Baby, Unplugged
One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A charming, meticulously researched, and illuminating look at how technology infiltrates every aspect of raising children today, filled with helpful advice parents can use to best navigate the digital landscape, and ultimately learn to trust their own judgment.
There’s an app or device for nearly every aspect of parenting today: monitoring your baby; entertaining or educating your toddler; connecting with other new parents for tips, tricks, and community—virtually every aspect of daily life. But it isn’t a parenting paradise; the truth is much more complicated.
The mother of two young daughters, journalist Sophie Brickman wondered what living in a tech-saturated world was doing to her and her children. She turned to experts, academics, doctors, and innovators for advice and insight. Baby, Unplugged brings together Brickman’s in-depth research with her own candid (sometimes hilarious) personal experience to help parents sort through the wide and often confusing tech offerings available today and to sort out what’s helpful and what’s not.
Filled with relatable and entertaining stories as well as practical takeaways, Baby, Unplugged is destined to become a touchstone for parents today, giving them the permission to forge their own path through the morass of technological options, to restore their faith in themselves, and to help them raise good, social, and engaged people in the modern world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Equal parts informative and entertaining, journalist Brickman's debut explores parenting in these tech-drenched times. With a baby-tech market worth nearly $46 billion in 2019, new parents have plenty of ways to gather data on their child's lives, leading Brickman to ask if parents should "run... toward the safe, analog space." She covers a slew of child-related gadgets, among them breast pumps, sleep trackers, and monitoring devices that provide parents with "NASA-level" data. Along the way, she offers insight from people who develop and market such technology ("You don't want to overwhelm people who are looking for simplicity," the founder of a baby monitor company tells her), explores physicians' opinions (sleep trackers, one pediatrician warns, "get right up to the line so they don't have to be regulated by the FDA"), and candidly shares her own experiences ("like many women before me, I grew to despise my pump"). Things come back to how overwhelming parents' options are, a situation Brickman considers with humor: though looking at tracking data has been shown to release dopamine, she writes, "you can control a child as much as you can force her to poop on command." For parents wondering whether to bring gadgets into the nursery, this will be an invaluable tool.
