Last fall, 31-year-old Nicole, a mom from North Carolina, took her first vacation since giving birth to her one-year-old son. She and her husband packed up the Owlet Cam baby monitor, left the infant in a rented apartment within the Outer Banks, and headed without hesitation to the beach, a 5-minute walk away. She said it’s common for her to leave her baby unattended while they monitor him remotely.
“We sat on the beach and watched the monitor,” said Nicole, who asked The Post to use a pseudonym. She noticed that the monitor has a built-in app that sends her phone notifications when it detects movement or sound.
“We do it on a regular basis. No point in having a babysitter. We frequently return and check on him,” she said.
Parents are increasingly – and controversially – counting on nannies as short-term caregivers. Synchronized with smartphones, high-tech devices can track their kid’s every move after they are away from home for a couple of minutes or a few hours. But leaving children unattended can have potentially dangerous consequences and end in legal charges.
This week, the wife of the late ABC News producer Dax Tejera, 37, was arrested for allegedly exposing their daughters aged 5 months and a pair of years, just hours after her husband suffered a fatal heart attack. The couple left their children alone in a hotel room on the Manhattan Yale Club while they visited a steakhouse across the corner, sources told The Post on Tuesday.
Veronica, a 33-year-old senior producer on the Washington Post, claimed the couple monitored the youngsters via a distant video system attached to Dax’s phone. The widow was charged with two charges of “acting in a way that was harmful to a child” and later admitted that leaving her children unattended was a “bad decision”.
Parenting experts agree along with her assessment and advise against leaving your child alone – with or without a baby monitor.
“Things can change within the blink of a watch,” Liza Maltz, doula and founding father of childcare website HaveaNanny.com, told The Post. “I’m not a fan of watching a baby monitor – having one is convenient – but using it as a babysitter? I do not think it’s protected.”
Some parents still depend on them when needed but cannot use them outside the house.
Pete, a 34-year-old father from Westchester who asked The Post not to publish his name for privacy reasons, said he relies on his $240 Vava nanny to keep watch over his 10-month-old twins when he occasionally slips past on dinner and drinks with friends while the children are sleeping.
“I used to be at a party at my neighbor’s house within the backyard round the corner with a monitor in my hand and locking the home. But I could reach them in lower than a minute if something went mistaken,” he said.
“I might never do this in a hotel. I might have a panic attack. I would not even give you the chance to enjoy myself if I did not have quick access to them or in a place where I did not have full control over the locks, like in my very own house within the suburbs,” he said.
Other parents note that there are cultural differences and that this practice is common in Europe.
Meg Faherty, a 38-year-old mother of a 6-month-old from Greenville, South Carolina, said she used the monitor as a temporary babysitter while abroad.
“While we lived in Europe, my husband and I used the monitor as a ‘babysitter’ on a regular basis, while having fun with a drink or late dinner on the restaurant below our apartment,” she told The Post in an email. “It seems to be a more accepted practice abroad.”
Nevertheless, leaving a child unattended, even for a couple of minutes, has had a devastating effect on some parents. In 2014 Kim Brooks he wrote a first-person essay for Salon in regards to the decision she made in a split second to leave her son, then 4, within the automotive for “about 5 minutes” while she ran to the shop.
“I told him I’d be right back.” I broke the windows, locked the door and double clicked the keys to set the automotive alarm,” Brooks wrote. After a bystander recorded the incident on his phone and sent it to the police, a warrant was issued for her arrest, and Brooks was charged with contributing to a juvenile delinquency.
“I felt guilty and ashamed. I felt that I might put my child at risk for my very own temporary convenience. I knew I wasn’t a terrible mother, but I did something terrible, dangerous, and now I’m going to face the results, go to court, pay legal fees, live with a criminal record,” she wrote.
Other moms said they might never leave their children alone after the horrific disappearance of Madeleine McCann, a 3-year-old British girl who disappeared from her bed in 2007 at a holiday home in Portugal while her parents were dining nearby, occasionally checking in how are she and her two younger siblings. The 11-year missing person investigation was concluded last 12 months and the case stays unsolved.
“As a mom, once I heard this story, it was at all times at the back of my mind that I could not leave my kids alone in a room, with or without a baby monitor. I used to be too neurotic about that,” Jamie Ratner, a 45-year-old mother-of-two from Potomac, Maryland, told The Post.
“The danger, if there may be any, is at all times small, but you concentrate on the parents and the way sorry they have to be. Do you really want to exit for that drink? How essential is it? You will spend your whole life wishing you’d left them alone.