Halfords now sells a gadget that tells you when your newborn has been asleep in a car seat for more than 30 minutes, so you can take them out for a break in accordance with NHS guidelines.
The Chicco Bebe Care Easy Technology costs £60 and alerts you after half an hour of your little one nodding off. And, in the unlikely scenario that you accidentally mislay your car with your baby in it – or if your baby is left “unattended”, as they put it – it will send you a text with GPS coordinates in.
Making sure you don’t leave a small baby in a car seat for ages is, obviously, good – staying in too long can lead to breathing difficulties, slowed heart rates and even death – but is a specific machine really necessary?
It works in conjunction with a phone, and phones have these things on them called ‘clocks’. You can set a half-hour timer, or even an alarm half an hour from when you put the baby down. You can keep half an eye on the clock in the car, or just feel out half an hour or so – none of which require shelling out sixty quid.
The thing is, people will still buy it. Becoming a parent is so fraught with anxiety that as soon as something is mentioned that could hurt your child – and something else is mentioned that you could buy to prevent that happening – you feel like you have to do it. “This sixty quid could save my child’s life!” you think, buying gadget after appliance after doodad after whatchamacallit, amassing a collection of high-tech appliances so as not to feel like you’re neglecting your child.
It can often feel like product manufacturers, in general, know how vulnerable new parents are and, perhaps, use that – preying on their fears to get them to dig deep. The Chicco device requires topping up with credits (20p per credit) in order to send text notifications if your child is left unattended. But, considering it seems far more likely that you’ll forget to turn the device off when taking your kid out of the car than forget the kid themselves, does this mean you’ll be charged credits for leaving it running?
In response to the questions we had around the product, a Halfords spokesperson told us: “This product gives busy parents personal choice and convenience when it comes to monitoring how long their children spend in car seats. It also sends emergency alerts in the case of a child being left behind which a simple alarm does not offer. We think this brand new technology offers reassurance and extra peace of mind.”
Meanwhile, Chicco itself said its products were developed in its research centre to “ensure we are meeting the real needs of modern day parents”.
Technology is a wonderful thing, and if your child has specific issues or you need to keep track of certain things, terrific. But if not, beyond a few essentials like a baby monitor and thermometer, isn’t most of it a bit unnecessary? Do you need your baby monitor to relay heat-sensitive night-vision and email you a weekly report of your baby’s sleep? Or do you just need to hear if they wake up and scream the house down?
People managed for millions of years without this stuff. Endless high-tech devices ostensibly intended to help might just end up causing a lot of stress and anxiety – creating more tasks to keep on top of and leading to paranoia if they break down. Your child’s safety is the most important thing there is, but flinging machine after machine at a baby won’t keep them safe – you will.