Two months after my youngest daughter, Constance, was born, I reached a low ebb.

Still recovering from a C-section and exhausted by juggling a baby with her six-year-old sister Alexandra, I began to feel desperate.

Particularly when Constance became a nap-refusenik, too.

It was during a moment of profound sleep-deprived weakness that I found myself turning to the internet for help.

In this AI age, I thought, there must be some sort of gizmo or app that would fix my daughter's erratic sleeping patterns?

Sure enough, I discovered a plethora of gadgets and apps, each promising to get Constance to sleep. So began my ever-so-slightly alarming journey into the world of baby tech.

And I'm certainly not the only one to fall prey to the algorithms in the small hours. The global smart baby monitor market is said to be worth $1.65billion (£1.3billion). No doubt fuelled by the estimated four in five Millennial parents who've turned to tech.

But if we rely on apps to tell us when to feed our babies or put them to sleep, along with machines to rock and shush them, aren't we in danger of killing our maternal instinct?




Arabella turned to baby tech after growing desperate while juggling both Constance and her six-year-old sister Alexandra

Then there's my concern about what these companies do with all the data they've gathered on our babies.

One report suggests a pregnant woman - and even her baby - is particularly lucrative when it comes to data. ‘Marketers are willing to pay more to reach consumers at major life events... the more intimate the information, the more valuable it is.'

It seems a host of complicated feelings is fuelling this valuable market - a need for control among them, as well as a fear of doing something wrong and the fact that these days we're all so used to finding solutions at speed.

The £1,395 price tag deterred me from buying the crib that rocks and shushes your baby with white noise - despite it adjusting the speed of its motion and volume depending on the strength of their crying.

But I did succumb to the Pampers Smart Sleep Coach app (monthly subscription £29.99), which promised to track my baby's awake windows to make napping ‘a breeze'.

Within hours of downloading it, I did feel more in control. Notifications gave me prompts for when I should be putting her to sleep and adjusted her bedtime according to her real-time nap patterns. With my mother living over an hour away, my husband, a businessman who is often out and no one else to ask, it was oddly comforting - like a robotic maternity nurse.

A couple of times, it did actually work. Keeping Constance awake longer than I would have judged acceptable by her tiredness cues, she napped when the app had predicted - albeit only for 40 minutes.

On other occasions, I would be picking up my eldest daughter from school and the app would start to buzz insistently in my pocket to alert me to the fact I should be putting Constance down for her nap; a digital reminder I was failing one child as I met the other's needs. I started to question when I should follow my instinct or the app.




After being deterred by the and alert me only if my baby does need attention.

But Chelsea Conaboy, mother of two and author of the acclaimed book Mother Brain: Separating Myth From Biology, says some anxiety - for example, uncertainty over naptimes and concern over feeding patterns - is ‘productive'. That's how parents learn to read their babies' needs.

She concludes, as I do, that following tech's ‘recommended data' - which is based on averages, not individual children - is not enough. ‘We need to make mistakes to develop the maternal brain,' she says. Today, my gadgets are long gone. Some days Constance naps for two hours straight, some days she doesn't. But now I know no technology can fix that.

In The Blood by Arabella Byrne and Julia Hamilton is out now.


John Lewis