Book Club: BABY UNPLUGGED

Hey book club, I've got a new one for you—Sophie Brickman's BABY, UNPLUGGED. If you haven't read it, the TL;DR is that Sophie Brickman details her flights all over America to interview people about technology related to babies, and she thinks it's mostly bad, but she keeps using it anyway. The book isn't actually about her flights—I just thought it was crazy how often she mentions getting on a plane to do research for this book. Her conclusion also is not, "The tech is bad but let me keep using it anyway." I think her conclusion is supposed to be that the tech is bad, but she also describes all the ways in which she uses it anyway.

If that paragraph seemed overly sassy, I have to say I was biased against this book from the first chapter, despite how much I expected to agree with her based on the cover. You can see in my photo there my library copy of the book next to my son's Owlet sock, which is a heart monitor and pulse oximeter we wrap around his foot at night so that if he has any health issues while we're sleeping, we will be alerted. This sock cost me $300 initially. Then it played a key role in getting my son to the ER in time to reach a CPAP and intubation, the hospital lost the sock, and I paid another $140 to replace the sensor. And I would do it again and again and again if I had to. Yet, Brickman chastises Owlet users, saying she wrote this book with the purpose of giving parents "ammunition with which to tell their tech-loving spouses that strapping Owlet Smart Socks on their children is as nurturing as ditching vitamin D drops, slathering their babies in coconut oil, and setting them outside to broil in the sun."

I'll just let the nastiness of that sink in for a moment.

It would have been so easy for her to acknowledge parents with babies with medical needs as an exception to her opinion, however I don't feel that exception is needed. God forbid a parent be worried about the health of a tiny thing that just came into the world and can't tell us if they're in pain or need help. Brickman's take on this is purely a bad one.

There were things I enjoyed about this book. I was very interested in the difference between kids' shows like "Mister Roger's Neighborhood" and the cartoons of today. Brickman explains that "Mister Roger's" was shot with one camera, in one take, so kids watching were experiencing the show in the same way that they experience real time, like watching a play on stage. Meanwhile today's shows have constant scene cuts that disorient kids and wear down their attention spans. We have no plans to show my son any television show any time soon, but it was neat to learn about.

In terms of television watching, I was trying to check my privilege the whole time I was reading. My experience working in childcare has given me exceptional patience, and thus far my son, now almost 6 months, has been a very "easy" baby. (However, as he is possibly beginning teething, or something, this is starting to be less consistent.) I kept finding myself thinking, how hard is it to just never put a kid in front of a tv show? Seems pretty straightforward to me. So what am I missing? Why do parents do it? I just can't imagine making that choice, can't imagine wanting to. I want to be with my kid all the time, and to deliberately disengage him from me and from our household would not be enjoyable to me. I don't mean to imply that people who let their kids watch tv don't want to be with their kid. That's just my thought process when I think about what it would be like for me to turn a screen on for him. Maybe that has something to do with how many years I waited for him and how much he had to fight to adjust to the world after he was born, how thin the thread of his life became and how much fear became part of our lives while helping him fight and strengthen that thread.

I would love to hear thoughts on this from anyone who read the book or just had ideas in response to my thoughts!