In the several decades since baby monitors first appeared on the scene, most parents have come to insist on their necessity. As noted earlier, theoretical accounts of the rise of a more generalized “anxiety” rest on the work of Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck regarding the emergence of a “risk society.”6 In the case of baby monitors, an intensified sense of individual responsibility combines with—and ultimately re-creates—a perception that babies are very fragile and can easily get into some form of distress. When the interviewed parents were pushed to explain why they purchase and use baby monitors, safety concerns were dominant, as they are in advertisements for this technology.7 In turn, concerns about safety lead to a practice of vigilance. These concerns—and the necessity for a vigilant response—were expressed quite similarly by the working-class, middle-class, and professional middle-class parents.8 A white, working-class mother of three, for example, commented that she wanted to have a baby monitor because she wanted “to hear everything,” out of fear her child could be in danger: “What if they’re choking or something? I guess that’s why you use it.” A considerably more privileged woman, a professional middle-class, white mother of two children, raised almost precisely the same issues: “The advantages are you can hear what’s going on in another room. . . . Things can happen in an instant with a baby: they can strangle themselves, they can be coughing. … So I wanted to be able to respond right away.”
Of course, this attentiveness to safety not only rests on an assumption about the intrinsic fragility of babies, but it also has its own repercussions. That is, hearing every sound a baby makes might make parents more, rather than less, anxious. Parents suggest that anxiety is one of the inevitable costs of having a baby, and if vigilance intensifies that cost, then they are more than willing to pay that price. For example, one professional middle-class mother, when asked about the advantage of having a monitor, acknowledged that even as it ensured “safety, making sure the kid’s alive,” it might very well have made her “more uptight.” Similarly, a middle-class mother said that when she was a “new mother” she “didn’t want to miss anything” and then added, “You can get really neurotic having something like that too; I was kind of neurotic with [my first child].” This mother further explained that she didn’t use a baby monitor with her second child.
Parents, particularly new parents, thus normalize a child’s fragility rather than a child’s inherent ability to keep itself alive; in response to this perceived fragility, they want to be able to hear every sound the baby makes. Parents also normalize anxiety rather than calm self-assurance; they readily accept that as new parents they will be very concerned about—perhaps even “neurotic” with respect to—the well-being of their infants. And, ultimately, they normalize vigilance. None of these attitudes resides more often among one group of parents than another: that is, all parents agree that baby monitors are important for safety; all parents think it “normal” for a new parent to be anxious about a baby’s well-being; and all parents respond with oversight. Baby monitors are thus the ground zero of good parenting in an era of individual responsibility for risk. But those who are parenting out of control relish baby monitors for yet another reason.