Baby Monitors

A few thoughts on baby mon­it­ors; how you par­ent will affect how (or wheth­er) you need a baby mon­it­or. I’ve got a couple of “how to buy” tips if you do want one which I wish someone had told me!

First, do you need one? If you think you’ll be spend­ing quite a lot of time where you can­’t hear the baby without help (e.g., out in the garden, in the base­ment, in the work­shop or gar­age), you’ll prob­ably want one. Depend­ing on how you handle the first couple of months, you may not need a baby mon­it­or dur­ing that time. Little babies sleep a lot and are light enough to carry around that much of the time you can just keep the baby near you any­way. I was­n’t up to spend­ing much time in the work­shop or garden­ing in the first couple of months, so there was­n’t a prob­lem there. We also had the baby sleep in our room at night so we could wake up quickly when she did, feed her quickly, and get every­one back to sleep quickly. By the time she moved into her own room, she could yell or cry loudly enough to wake us up in the night (and don’t worry, even if you’re a good sleep­er, once you’re over the first sleep depriva­tion phase, you’ll wake up when the baby cries even without a baby mon­it­or as long as her room isn’t too far way from yours).

After the first couple of months, when the baby’s a bit big­ger and get­ting onto a routine of reg­u­lar naps (at least in the­ory, ours does­n’t nap much) it’s handy to have a baby mon­it­or so you can start doing more things a little fur­ther away and be aware of when the baby wakes up. Ours usu­ally wakes up cheery and not mak­ing many sounds at all, so I would­n’t hear them if I did­n’t have a mon­it­or. For this to work, of course, you need a mon­it­or you can rely on, one that does­n’t have so much stat­ic that you can­’t hear the baby over it.

So how do you choose a baby mon­it­or? The most import­ant thing in my exper­i­ence is to get one from a store that will let you return it if it does­n’t work prop­erly in your house/apartment/condo. We failed to do this with the first baby mon­it­or and when it did­n’t work, had no recourse. With the second I made sure I could return it for a full refund if need be. 

There are lots of types of baby mon­it­ors, mostly clas­si­fied by how they work. Those that use a 49 MHz trans­mis­sion fre­quency have been around for years (we had one with our first child), are cheap, and usu­ally work. They tend to have quite a lot of stat­ic, inter­fere with one anoth­er (import­ant if you’re liv­ing close to oth­er fam­il­ies that also have baby mon­it­ors), and can inad­vert­ently eaves­drop (one of our neigh­bours picked up a con­ver­sa­tion I had on a cord­less phone on hers; I promptly bought a new 2.4 GHZ phone). Those that run on 2.4 GHz are in the­ory bet­ter but have prob­lems of their own. We bought a Sum­mer Infant 2.4 GHz mon­it­or, which sup­posedly changes chan­nels to be secure. In our house at least, it was so secure you could­n’t actu­ally get it to work if you had the par­ent end more than a few meters away from the baby’s end. It would­n’t work from the liv­ing room to the baby’s room, let alone from the base­ment or out­side. (This was the one we bought first and could­n’t return). I’ve read lots of reviews of this mon­it­or and oth­er people seem to have got it to work, so I assume it’s some­thing about our house, either the fact that we’re sur­roun­ded by wire­less net­works (which in the­ory might be inter­fer­ing), or the fact we have some stain­less appli­ances in the kit­chen (a the­ory pro­posed by someone at the store where I bought the second monitor). 

The baby mon­it­or we finally bought and are extremely happy with is the Graco iMon­it­or. It uses some­thing called “Digit­al Spread Spec­trum (DSS)” tech­no­logy to trans­mit the sig­nals, has very little stat­ic, and works through­out our house and in the garden. It’s more expens­ive than a lot of oth­er baby mon­it­ors but saves an immense amount of frus­tra­tion, so if you think you need one, I’d recom­mend look­ing at this.