I like baby monitors for their one-way-ness. If I just open a door a bit, I can hear a baby just fine, but the baby can also hear me. Would you believe that babies can get woken up by their parents making noises?

I think we gave up trying to be quiet around our baby after the first few weeks. Sooner or later a postal delivery will drop heavy-items through the door, just as the baby is trying to sleep, or some other random noise will occur.

I know all babies are somewhat different, but at least ours seems to be happy to sleep through most noises - up to and including using a vacuum-cleaner in the next room.

I try to keep things a little quieter than usual around bed/nap-times, but otherwise the family life must go on. If the baby wakes up sometimes because you boiled a kettle, dropped a book, or turned on the laundry then that's just something you have to deal with at the time.

Babies get woken up like that when you cocoon them from sound.

There’s a baby in the house where I live. When he wakes up and is fussy, you can absolutely hear him throughout most of the house. If you’re in the kitchen it helps to have a monitor, just for the distance. Otherwise, do baby monitors help if a baby is having breathing issues? Is it possible to tell? And if so, what do you do to save them?

They don't help with breathing issues.

Where a (video-capable, audio-muted) monitor helps with my 1-year-old is that I can see at a glance whether he's just fighting a loosing battle with sleep, or if he has won that battle, is standing up and sleep has lost this battle.

If it's the former, I dare not open the door. If it's the latter, I need to go in and rock him back to sleep. Having this tool has saved him and I from many cranky, nap-deprived days.

And, btw, it's a dumb monitor with a ~400 foot range. All 3 neighbors within range are trusted to watch the kid - if they want to help, great!

They have little movement monitors that you can clip to their waistband that monitors the rise and fall off their chest. If it doesn't rise for 15 seconds or something like that, you get an alarm. Hopefully it's enough to startle the baby into breathing again, but otherwise at least the parents are alerted as well. There are methods of encouraging the baby to breathe again, but I haven't learned that yet. (The wife and I are expecting, so we're learning all this stuff right now. 16 hour course next weekend... Oof)

Rather than use a clip-on version, go with something like AngelCare's line of under-the-mattress ones. False-positives will be the bane of your existence, so you want to avoid things that can fall off. With ours we usually got alarms when our kids rolled to the very edge of the bed.

We never had any real issues with either of our kids, and only false alarms. But I know my wife got better sleep just because the alarm was there (only in part because I was usually the one to check when the alarm went off).

Two kids, had an AngelCare.

We stopped using it nearly immediately. It was a glorified audio only monitor for us, the check for movement/breathing was giving lots of false positives and drove us insane.

Other parents even turned on a beep for each breath, made it sound like a hospital. You subconsciously gold your breath if the device beeps with a tiny delay.. beep..beep....???beep

For us it was the wrong choice.

Same one we've used for our three. Awesome product. False alarms only really were an issue the first few weeks of life, as the babies got bigger, it was easier to pick up the breathing patterns.

Definitely is a sanity-saver.

> do baby monitors help if a baby is having breathing issues? Is it possible to tell? And if so, what do you do to save them?

Yes, we use a movement-based monitor and have for the last 6 years (3 kids). It doesn't require anything on the baby, and sits under the mattress. Sensitivity is adjustable and it's very accurate. It truly lets me sleep better at night.

We bought an audio-only baby monitor and gave up on it for precisely this reason. We'd hear the baby, then two seconds later the baby monitor would wake up with a ksssht-WAAAH noise.

Now, what would be really helpful for small babies is consumer-available version of the 'clicker' breathing monitors they use in NICU wards. Our oldest was in NICU for nearly two weeks due to being a little prem, and when we got them home the lack of that regular 'click... click...' from the monitor was so hard to get used to.

Owlet sells a "smart sock" that measures pulse and O2 levels and alerts you if they drop below a set level.

It's not a medical grade device like the NICUs have, but it lets you rest easier knowing you'll be notified if your baby's pulse or O2 levels drop.

this comment could come off as flip, but it's an important one.

Sure: baby monitor security is important too: if you can get it right for a baby monitor you've probably got the framework (technical, social, regulatory, etc) to get it right for a bunch of other things.

But are baby monitors themselves solving a problem or causing one? The alternative is to either have the baby in the room with you (distracting: they're like a campfire!) while you do your chores or talk to your visitor or whatnot, or learn to be able to be in another room from your baby.

Sounds luddite, but it helps lay the foundation for a healthy, non-helicoptering relationship with your kid and doesn't slip tolerance for pervasive surveillance into your home.

I'm not a parent yet, but I don't think monitors at a very early age are contributing to helicopter parenting. An infant has all sorts of risks that could cause very sudden death that I'm sure most parents want to avoid. Being able to leave your baby in another room without anxiety over those things probably helps a parent develop a healthier "concern, but don't need to be ever watchful" attitude.

My counter example is my sister in law who is very helicopter of her first child, even now that he is over a year old. They've been in small apartments, and have traveled a lot with him in arms(no car, so no car seat). I doubt they have ever used a monitor. I bet if she had had more opportunities to put him in another room to sleep without concern, she'd be more willing to let family play with him in other rooms of my parents' house during holidays.

> it helps lay the foundation for a healthy, non-helicoptering relationship with your kid

I think that's a pretty big exaggeration. "helicopter parenting" usually characterises parents who refuse to/cannot step back from their child's life and let them make decisions on their own. A sleeping newborn child cannot make decision on it's own - the only acceptable form of parenting is helicopter parenting when your child isn't capable of doing anything for itself!

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome exists. You can hardly blame people for wanting to protect their child from it.

Can a "sudden death syndrome" actually be reversed, or does monitoring just provide better estimates of death time?

Our first daughter stopped breathing, turned purple and didn't come-to for what seemed like an eternity. I can't imagine what would have happened if she was alone during this time.

She was alert when the paramedics showed up, but the subsequent tests at the hospital proved nothing. The cardiologist, nurses, and other doctors all seemed to agree that it was "nearly a SIDS thing" and that we just got lucky.

After that night, and for every night since (2 more kids since then) we've used a breathing monitor. Occasionally I've noticed the kids will go in a "deep sleep", and the monitor will go off a few times during the night, you'll have to reposition them; they'll wince (in their sleep) and carry on. If that's what it takes, then that's what it takes.

From my research after that event, it seems like SIDS is all-encompassing, and the amount of time allowed for an infant to slip into death may play a factor in it's "suddeness".

interesting, wonder if there's a correlation to sleep apnea later in life

Could be, essentially there's a counter that counts seconds between "breaths" felt. Someone who forgets to breathe during sleep could certainly throw red flags on it's rather simplistic design.

I think I understand where you're coming from.

But with our first child we had a near-SIDS experience; nothing terrible came of it, but it definitely shook my core.

Having a baby monitor that tells when it can't feel the baby breathing any more is a complete sanity saver. It's the one and only reason I recommend them.

Um, no.

I really need to hear if/when my newborn is having breathing problems.