In the penumbra cast by the light of my phone, I can dimly see the wreckage of a night with a newborn baby: half-drunk bottles of milk, the tangled cord of the monitor, muslins strewn across the bed. It is 3 a.m. and the baby has gone back to sleep. I, however, am wide awake. Or rather, the consumer in me is wide awake. I decide to buy a Dreamland Baby weighted sleep sack costing £79. Its promises are seductive, outrageous even, to my crazed mind: ‘Our mission is to help your baby feel calm, fall asleep faster & stay asleep longer, so your whole family can get the sound sleep they deserve!’ The sleep they deserve. Yes, I think, we are owed sleep and I’m prepared to pay over the odds for it.
I use an old-fashioned audio monitor – the video one drove me crackers
Welcome to the strange, quilted world of the baby marketplace. Like any good consumer journey, it starts on Instagram. Fed by the frantic searches new mothers make on Google – ‘how much sleep does a newborn need’ or ‘can you die from sleep deprivation’ – it is then digested into your Instagram feed quite seamlessly. Behold pictures of peacefully sleeping babies for long enough and you will, eventually, buy the sleep sack. In the big bucks of the baby bazaar (worth $46 billion in the US according to Forbes), I am down as a prime target for sleeptech: apps such as Huckleberry and Pampers Smart Sleep Coach that promise to get your baby to sleep through the night, bamboo-fibre sleep suits that promise to regulate your baby’s temperature to avoid unnecessary waking, pink light diffusers to soothe, cots such as the Snoo that replicate the conditions of the womb and rock your baby back to sleep when it stirs. All in all, sleep porn.
And yet these products are relatively primitive compared to sleeptech’s evil twin: fear gear. Fear gear manifests as concern – tracking oxygen levels, heart rate, temperature and movement – wrapped up in one giant price tag. One such product, Owlet, is a sock that will connect to your phone via an app for the princely sum of £289. But don’t be fooled. It’s not the sock itself that will make its entrepreneurs money, but the data it will emit. Kurt Workman, the Owlet creator based in Utah, says that the sock is designed to quell anxious parents’ fears, aiming the technology at the ‘pain points’ of parenthood.
If you’ve ever woken up every hour in the night to check that your child is still breathing, then this product may be for you. Several questions spring to mind. Firstly, where does all the data radiated by the Owlet babies go? Into a central AI bank for all to access? Secondly, and perhaps more worryingly, if you’re only checking on your baby via an app from your phone, what happened to touch and proximity, two fundamentally important aspects of the mother and baby relationship? A study of ‘remote parenting’ and the Owlet device conducted by Bristol University in 2017 found that remote devices ‘potentially separated mothers from their babies’ and ‘aggravated anxiety while providing some perception of security’. Maternal instinct has disappeared, lost somewhere between a smartphone and a Silicon Valley billionaire.
I use an old-fashioned audio monitor – the video one drove me crackers with my first child when I could see that she was not asleep – and very often switch it off if I think I can hear the baby from my room. Sleep, however, is my consumer weakness and the good people of Dreamland Baby et al have me firmly in their sights. Not one day after my 3 a.m. purchase of the weighted sleep sack, it arrives. One week later, after it has not given either me or my baby the sleep we deserve, it lies discarded in the nursery. Eventually, I sell it on eBay to another mother, further fuelling this desperate market.
I haven’t completely lost all hope though; I’ve ordered a myHummy teddy bear with integrated white noise and light to help little Constance ‘fall asleep peacefully’. I just know it’s going to work.
Comments