This Journalist and Mother of Three Suspects That When It Comes to Parenting Gadgetry, Less Is More

If it comes right down to it, better to trust your gut than countless online sources and high-tech monitors to understand why your baby is fussing—you know your child better than anyone. In broad strokes, that’s the conclusion tech journalist Sophie Brickman reaches in her book, Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age, which came out last fall.

Brickman remembers that when her husband was starting out as a tech entrepreneur, he was always strapping new-fangled devices onto himself and getting happily lost in his biometric data. A food writer at the time, Brickman basically paid no mind. But then she became a parent, and she let him persuade her that the wearable gadget he brought home to monitor their newborn’s heart rate and oxygen levels added an extra layer of safety.

So she wrapped it onto baby Ella, and they all went off to sleep. That night, an alarm awoke the couple in a panic. While Ella slept on peacefully, her frantic parents eventually discovered the problem’s source: a disrupted Wi-Fi connection. A realization hit Brickman: Perhaps technology was actually delivering more agitation than peace of mind.

Brickman, now a mother of three and a (mostly parenting tech) columnist at the Guardian, is not anti-technology. But as her book title suggests, it’s all about balance—and erring on the side of what inspires your kid’s imagination off-screen. We asked her to tell us how we can figure out where the dividing lines are and how to use our best judgment.

Dwell: Do you think technology can alleviate parental anxiety?

Brickman: Technology generally promises that it’s going to simplify your life, calm you down, or optimize something. So, if it’s going to optimize parenting, it’s going to improve your kid’s sleep schedule or make them smarter by putting them in front of the right screens. But in the process of doing all this, technology presents you with data that make you aware of a lot of things that ultimately are not important—but when you’re a parent, and those pieces of information are about your most precious thing in the world, it’s very hard not to fixate on them.

Overall, technology’s promise is not borne out in parenting. Give your kid a cardboard box and they’ll do all sorts of things with it. It’s really good for their motor skills, imagination, and resilience. Boredom is good for kids.

How do you determine kids’ readiness for screens as they get older?

One doctor I spoke to at the American Academy of Pediatrics said that an easy test to see whether or not a kid is old enough to handle a technology is to give it to them and then take it away and see what happens. If you give your kid a book and then take it away, chances are they’re not going to have a real meltdown. But I used to give Ella an iPad, and when I took it away, there would be kicking, screaming, and crying. It’s a smart way of getting a handle on whether or not the technology is too much for your kid.