The Guardian That Never Sleeps
For almost ninety years mass anxieties about kidnapping and child abuse have driven the development of surveillance technologies focused on seeing and hearing children. How might these technologies impact the relationships between mothers and children?
A “Radio Nurse” now brings the nursery into the living room, kitchen, or any other room desired. When a child is sleeping or playing in a room when no older persons are present, every sound within that room can be transmitted to any spot in the house. The outfit consists of a pickup unit, placed near the child to be “watched,” and a loudspeaker which can be placed in any convenient location.
1937 Zenith Radio Nurse Advertising copy
In his recent essay “The Stork,” psychoanalyst Stephen Hartman describes visiting his newborn niece in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) of an upscale New York City hospital. He finds the baby wearing a plastic ankle monitor of the sort created to track pedophiles on house arrest. He learns from the parents that one of these devices is placed on every baby in this NICU to prevent kidnappings. While no actual kidnappings have been attempted, some parents and hospital attendants have, at times, failed to pass a baby over to the desk nurse on the way out of the unit, so that she can deactivate the ankle monitor before they leave. These failures lead to a lock down. The elevator seals to trap whoever is with the baby. Alarms sound, and the unit is impenetrable until the baby can be safely returned to the nurse at the front desk.
Infant ankle monitors can be found in NICUs across the country. Such surveillance technology has—without much thought being given to what it means to developing children, the experience of parenting, or the parent-infant relationship—become an ever-present fact in the social matrix that is contemporary child-rearing. What might the presence of these new forms of tracking and watching mean to the experiences of mothering and of being an infant?
