Are We All Just Pretending to Be Helicopter Parents?

At some point, we’ve got to stop allowing the most risk-averse among us to hog the mic.

Last September, the parenting influencers Matt and Abby got in a bunch of trouble with The Internet for posting an Instagram story that seemed to indicate they’d left their sleeping kids (then 1 and 2 years old) in the cabin of a cruise ship with a smartphone rigged up as a makeshift baby monitor while the couple went to dinner somewhere else on board. When I first caught wind of the story, I was sort of shocked by the enormous wave of criticism levelled at the couple because, well, they were getting in trouble for doing something I’d done dozens of times—not on a cruise (I’ve never been on one), but in hotels and other places.

As a parent who falls on the “rub some dirt in it” end of the spectrum, it is not terribly uncommon for me to learn that other people find my approach to parenthood insufficiently vigilant. Even for me, though, the yawning chasm between my instincts and the pearl-clutching over the Matt and Abby incident seemed large. From my perspective, it seemed impossible know, without more information, whether their cruise ship baby monitor set-up was safe (how far away was the restaurant from their cabin? How easy would it have been for the kids to get out of their little travel cots? Did the parents leave a bunch of glass objects or, like, cocaine lying around the room within easy reach of a fugitive toddler?), but it sounded theoretically reasonable. The vast majority of those responding to the incident online, by contrast, seemed to take for granted that the couple had left their kids in immediate, obvious danger—of abduction, fire, or just something bad happening. And then, Matt and Abby did an about-face on the matter—swearing up and down that they “have not, would not, will not ever” leave their kids unattended and apologizing profusely for the misunderstanding—which seemed more than a little suspicious.

I considered posting my thoughts about it on Twitter but thought I’d better not invite that sort of scrutiny into my life. Then, an editor from Slate reached out to me to see if I had any interest in writing about the incident, and I thought again. Months later, the resulting piece was finally published a couple of weeks ago. I won’t rehash what I cover in that piece here, so you should read it if you want a complete picture of my take on the matter. But as is always the case, plenty of what I learned while reporting ended up on the cutting room floor, so I thought I’d run through a few more of my findings here.

Anyone who has ever waded through Internet discourse on this topic has heard of Madeleine McCann because someone brings her up in every third comment. Almost encouraging that people can't seem to come up with another example.

My hunch, which I was eventually able to confirm, is that doing some version of the baby monitor arrangement would not have been terribly controversial in decades past. And indeed, I heard from more than one parent with grown children who remembers doing as much in the 1990s without worrying about being judged for it. In that sense, the reproach that awaits parents who publicly admit to it now is a straightforward continuation of a story that has been unfolding for a long time: our standard for what we consider adequate parental supervision is rising. But the more I probed for answers on how we got here, the harder it became to tell where we actually are. The more I spoke to people, the less confident I became that a large majority of people actually believe a child left sleeping in a hotel room while his parents sit in the lobby with a baby monitor and a glass of wine is in grave danger. Some parents, no doubt, are genuinely convinced as much, and perhaps they are growing in number. But plenty of people, parents or not, think it is a perfectly reasonable arrangement. It’s just that, for a whole variety of reasons, everyone’s gotten a bit more coy about admitting as much.

To be clear, it’s true that, even when it comes to babies, supervision expectations have risen in the United States. Talking to the historian Janet Golden, I learned that for most of American history, close and constant supervision of babies was mostly a rich mom thing. That it has now become fairly standard is, to some degree, a byproduct of prosperity. The emergence of the middle class following World War II meant that far more people had the resources necessary to watch their kids closely. A steep decline in infant mortality, largely on account of things like improvements in infrastructure and vaccines, somewhat paradoxically heightened anxiety about keeping kids alive. “When there are fewer deaths, you expect nobody to die,” Golden told me. It’s depressing to point this out, but infant death used to be so common that parents recycled the names of kids who passed; today, infant mortality is so comparatively low that when a child dies, the parent is presumed to have done something wrong. In other words, modern parents are victims of their own success.

Technology has also played a role in raising parental standards. I cover this pretty extensively in the piece, but here’s a snippet:

It’s a common pattern for technology: The washing machine increased the ease of cleaning clothes, Golden told me, but also raised the expectation that our clothes will be clean all the time. Before bathroom scales became a household item, parents might take their kids to the butcher to be weighed once a month. Afterward, parents started weighing their babies every single day, and every “ounce gained or lost was a cause for glee or concern,” Golden said.

So it is with the baby monitor. Prior to its invention, you put the baby down for the night and counted on the fact that they were safe in their crib if they woke up. “But now, with the baby monitor, every time they make a little gurgle, you’re on high alert,” Golden said. “Hypervigilance is driven by technology’s availability.”

But as I nodded to above, the more interesting part of my research for this piece came from discovering that it’s actually sort of difficult to figure out just how pervasive hypervigilant views on parenting really are.

For one thing, throughout the course of my reporting, I discovered that, to this day, some hotels in the United Kingdom, where I currently live, offer “baby listening services” that are expressly designed to help parents do some version of the monitor trick. In the past, these services didn’t involve any monitors at all: parents would leave their kids sleeping in their hotel room and head to dinner. Meanwhile, a staff member would periodically listen in at the door of their room to hear if any of the kids had awoken and then fetch the parents if so. I called a few places that still offer such services to inquire about how they work today. At one hotel, the woman explained that whoever is running the front desk simply keeps a phone call to the room going, allowing them to listen in on the child while the parents dine. At another, the hotel provides the parents with a monitor that they bring with them to the restaurant.

