When you first get pregnant, there are so many things on your list of “must-haves” (and probably an equal number on your list of “nice-to-haves.”) For most parents, a baby monitor is on one of those lists.
But, would it surprise you to hear that Nicole sometimes urges families to ditch their baby monitors (at least for a time)?
No, we’re not advising parents to be negligent! We recommend that some families put away their baby monitors for a different reason.
Read on, as we explore how baby monitors can impact your baby’s sleep!
Some Families May Need Monitors… Other Families May Not
Let me start by saying all families have different styles of parenting, and everyone’s house is a different size and shape.
If you have a 500 square foot apartment, then you will likely have no problem hearing your baby from anywhere in your home – and you probably will not need a baby monitor. However, a family that has a 3,000 square foot home with 3 floors may very well need monitors placed strategically throughout the house.
What About Movement Monitors?
Of course, not every family buys a baby monitor strictly to hear the baby when she cries. Today, there are monitors that detect movement designed to help reduce the risk of SIDS. Movement monitors can alert parents when a baby hasn’t moved in a certain amount of time. An alarm sounds letting parents know that the baby has been completely still for too long.
And, there are monitors that detect heart rate and oxygen levels.
The reviews on these kinds of monitors are positive, and some families have truly incredible stories of actually catching their not-breathing baby in the nick of time and intervening before something truly awful happened. However, other parents report lots of false alarms, resulting in unnecessary middle-of-the-night wakings and more anxiety for everyone.
In this post, though, we’re going to focus strictly on sound and video monitors, and how they impact sleep.
Baby Monitors and Baby Sleep:
The Good
There is a distinct up-side to sound monitors (both the video and the non-video versions). A monitor is great to help you…well…monitor your baby’s crying.
Is it a hungry cry? Uh oh. Is he distressed? Perhaps that’s his falling asleep moan? Or is his leg stuck between the crib slats? (You’d need a video monitor to see that one, of course).
This is all easier to do with a monitor than putting your ear to the door or poking your head in the room while trying not to let your baby see you (or maybe even doing an army-crawl across the nursery floor, to do some reconnaissance!)
Baby monitors are also great if you have a large home. If your baby sleeps on the second floor, for example, and you and your partner want to watch a movie in the basement, a monitor can give you peace of mind. The same is true if you want to take your older children outside to play in the yard, while the baby naps.
A monitor allows you to do these things without needing to worry that you’re leaving the baby unattended.
And, of course, baby monitors can be really helpful during sleep training, too, for the same reasons. Parents who use no-cry sleep coaching methods and stay in the room may not need to use a monitor. But, if you use any kind of cry method of sleep training and leave the room, you’ll want to keep tabs on your baby’s cries. A monitor makes it easy to do that.
However, while baby monitors can definitely be helpful, they can also become a problem.
Baby Monitors and Baby Sleep:
The Bad and The Ugly
The good thing about baby monitors is that they let you hear your baby’s every cry. But the bad thing about baby monitors is…that they let you hear your baby’s EVERY CRY! (And sniffle, and squeak, and moan, and hiccup, and…you get the idea!)
In the newborn stage, you’ll no doubt find that your baby makes lots of little sounds throughout the night. A baby monitor amplifies all of those, and so every sound your baby makes will probably wake you from your own precious, much-needed sleep.
And, if it sends you running to check on your baby (a perfectly normal new parent instinct, by the way!), you may end up inadvertently waking up your baby – something which no parent wants to do!
This was the case for Nicole when her oldest son (who inspired the Baby Sleep Site®) was a newborn:
When my eldest was a baby, he was a loud sleeper. Every time he rolled over or made a little noise or coughed, I could hear him through the monitor. This was unnecessary and woke me up literally for no reason. Because of the way the bedrooms in our house are situated, I could hear him very well without the monitor. I birth screamers, by the way! So eventually, I turned off the monitor at night when I slept.
Baby Monitors During Sleep Training
As your baby gets older, you may come to the point when you decide to sleep train, to help your baby sleep through the night. While a baby monitor may help you with sleep coaching, it can also hinder your progress. Having a fuss or cry magnified in a monitor may make your heartbeat twice as fast and make you think that someone is either kidnapping your child or that he is facing extreme harm.
