If it comes right down to it, better to trust your gut than countless online sources and high-tech monitors to understand why your baby is fussing—you know your child better than anyone. In broad strokes, that’s the conclusion tech journalist Sophie Brickman reaches in her book, Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age, which came out last fall.

Brickman remembers that when her husband was starting out as a tech entrepreneur, he was always strapping new-fangled devices onto himself and getting happily lost in his biometric data. A food writer at the time, Brickman basically paid no mind. But then she became a parent, and she let him persuade her that the wearable gadget he brought home to monitor their newborn’s heart rate and oxygen levels added an extra layer of safety.

So she wrapped it onto baby Ella, and they all went off to sleep. That night, an alarm awoke the couple in a panic. While Ella slept on peacefully, her frantic parents eventually discovered the problem’s source: a disrupted Wi-Fi connection. A realization hit Brickman: Perhaps technology was actually delivering more agitation than peace of mind.

Brickman, now a mother of three and a (mostly parenting tech) columnist at the Guardian, is not anti-technology. But as her book title suggests, it’s all about balance—and erring on the side of what inspires your kid’s imagination off-screen. We asked her to tell us how we can figure out where the dividing lines are and how to use our best judgment.

Dwell: Do you think technology can alleviate parental anxiety?

Brickman: Technology generally promises that it’s going to simplify your life, calm you down, or optimize something. So, if it’s going to optimize parenting, it’s going to improve your kid’s sleep schedule or make them smarter by putting them in front of the right screens. But in the process of doing all this, technology presents you with data that make you aware of a lot of things that ultimately are not important—but when you’re a parent, and those pieces of information are about your most precious thing in the world, it’s very hard not to fixate on them.

Overall, technology’s promise is not borne out in parenting. Give your kid a cardboard box and they’ll do all sorts of things with it. It’s really good for their motor skills, imagination, and resilience. Boredom is good for kids.

How do you determine kids’ readiness for screens as they get older?

One doctor I spoke to at the American Academy of Pediatrics said that an easy test to see whether or not a kid is old enough to handle a technology is to give it to them and then take it away and see what happens. If you give your kid a book and then take it away, chances are they’re not going to have a real meltdown. But I used to give Ella an iPad, and when I took it away, there would be kicking, screaming, and crying. It’s a smart way of getting a handle on whether or not the technology is too much for your kid.

What screen time guidelines do you follow in your house?

It’s less what’s on the screen and more how you’re using it. There’s a lot of great programming out there—you just have to know how to find it. If you’re using the screen as a jumping-off point for you and your kid to watch something together and then talk about it later, that can be great.

As most parents know, if you put a kid in front of a TV, their jaw drops open, and it can be hard to get their attention. That’s not the best thing in the world. So consider the best programming for them and also how to use it in a way that is enriching. Realizing this was a big release for me, because I became more comfortable putting my daughter in front of the TV every once in a while.

What advice about technology would you give to parents who are expecting their first child?

The technology that I introduced into my household gave me anxiety more than it calmed me down. After researching it, I realized that the less technology in the house, the better I felt as a parent.

My other piece of advice for all parents is to pick a “rabbi.” By that I mean pick a couple of people and have them be the ones you turn to for advice. For me, that’s my mom and my pediatrician. And, of course, there are friends I will text in the middle of the night and be like, Oh, my God, he’s not sleeping again. What do I do? But if you have just a few people you really trust, they will likely be way better for you than turning to social media, blogs, and things like that.

“You know your kid better than anybody else, so trust that you’re doing the right thing, and try to minimize your anxiety, because you’re not doing anything wrong.”
—Sophie Brickman

What technology makes it easier and more manageable to be a parent?

I can think of two concrete things that I rely on: One is my WhatsApp chain with my close girlfriends. It’s something that is constantly going on in the background, and it’s like a social outlet for me.

The other thing is FaceTime. I know we have so much Zoom fatigue, but particularly during the early, scary parts of the pandemic, being able to have my parents speak to my kids with relative regularity was very comforting. It’s isolating to be a parent, so I think being able to use technology to expand your village, in whatever ways, is really wonderful.

There are many people who lean on screen time because they have to work and don’t have childcare—disproportionately lower-income families and people of color.

How do you think about healthy habits around screens in these circumstances?

I feel like parents across the socioeconomic spectrum wish they didn’t have to rely on technology, specifically on screens. We wish kids could be entertained and enriched in a different way, but we don’t have the support that we need as a society.

I think there comes a moment at which screens can actually be quite beneficial, but for very young kids, boredom and free play are where the magic happens. You want to teach your kids to be able to amuse themselves and to play. This is not as easy as putting them in front of a device—it takes work—and we don’t always have the time to do that work.

I think the notion of our age right now is that every moment needs to be more and more enriched. But if you know that when your kids are just playing with some blocks on the floor, they are becoming smarter and more resilient and more emotionally connected, then you might not feel the need to put them in front of a screen as much.

I think the best that you can do is minimize screen time, especially for kids under the age of five. Ella is now five and a half, and it’s not like a switch flipped in her, but she can understand a lot more on her own with apps that are smartly designed than she could a few years ago.

Who do you think parenting tech is serving?

For the most part, it’s serving anxious parents who have lots of disposable income. Not many parents can afford the $400 baby monitor. The technology is not, at this point, incredibly affordable.

I think that Silicon Valley is hoping it’s going to trickle down and that devices will become more affordable. Right now, though, tech capitalizes on the anxiety of parents, who have been anxious for millennia. When I started researching mothers groups from the 1850s, they were hilariously going through the same things. Parental anxiety doesn’t change from generation to generation. What is slightly different now is that technology is ever present, so whatever anxiety that we had before seems to be amplified, because it exists online in a million forums.

Illustrations by Daniel Gray-Barnett / @dgraybarnett