having the device next to our bed, and we still hear the cries for extra stuffies, hugs, or water if we’re watching TV downstairs before we go to sleep.

There’s plenty to be anxious about being a parent, but I’m relieved that I don’t have the baby monitor stressing me out anymore.