Of course, some babies may have medical conditions that require parents to check-in frequently. In those cases, yes, parents will probably want to listen for every little sound. But, for the average healthy baby, we don’t need to hear every little noise the baby makes. Remember, fussing and crying a little between sleep cycles is very normal and expected. But if you respond to every little fuss or cry, you may inadvertently get in your own way. In that case, your baby will not have the opportunity to learn to fall asleep on his own.
Here’s Nicole’s story, about the moment when she learned that allowing a few minutes of fussing can actually produce good results:
One day, as I was making my eldest son’s lunch, I heard my younger son crying in his room. I couldn’t get to him right away — I had to finish up making lunch first, so that my oldest son could eat (can you say cranky when hungry?) It took just a few minutes (less than 5) to finish up, and then began walking up the stairs to check on my younger son (who was still crying).
I kid you not, I got so far as his door (and actually put my hand was on the doorknob!) and suddenly, his crying stopped. My son had fallen back to sleep! I am not suggesting all babies will be that “easy” (he was by far not a perfect sleeper, by the way)! But having a monitor where you hear everything is not always the best tool in your toolbox!
Remember, a baby monitor is a tool. And as with so many tools in your parenting toolbox, it’s not the tools themselves, but how you use them that ends up making the difference. If your baby monitor is proving to be a tool that’s helpful, then by all means – use it! But if your baby monitor is waking you unnecessarily at night, or making you tear your hair out during sleep training, then it might be time to put it away (at least, for a while!)
Baby Monitors Won’t Solve Baby Sleep Problems – But We Can!
Baby monitors can be GREAT tools – but they won’t solve sleep issues (in fact, in some cases, they may make them worse!). Fortunately for you, we CAN help solve baby sleep problems! Our team of expertly-trained consultants is standing by, ready to craft a Personalized Sleep Plan™ just for your baby.
Browse our list of consultation package options here.
Once you make your choice and purchase, you will immediately receive an e-mail with your Helpdesk login information. You’ll be able to log in and get started right away – it’s that easy!
Do you use a baby monitor? Is it helpful, or is it making sleep worse?
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If you’re looking for ways to get your baby or toddler into a healthy sleeping routine during the day, I encourage you to explore Mastering Naps and Schedules! This is our comprehensive guide to napping routines, nap transitions, and all the other important “how-tos” of baby sleep. With over 45 sample sleep schedules and planning worksheets, Mastering Naps and Schedules is ideal for every parenting style.
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@ Meagan — yes! My boys are pretty active sleepers, too – and they snore! I can count on one hand the number of times they’ve slept in our bed, and I got virtually no sleep any of those nights! Too many elbows/knees/cold feet hitting me in the night!
You make a good point about using the sensitivity of the monitor being key – I agree. When I was a new mom, I remember turning it all the way up, as loud as it would go, and then being stunned, those first few nights home from the hospital, when I could literally hear my son sigh on the monitor! I quickly learned to turn it way down after that, so that I heard crying but not anything else 🙂
Thanks for commenting, Meagan!
@ Christine — thanks for sharing your thoughts about Angelcare! Sounds like it’s been a good product for you (and like it really works – which is good to know!) I know a few people who’ve used the Snuza with success, too. It’s a movement monitor that you actually clip onto the baby, so it’s a little more portable.
Thanks for sharing a bit about your experience, Christine! 🙂
@ Blakely — do you mean the kind of feedback you’d get off a microphone? Wow – that would be obnoxious! Worse than having to listen to crying, I’d imagine. Have you thought about getting a new monitor? Do you think it’s a quality issue, maybe?
@ Allison – I never had a video monitor, but my friends who’ve used them have just loved them. And that’s something that really grows with a child, I think. You don’t necessarily need to hear a toddler during naptime, but it can be helpful to see them.
Good points – thanks for sharing, Allison! 🙂
@ Heather – oh, yes, that’s a good point. Especially if you’re trying to track total sleep amounts – it would be good to be able to hear/see baby at naptime, to know how much of the nap was sleep and how much wasn’t.
