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.