A Mom Is Wondering When To Stop Using A Baby Monitor In Her Kid's Room

Confession: my daughter is six years old, and we still have a video monitor in her room. I don’t stream it while she’s asleep. In fact, I rarely look at the footage at all, but for some reason, I just don’t feel ready to take it out of her room. She still gets up in the middle of the night sometimes, or if I hear a weird crash in her room, I can quickly open the app and see she knocked over a lamp in the midst of a sleep position change. I guess I just feel like I’ll know when it’s time to take the monitor out.

One mom wondered when other parents decided that it’s time to pull the plug on monitoring and posted her story in the /Parenting subreddit.

The original poster (OP), a toddler mom with another on the way, says she uses the baby monitor every single night. She was especially thankful for the surveillance after her two-year-old got stuck in her crib slats, and she was able to help her before she hit absolute panic mode.

With another kid on the way, she’s wondering if she should just take their existing video monitor out of the two-year-old’s room and hand it over to the baby.

“... we understand that she's not going to need to be monitored forever,” she said.

Several Reddit parents admitted that they, too, still had a monitor in their older kid’s rooms while others nixed the monitors once they were more independent sleepers.

“My son's 4 and I still keep it on. I think I'll eventually stop when I know he'll sleep through the night without fail. I've had a few instances where hes woken and just stood at his door in the night,” one mom wrote.

“I have a 2 year old and almost 5 year old and haven’t turned the monitors on at night in probably a year,” another admitted. “I use them during the day to watch my 4 year old during her quiet time, though. I like to be able to see what she’s doing in her room and make sure it’s safe.”

“We stopped once they were out of the crib and could get out of bed and their room to come get us on their own if they needed something,” another said.

One mom said that they were never video monitor people and opted for an old school audio monitor.

“I know this isn't helpful to your specific set of options -- but we only ever used audio monitors (rather than video), so that we could hear if baby was crying (our room was on a different floor),” they said.

“Our youngest is 7 and we actually still have them set up -- we just use it as an intercom between the floors, so instead of calling up the stairs for them to come down, I can speak to them through the monitor. I tend to leave it off most of the time when they are playing.....my brain can only tolerate hearing barbie games for so long.”

Read the entire thread here.