Thanks for pointing this out, Heather! 🙂
We use video monitors with our 2 kiddos, daughter is 3yr6mo and my son is 22mo. It made the transition out of our room into cribs much easier on us. We have 2 loud cats so we have to keep doors closed at night and I don’t dare open a creaky door to a sleeping baby’s room. It’s like waking a sleeping bear, no thanks! While we are close by at night, it still helps to see if crying is accompanied by standing up or if it’s just a laying down settling kind of cry. My daughter is in a big girl bed now and the video has been so helpful in monitoring her location in her room during rest time, and also to know when she’s on the move in the morning! I do think that some parents, if they are already on the more anxious side, may become even more anxious with a video monitor or become somewhat obsessed with watching it, but for average parents and healthy kids, I think they are great.
We used the snuza until she about 8 months old (when she started to wriggle it off of herself under her footy pj’s). Even though we got several false alarms during those 8 months, my husband could not sleep without it on her because he was terrified of SIDS. The monitor we use at night because we can’t hear her otherwise, but I leave the volume really low so that I only hear her when she is really screaming (although now at 2 it is sometimes just a night terror or nightmare).
We have a video baby monitor and I can’t even express how useful it has been for our family. Our daughter was an EASY baby who rarely if ever had any sleep problems except her first winter when we didn’t think about the fact that her room is above the garage and she woke up freezing and screaming every night wanting to cuddle which was very strange. A space heater solved that, but the problem we had with her, is that as an infant and even still at 2, she is perfectly happy to just VERY quietly play in her room after she wakes up. One day to see how long she’d go, I let her play in her room after her nap to see if she’d ever call out or ask for us, and 3 hrs later she was still happily entertaining herself. It was maddening waiting for her to realize that she could call out and we would come for her so I caved and went anyways. Because of that, having the video monitor allows us to see that she’s awake and moving around and we can get her ready for the day. Without the video monitor, we’d just be taking a chance that we’d either be waking her up, or interrupting her “quiet play time” that she really enjoys. Every great odd once in a while if she’s sad, or sick she will call out for us so we know she knows she can, but for whatever reason she doesn’t feel the need to most of the time.
I really don’t like using a monitor, because every sound wakes me. Unfortunately, we cannot hear our baby in her room during then night from our bedroom without the monitor. Sigh.
I always use a monitor for naps, because it’s really helpful for me to know if the baby has slept for an hour, or slept for 30 minutes and babbled to himself for 30 minutes. But I never use one at night, because I can hear the baby crying without it, and it just wakes me up more to hear all the little sounds he makes.
We had been warned that a monitor was not necessary, but we bought one anyway. Our daughter is 8 months old and I have already sold it. I definitely slept better once it was packed away. However, I was so paranoid about SIDS (wish I didn’t know what that acronym meant, honestly) that I think I would have really appreciated a video monitor for those first few months. Would have been happy with video and no sound.
I’m really frustrated with our baby monitor keeping me up with feedback not baby noises. However, I can’t hear her cry without it. I will rarely go upstairs when she cries because it usually stops within 15 minutes. However, she’s 15 months, so if she really needs something she can’t just run downstairs and tell us. For this reason, I feel I have to keep the monitor until she can safely get to us for help.
I find the angelcare monitor means I don’t check on sleeping baby during the night. I’ve forgotten to switch it off sometimes and it definitely goes off when no movement. I only use the handset when I’m in the yard or the bath where I can’t hear baby until she’s screaming the place down.
My son is generally healthy, but he does have asthma, so I think we’ll be hanging on to the monitor for a while. When he’s sick I still need to sneak upstairs and crack the door occasionally to reassure myself that he’s still breathing, but the monitor lets us keep tabs on how much he’s coughing when he’s not sick (there’s always a little coughing). We keep the monitor on a low sensitivity setting, so it actually shuts itself off when there is no irregular noise (it ignores the white noise generator). We sleep downstairs so we really can’t otherwise hear anything short of screaming.
We didn’t discover the sensitivity setting right away, and I will say my sleep was much worse when the monitor was at a high sensitivity and always set to “on.” Babies/Toddlers are noisy sleepers.
Side note: they are also insanely restless sleepers, or at least ours is. We recently traveled and ended up having to bring my son to bed with us to get him to settle down. He thrashed around all freaking night. At several points my husband woke up and sternly told my son to go back to sleep. I finally hissed at him, “Shut UP he IS asleep.” How do people cosleep? I got no rest at all.