How Your Baby Monitor Can Help And Hurt Your Sleep

Let’s chat about how your baby monitor, and how it can be your best friend, it can also be kind of your worst enemy. I love our baby monitor; we have the Infant Optics and and I like that you can have four cameras on the same monitor. It doesn't do a split screen option; you just have to flip through the screens to see what's going on.

Of the four cameras that you can't have, we actually use three of them because we have one in the room that my boys share, one in the baby’s room and then we have one in our room that is focused on the floor where our little one does his rest time while the middle boy has his nap their room - I wanted to separate them for that time. 

How Your Baby Monitor Can Help Your Sleep

Your baby monitor can be like your BFF because it can be your eyes and ears without having to physically stay in the room. It's really nice to be able to just look at the monitor, see exactly what's happening, the position that your baby is in, if they're crying you can take a look at why they're crying before you decide if you need to intervene. 

It can be a nice middleman because it gives you that second to stop to pause and look at what's actually happening before you respond. 

Also, if you have the talk feature for older children, this can be really helpful because you can use that feature and they can just talk out loud and you'll be able to respond to them. That works for my 5 year old. It's really helpful during his rest times. 

For example: if he builds something and he wants me to see it he’ll yell out to me and I can just talk right back “Bud, that looks so cool! I can't wait to come and see it after rest time”. 

So that feature really gives you interaction without anyone having to leave the room or anything. It also helps at bedtime, if something happens, they can call out to me and I'll be able to respond without physically having to go into the room which can cause more disruption.

How Your Baby Monitor Can Hurt Your Sleep

The reason that it can be kind of detrimental to your sleep at the same time as being your BFF is if you become too reliant on it. When we sleep trained my oldest, I watched that monitor like a TV. 

The first time that he ever slept in his own room when we started sleep training, I just like had the monitor and I was watching it the entire time. We have planned something to watch so I would be distracted but I didn’t look up at the TV once, I just watched the monitor like a hawk. 

If you feel like the monitor is producing more anxiety, or you're just really fixated on the monitor, that's where it can be a little bit different because you're not actually living your life and giving that space because you are just watching that monitor. Be careful of that. 

Also for overnight if you have the monitor right next to you and the volume is all the way up that is going to be disruptive to your sleep.. If your child makes any noise, any movement, you are going to hop up right away and run in to help them. We want to still provide that pause, provide that wait time so that they can settle themselves. Maybe they're just rolling around or maybe they're just crying out between cycles and will be able to get back to sleep. 

But if you have that monitor super close to you and you hear them make any noise and your first instinct is to jump out of bed and run to where they are sleeping, that's actually not going to be helpful for anyone. It's going to be bad for your sleep and it’s going to be that for their sleep because they probably didn't need the help, but you hearing them and rushing in can actually interrupt their sleep and cause them to wake up when they may not have been already. 

Definitely something to be mindful of. Even if the monitor is right next to you, volume is turned all the way up but you're not going into the room, it's still waking you up. 

I do have the monitor next to our bed, on my bedside table but turned the volume down to the lowest level. So if someone does call out or cry out in the middle of the night I will wake up, but it's not like a blaring noise that is really going to like startle me out of a sleep. It's going take a couple of minutes of one of them crying out or calling for me for me to then wake up and check the monitor and then decide if it's something that I need to go and help with.

So definitely make sure to monitor your monitor use and decide if it’s something that is helping you to support and engage with your child or if it’s actually hurting yours and your little one’s sleep.

If you have any questions about monitor use, about our personal monitor or my monitor recommendations, pop them in the comments and I will answer them!