In 1939, the During the Great Depression, the president of the Zenith Radio Corporation, Major Eugene F. McDonald Jr., commissioned the first baby monitor, designed by famed American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The monitor came in two parts, the Nursing Radio Receiver and the Guardian Ear Transmitter. The receiver attends to the baby when the father cannot, without risk of falling asleep himself or harming the baby while working under his care signal; The transmitter springs into action, instantly relaying information to parents at a distance: a gendered paternal ideal, augmented through technology.
McDonald was, to put it bluntly, wealthy and the father of a young child. Concerned that his daughter would be the prime candidate to be Lindbergh’s next baby, who had been kidnapped from her crib seven years earlier, he needed a device that would provide a form of security that the Lindberghs had not had. A full staff was not enough to safeguard the little one from him: the Lindbergh baby’s nanny, Betty Gow, had been the prime suspect in that case. Although she was acquitted, domestic workers were often the subject of classificatory, racial, and/or xenophobic mistrust by the families that employed them. Gow, an immigrant from Scotland, would return to Glasgow after her questioning; Violet Sharp, a woman who worked in the house as a servant, was subjected to such intense interrogation and suspicion that she ended up taking her own life by drinking poison; she was acquitted by postmortem alibi the next day. McDonald, who probably shared the classy attitudes of his peers, didn’t want to have to rely on human care. He wanted to be able to safely lay their baby on one end of his yacht and have his wife entertain on the other, without sacrificing knowledge of her whereabouts and well-being.
The baby monitor began life as a techno-optimistic fantasy of seamless monitoring and control, and it has remained just that: a fantasy. However, the promise of extending and increasing parental parenting and protection has driven the commercialization and development of much parenting technology since then, which has grown to include monitoring tactics absorbed or associated with more advanced forms of surveillance. repressive. Many of these technologies encode the same class suspicions as their predecessors. Today, cutting-edge parenting technologies are often designed to monitor not just children, but also those suspected of posing harm, target bystanders, and import state surveillance—inseparable, as Simone has shown. Browne, of a history of racial discrimination. training and violence—at home.
If we look back at McDonald’s concerns, yacht notwithstanding, we can see that our most extreme fears (kidnapping, death) influence our most basic, even boring, parenting technology and related activities: turning on the monitor, putting the baby to bed for a nap . Watching children is part of parenting; Contemporary parental mores have intensified this basic imperative to police, even as both paid and unpaid care providers are outsourced to automated machines and their analog counterparts.
The brutal truth is that children are vulnerable, and that this vulnerability is multiple: to their own bodies (mid-century “suffocation,” or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS), outside influence, and crime. The danger can come from within (a favorite blanket), from outside (an intruder), or from someone who crosses the domestic threshold under the sign of care (a babysitter or, conversely, a nursery). There has been panic about all these forms of real and perceived danger, some addressed through medicine and pediatrics (as in the Back to Sleep campaign of the 1990s that dramatically reduced the risk of SIDS) or exacerbated through the media (the “satanic panic” of the same decade, in which widespread satanic ritual sexual abuse in daycare centers and preschools was alleged; a conspiracy theory that targeted, in part, gay women of color). Parental fear is almost universal, but what we fear is not; the primacy of each threat varies by class and race, personal experience and its intergenerational transmission, and history. Children are vulnerable, but not equally.
In some of these sites of intense parenting concern, corporate parenting technology has stepped in to supposedly aid and enhance parenting by marketing peace of mind. The baby monitor expanded parental surveillance, initially for wealthier parents with large homes, but now used by about 75 percent of American parents. Today, the most exclusive devices, such as GPS strollers and children’s smartwatches, lovingly track and monitor children; some do this before birth, tracking the pregnancy. Part of the $10 billion-a-year parenting technology industry, these devices are often marketed to millennial consumers who can spend $399 on a smart baby monitor or hire a babysitter. They address and often encode the same suspicions as the analog baby monitor a century ago, but with the help of new surveillance technologies, many of them tied to law enforcement.
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