Baby, Unplugged: One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age

by Sophie Brickman

Overview

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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062966483
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	704,582
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sophie Brickman is a writer, reporter, and editor who has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Saveur, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other outlets. Her work has also appeared in the Best Food Writing and the Best American Science Writing anthologies. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part 1 Parentech

1 The Quantified Child Do We Really Need This Much Baby Data? 31

2 It Takes a Virtual Village Can Online Parenting Groups Replace IRL? 61

3 Baby Paparazzi If You're Capturing the Moment, Are You Ever in It? 93

4 Buy, Buy, Baby Are We Strong Enough to Escape E-commerce? 131

Part 2 Babytech

5 Plug and Play Are Smart Toys Better than Analog Blocks? 157

6 Couch Fingerlings Is Preschool Programming Worse than Ever? 187

7 Swiped Out Will Interactive Apps Change the Game? 215

8 See Spot Sprint Can E-books Improve Upon Print Ones? 253

Conclusion 287

Acknowledgments 305

Index 309

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/05/2021

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. Agent: Amelia Atlas and Kari Stuart, ICM. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Baby, Unplugged is a heartfelt, thoughtful, and warmly humorous odyssey through parenting in the Digital Age. Sophie Brickman looks to science for guidance, makes decisions from knowledge rather than fear, and humbly shares her mistakes and successes. We can all benefit from her journey.

MICHAEL RICH

If you feel overwhelmed by your digital existence, definitely make time to unplug and read this book.

Boston Globe

In Baby Unplugged, Sophie Brickman doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable conversations or uncomfortable conclusions about herself, her generation or why technology is often compensating for historic failures to support parents and kids. This is a book for parents, grandparents and anyone who loves kids or is curious about childhood, including their own. It is also fantastically well-written, both challenging and fun to read and deserves a place on your bookshelf.

CHELSEA CLINTON

Sophie Brickman has crafted a comprehensive, personal, hilarious exploration of all the ways technology touches our children’s lives, for better and for worse. Baby, Unplugged explains the terms and conditions of our wired families; read this book before you touch one more ‘on’ button.

DAVID L. HILL

Well-researched and unvarnished conclusions.

Wall Street Journal

Well-researched and unvarnished conclusions.

Wall Street Journal