(This is a bit of an aside, but one very common objection to the baby-monitor-in-the-hotel-lobby arrangement is that, if a fire broke out, hotel staff would not allow guests to go back up to their room to fetch their babies. But when I asked a worker at one of the UK hotels that offer baby listening services if they’d allow me to go back to my room in the event of a fire, she laughed and said “of course.”)

But even in the U.S., it just wasn’t that hard to find people who have used the monitor trick in some setting. All the parents who admitted as much seemed like pretty attentive parents. And they all had their own particular, often conflicting, perspectives on the boundaries of appropriate baby monitor usage. One mom said she wouldn’t do it with kids as young as 1. Others said they were only willing to leave their kids unattended as long as they were too young to climb out of a crib. Ultimately, a lot of the consideration rested on the particular quirks of their particular children: their sleep-patterns, or how anxiety- or accident-prone they were, etc…

Despite confidence in their decisions, many parents kept their baby monitor habits on the DL. And many were particularly wary of copping to it online. There’s some straightforward wisdom to this: as one mom told me, if you are trying to ensure your child is safe in your absence, it’s probably best not to advertise publicly that you’ve left them alone. But multiple parents said there is something about the open scrutiny of the internet that makes it structurally ill-disposed to discussing the risk management inherent to parenting. If you read the piece, you’ll know I pretty much agree: I argue that the internet “emboldens the neurotic and encourages everyone else to keep quiet.”

An experience I had while reporting might help to illustrate what I mean by that. When I posted in a moms group on Facebook looking for parents who’d done the monitor set-up that might be willing to chat with me, I initially got a couple of friendly and willing replies. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for the comments to devolve into, well, exactly what you might expect if you have spent literally any time in a Facebook group for moms. One woman announced that she’d block anyone who was “cool” with leaving toddlers or infants alone. Madeleine McCann obviously came up. The uproar seemed to have a chilling effect on others—a few of the moms who’d initially offered to chat stopped responding to my messages.

Then there are, of course, legal ramifications to consider before opening your mouth on the subject. A number of those commenting on the Matt and Abby situation online confidently asserted that leaving a child alone in a hotel room or cruise cabin is illegal, which isn’t true. But you can get in legal trouble for it because the statutes governing child maltreatment are vague and America has a robust hotline system set up that offers anyone with a phone a socially frictionless means of reporting someone for child neglect—which, as we’ve covered here at Family Stuff, people do with impressive frequency. Many of those calls are screened out, but the ones that aren’t trigger a very open-ended “blank check” investigation, in which a person’s home will be searched, their children asked to undress and inspected for bruises, their liquor cabinets and fridge inspected, all with the looming knowledge “that the person doing that has the legal authority to walk out of your house with your child,” Josh Gupta-Kagan, a clinical professor of law at Columbia University, told me. So in a very literal sense, it kinda doesn’t matter what a parent considers adequate parental supervision. At any given moment, parents are legally beholden to the opinion of the most neurotic busybody in their vicinity, be that a hotel or a suburban neighborhood or a court of law.

All of this is complicated by the fact that the emergent caginess on this topic makes it very hard to get a sense of what observers, whether it's your neighbors or hotel staff or a police offer, actually think about something like the monitor trick. This became readily apparent to me during my quest for insight from hotels or other commercial enterprises on this subject. The TLDR here is that everyone was really weird about it.

I started by reaching out to one of the country’s premier hospitality schools (not going to say which one), thinking that surely someone there might be able to offer insight into how hotels and other venues think about supervision of children on their premises. Reaching out to press offices at universities is something that I do quite frequently when I have a topic I want to explore but am not quite sure who to consult. Generally speaking, schools are eager to put me in touch with their researchers. And indeed, initially, I received a swift, enthusiastic reply from the press liaison saying they’d look for someone willing to chat with me. But when I followed up a few days later, they apologetically let me know that they couldn’t find anyone to discuss the matter. I tried again with another prestigious school of hospitality; exactly the same thing happened.

From there I tried reaching out to hotel chains and cruise lines, and simply could not get any sort of direct answer from anyone. The ones I managed to get any sort of reply from all ended up declining to comment or simply ghosting me. Meanwhile, when I called individual hotels asking if they’d be okay with me leaving my kids in my hotel room while eating dinner at the restaurant downstairs, the responses were all over the map. A lot of the front desk workers seemed totally fine with it; others were horrified. But nobody seemed to have any official policies or protocols. Probably the strangest moment in all of this is when I called one of the hotels where a couple had been arrested for doing the baby-monitor-in-the-restaurant thing. I figured that if any hotel had an official rule on the matter, it would be one that literally reported a family to the authorities. I turned out to be very wrong about that, but you can read the piece if you want to know how that went down.

All of this leaves modern parents in a very difficult spot, in which the rules of parenthood are very murky, but the potential consequences for breaking them are steep. So it sort of makes sense that those of us who aren’t sold on hypervigilant parenting are keeping quiet about it. The problem is that, for better or worse, how we talk about these things in the public square, digital or otherwise, is shaping people’s understanding of what constitutes adequate parenting. And our intuitions about what constitutes adequate parenting informs how parenting is policed. At some point, we’ve got to stop allowing the most risk-averse among us to hog the mic.