Keeping your child safe is inevitably going to be one of the highest priorities as a parent, but you can’t watch them twenty four hours a day. Plenty of parents get stressed about making sure that they’re doing absolutely everything possible to keep their little one safe, but the fact is that you really can only do so much before you drive yourself around the bend and bankrupt yourself with every possible product!
Parents often find that it’s difficult to leave their child alone at night without worrying and checking too often.
A great example is bumpers in cots, which were once considered a safety feature, but now a hazard. They’re designed to cushion the blow if your child falls against the bars of their cot, but there have been freak accidents where children have got caught up in them with sometimes fatal consequences. There’s also been reports of children managing to use them to climb, and falling out of their cots, which as you can imagine is a big drop for such a little person. For that reason, they’ve gone from recommended to warn about to the point where today they’re actively discouraged.
As you can tell from that example, you can only follow today’s best advice from midwives and childcare experts. It may be that in future the advice changes, but if you can honestly say you’ve done your best, that’s as good as it’s ever going to be.
Baby monitors are a godsend for neurotic parents, giving us the chance to watch over our babies as they sleep, and help reassure us before we need to go and get them out of their cot. In fact, recent research suggests that letting your child entertain themselves for a few minutes on their own after waking will pay dividends later, as it’s an early step towards overcoming the separation anxiety that your child naturally has inbuilt in to their brain. Some children don’t start to break that until their first day at nursery or school, and any parent that’s found themselves in that position knows how tough it can be. I should add that you’re going to have the terrifying experience on that first drop off, but your child might do surprisingly well!
Modern products have come a long way over the ones many of us know and love from our own childhood. They’re no longer limited to listening in, although they still do achieve that goal rather well with digital audio channels. The big change is the camera technology is cheap enough to have become a standard feature. There’s actually far more available on the market than you might think, with some well known names like Samsung, as well as some you’ll never have heard of that specialise in great innovative baby monitor features.
Remember that your children fifty years would have much less in the way of safety gadgets and gizmos looking after them, and hundreds of thousands of children safely made it to adulthood around the UK every year. Today’s obsession with health and safety can easily take over and pummel new parents into nervous wrecks. As we said before, we all want to do our best, but not at the expense of our sanity as our children are going to need healthy, balanced parents in later years, and that’s a big ask in itself!