We’ve all seen that painting, or one like it. A mother slumped in exhaustion beside her child’s bed, fighting to keep her eyes open through another endless night. Christian Krohg’s 1883 masterpiece captures something timeless about parenthood: that bone-deep fatigue that comes from caring for someone who cannot care for themselves. Today, we have a solution for that exhausted parent: the baby monitor. A device that promises you can finally get some sleep while still watching over your child. The camera never blinks. The microphone never misses a sound. Technology, we’re told, makes us better parents. But what if that’s not quite the whole story?
Christian Krohg; Mother & Child (1883)
There’s a difference between the caring that flows naturally from love and the caring we have to consciously maintain when we’re stretched thin. Natural caring has limits. We get tired, we need to sleep, we have other responsibilities pulling at our attention. The baby monitor enters right at this threshold, promising to bridge the gap when we simply cannot stay awake another minute. It extends our awareness beyond the walls. Except awareness isn’t the same thing as caring.
The monitor can tell you when your baby needs something, but it can’t warm them, feed them, or comfort them. It extends your surveillance, not your presence. And it might actually change something fundamental about how you connect with your child. A parent learns to read their infant through countless hours of physical proximity: the feel of their breathing, the warmth of their skin, the subtle differences between an “I’m hungry” cry and an “I’m uncomfortable” cry. What happens when you learn to read your baby through a screen instead? When their breathing becomes a waveform, their movements a series of motion alerts? The attention changes. It becomes filtered, abstracted, mediated.
Caring for dependent people requires practical wisdom, the ability to interpret needs that can’t be clearly stated. You develop this wisdom through sustained physical presence, learning the vocabulary of someone else’s body, their patterns, their particular ways of expressing discomfort or contentment. The baby monitor offers you data instead: breathing rate, movement patterns, sound levels. But data isn’t interpretation. The parent who learns to distinguish seven different types of crying, who can sense something’s wrong before any alarm goes off, that parent has developed knowledge that can’t be captured by sensors. The device gives you information. Care requires attunement. They’re not the same thing.
Consider the parent who checks the monitor compulsively, anxiety amplified rather than eased by constant surveillance. Or the parent who starts trusting the device’s silence more than their own intuition, who overrides that nagging feeling that something’s wrong because the monitor shows everything’s fine. These aren’t failures of care. They’re transformations in how care happens, changes that slip into our lives without much conscious thought about what they mean.
By suggesting that monitoring an infant is essentially a data problem, manufacturers imply that the work parents have always done isn’t really that complex. But what these devices can’t replace are the fundamental elements of caring: sustained attention to a specific person, physical presence that enables embodied response, the practical wisdom that develops through repetition, and the reciprocal relationship where the person being cared for responds to your presence. Your baby can’t respond to you through a monitor. The device creates pseudo-presence, awareness without embodiment, knowing without all the tactile, olfactory, and emotional dimensions that constitute actually being there.
None of this means exhausted parents shouldn’t use baby monitors. Parents need sleep. Sometimes you need to be in another room. The devices serve real purposes. But we should recognize what we’re trading. When surveillance becomes the primary mode of parental presence, when monitoring replaces the messier, more demanding work of sustained physical proximity, care transforms into something else. It becomes management, a system, a practice that looks more like institutional oversight than intimate attention.
Krohg’s exhausted mother hasn’t left the room. She hasn’t delegated awareness to a device. Her care, however taxing, remains immediate and embodied. She’s right there. As technology extends further into how we care for children, and increasingly, how we monitor aging parents, track partners’ locations, and maintain awareness of everyone we love, we might ask ourselves: Does this technology enable care, or does it progressively displace care with something that merely resembles it?
The real work of caring has never been about perfect monitoring. It’s about being present, even imperfectly, even while exhausted. Technology can supplement that presence. But it can’t replace what happens when one human being holds another in mind, in body, in the fullness of attention that care requires.