Why Does This Baby Thermometer Need WiFi?

Smart baby products are almost always unnecessary

I knew right away that I didn't want our baby monitor to require WiFi to function. Finding such a mystical machine was easier said than done.

This summer, as I built my list of baby must-haves and might-needs, I was disappointed (albeit not surprised) to find that the most-touted baby-related products recommended by parenting magazines and forums involve an insanely unnecessary amount of technology. Why?

Why do I need my phone and a reliable WiFi connection to log my baby's temperature? Why does my bassinet need me to download an app that also wants to know my baby's name and birthdate? Why are so many moms clamoring for an Owlet Sock, a monitor that will send a parent's phone an alert if baby's vitals change in alarming ways? (Said sock will no longer be sold in the US after failing to receive appropriate FDA approval for claims made by its manufacturer.)

Why does a baby rocker need an app? Why does a motherfucking white noise machine? Why does this changing pad need the internet?

Why is everybody acting like this is normal and necessary?

I was raised a Luddite and I will be a Luddite until the day that I am turned into human compost. (I realize this is an ironic thing for a person who owes their entire career and livelihood to the internet to confess, but we've all got our contradictions.) I am what you might call a "reluctant late adopter." My home is not a smart home; it is an old fashioned stupid home. I turn off my voice assistant and all location and ad tracking on my phone. I worked on a project that gifted the cast and crew a hub for a digital assistant; I gave said hub to my local Goodwill unopened.

Part of this is because I'm paranoid. I don't understand how we can live in a world where Black Mirror is a very popular show that is also a world where we willingly purchase and place eavesdropping technology in our houses. It was nerve-wracking enough for me to rent a WiFi-enabled bassinet. This ends in us all being hunted by robot dogs!

Anything that can connect to the internet can be hacked, and it seems foolish that so many products that concern the life and health of human babies are running, open-armed, toward that possibility. Hell, in a perfect world, my child's face would not exist on the internet before they were able to consent to it, but I gave up on that when I realized just how much effort would have had to go into keep them off the internet.

For that matter, the internet isn't reliable in all places. The WiFi in my neighborhood-- less than three miles from Downtown Los Angeles-- craps out at least once a month. It's worst just about everywhere else. Do I want my baby monitor to be subject to the quirks of the creaky Rube Goldberg machine that runs the internet? Maybe we should make the internet good before we hook our baby thermometers up to it.

When my younger siblings were babies, the monitor my parents had was a pair of ugly grey bricks that looked like a neutered walkie talkie. It sounded like a haunted radio that only played crackly sounds of the baby crying. It worked. I generally hate the "well this is how kids were raised 30+ years ago and they survived!" tack when it comes to discussing parenting-related issues; that retort is often unleashed in defense of practices that we now know to be dangerous, like feeding newborn babies bottles of rice cereal to help them sleep or covering unsupervised napping infants with blankets. But no research-- at least none that I could find-- has found that baby monitors that are hooked up to the internet make babies any safer.

So: why does my white noise machine need the internet to function? Is it the same reason that my headphones need me to sign up for an account in order to use them? Could it be that needlessly smart-ifying objects that don't need to be made smart is a way for manufacturers to charge much more money for something consumers don't even want until they're told they should want it? Planned obsolescence comes for analog baby supplies?

Eventually, we found a baby monitor that didn't require us to download an app or log on in order to use. It works. But I haven't lost track of the creeping menace of over-digitizing kid stuff. Mark my words: if by the time my daughter is potty training, I'm being hawked digital toddler toilets, I'm going to learn to program so that I can create a virus that will take the entire toilet-network down.

Image via Shutterstock