After listening to a woman in a local barber say she wouldn’t bother buying a baby monitor because it might drive you up the wall with worry, I decided to write this article. She was talking to a pregnant woman. She reasoned that the monitor would make sounds at night and keep you awake, that some babies have sleep apnea, which is normal, that we as parents shouldn’t wrap them up in cotton wool, and that she was a midwife.
I was livid.
My Story
I used an Angel Care monitor (no affiliation); it was a pad that went under the mattress and had a sensor that could detect if the baby stopped breathing. The sensor was designed to detect even the slightest movements, ensuring it would not miss any potential breathing issues.
The separate unit would light up to signal that the baby was breathing and had the option to remove the sound of the baby breathing, reduce it, or keep it on. If you muted or lowered the volume, it still lit up, and if the baby stopped breathing, an override would set off an alarm.
It meant I could sleep soundly, knowing the monitor was there to alert me if something went wrong. The monitor didn’t go off at night during my son’s first year. My son was 15 months when he had scooched to one side of the mattress, and the signal couldn’t find him; he was bigger by then and passed the risk age of what was called cot death or SIDS, I was grateful that he was okay and so glad the alarm went off, I continued to use the monitor until he was 18 months. I bought a second when I had twins.
The worry regarding SIDS was all over the news when I was a child. After the death of a beloved presenter’s baby girl, suspicion and intrigue put her in the press. Then, my cousin’s newborn daughter passed from SIDS in her cot.
There are no reported incidents of SIDS when monitors are used.
There are over 100 babies a year that die from SIDS incidents where no monitor was used.
To advise a pregnant woman not to take precautions because it would be “wrapping them up in cotton wool” is ridiculous.
It’s not a situation where the child is not being taught to behave safely, like learning to walk up and down a staircase by going down on their bottom or holding onto a rail and/or being deprived of learning to handle the stairs with overuse or over-reliance on stairgates.
A newborn baby cannot be taught not to stop breathing in their sleep.
Also, if a child has sleep apnea, I would rather know than leave it up to chance. We reduce the risk of death of a newborn whose only defence against preventable death is us.
Some may have had these monitors, and they have never gone off. They may think the cost is not worth it as they didn’t need one. I understand these monitors can be expensive, and not everyone can afford them. However, these monitors protect the unlucky, and we don’t know if your baby will be lucky or unlucky. That’s the gamble.
Should a baby die of SIDS and you didn’t have a monitor, you may always worry if this could have made a difference. As a parent, I would wonder if I could have done better. I bought my monitor to keep my child safe. I would know if something ever happened, it would be despite my doing everything I could as a mother to keep my baby safe.
Not having the monitor would mean I would never sleep at night, and we know that sleep is essential for us all to recover, heal and function. As a parent, I understand the value of a good night’s sleep, and the monitor allowed me to rest knowing my baby was safe; this contradicts everything I heard in the barbers today.
I dislike the narrow, uninformed thinking of people who never had a monitor, didn’t know how to use it properly, or had an outdated one. Most importantly, their baby was one of the lucky ones. Everything is a gamble; you must decide if it is worth it and hedge your bets. It’s about making informed decisions and doing everything you can to protect your child.
The world is a dangerous place. We cannot protect them from everything forever, and we shouldn’t, but we should protect them from the things we can when we have the chance.
