The Robotics of Modern Parenting
Words Michael David Mitchell Illustrations María Ramos Bravo
“Did you know that some regimes use the sound of crying babies as a form of torture?”
That was one of the questions designer Yves Béhar asked me when I interviewed him about the Snoo — a robotic bassinet he designed in 2016 that reacts to a baby’s cries with increasingly vigorous microshaking and swooshing white noise until its occupant falls back asleep. This augmented crib, co-created with paediatrician Harvey Karp, is marketed to Americans who are increasingly without family support and need to go back to work quickly. It’s for parents who need speedy relief in a country that does not guarantee any form of parental leave.
According to Karp and Béhar’s data, and supported by many testimonials on the web, babies in a Snoo not only drop off more easily, but also often slumber for up to six hours within the first months of use. As a parent myself, who knows what it is like to barely sleep with a newborn, an easy bedtime routine and six hours of uninterrupted shut-eye seem as welcome and restful as a month-long vacation on a Greek island.
The efficiency of the bassinet, and the society that demands it, puts me in an intellectual bind, however. Even as I squirm at the idea of delegating an essential parenting role to a robot, I recall our own child-soothing difficulties and recognise that there are few modern societies that retain or innovate support structures for parents of young children. “It is not another baby bed,” says Karp, “but more like a robot, or an additional member of the family there to help when you need it most, available 24/7.” As creepy as that sounds, any help parents can get in those trying first months should be welcomed, but with caution.
The Snoo first entered my life in 2018, when I made a trip to San Francisco to visit my friends Len and Andrea and their two-month-old baby boy. At first, I thought that the beautiful bassinet was just another well-designed object in their craftsman-style house in Berkeley. The dark-wood finish of the basket and the elegant lines of its Eames-inspired wire legs fitted their home. It did not appear techy or over-designed, with the cloth mesh that envelops the upper two-thirds of the bassinet giving a clear line of sight to the baby. Even without the Snoo’s technological enhancements, it would make for a nice object.
Len and Andrea work in tech, have plenty of disposable income and are under pressure to put in long hours — they are Snoo’s target consumers par excellence. Len was excited to explain to me how the crib, which they bought second-hand for considerably less than the $1,200 retail price, was less a piece of furniture and more akin to the internet-connected speaker-microphones and cameras dispersed throughout their home. When their infant began to cry, they swaddled him in a “Snoo Sack” and velcroed him into the bassinet, hitting the single button to activate it.
“I know it looks wrong,” Len told me as we leant over the crib and watched it gently shake their baby boy to the accompaniment of white noise coming from its integrated speakers, the whole ensemble conjuring images of futuristic hospital incubators. “This is nothing, though. As the program goes to level four, it kind of looks like the crib is shaking the hell out of your baby. But it’s safe and it works. Microphones pick up the baby’s cries to initiate the rocking motion, and if it doesn’t put him to sleep after three minutes, we get a message on our phones telling us to go check in on him because he needs feeding or changing or perhaps simply some human love.”
While it may seem unsavoury, the Snoo’s swaddling, white noise and micro-shakes are part of a highly researched design. The Snoo is aimed at replicating the conditions of the womb where, according to Karp, babies develop the “calming reflex”. This operates as an “off-switch” for crying babies and finding it involves putting into action Karp’s “5 S’s” methodology for soothing babies: Swaddle, Side-Stomach Position, Shush, Swing and Suck. “The underlying premise is that human babies are essentially born too early in their development, so they need a postpartum ‘fourth trimester’ to adjust to the outside world,” says Karp. The 5 S’s technique and its automated, mechanical implementation by the Snoo are supposed to fill in for this missed fourth trimester. “The rhythmic and repetitive swooning sounds, the perpetual kind of movement that the body creates when the mother moves, are all deep experiential moments that we based the prototypes on,” says Béhar.
As a parent, this theory makes sense. I have intuitively discovered many of these techniques myself through trial and error, as well as being coached on others by experienced grandparents. Child-soothing methods vary across cultures — from slinging the baby in a shawl and carrying them on a mother’s back, to warmly wrapping them in blankets and animal skins to nap next to a window or even outside in the cold — but all reproduce the conditions of the womb to some extent. What’s novel about Karp’s technique and bassinet is the way that the science is packaged and explained to US parents as a solution to a set of contradictory conditions: little to no paid leave; stringent paediatric recommendations that are nearly impossible to follow to the letter; social pressure to be the perfect parent; and increasing geographical distance from family members who might otherwise help. All of these factors collide to make for an anxiety-filled parenting experience that is exacerbated every time a barely post-foetal human’s screams pierce the eardrums and torture the soul.
Len and Andrea’s child went from crying to sleeping in less than two minutes. I was impressed, all the while wondering if I would be able to delegate an essential parenting task to a piece of robotic furniture. My intuition was that I had learned an awful lot in those difficult first months, creating a bond with my child by learning to listen to her cries in the middle of the night and working with her to find ways out of these crises. During the best of these moments, as the moonlight came through the window to light up her little face at 3am, I was eternally thankful for both the trials and joys of early parenting. During the worst, I had dark thoughts about throwing her out that very same window.
Karp is aware of the situation in which parents find themselves. “We are currently living [through] one of the largest mass experiments in history, where parents are raising their children for the first time far from the help of grandparents and communities, and often both are working full-time,” he says. “The psychological and physiological effects of sleep deprivation on the parents, which include exhaustion and depression, can be devastating.” As such, Karp believes it’s through alleviating sleep deprivation that the Snoo can make a difference in people’s lives. It’s with this in mind that an increasing number of companies whose employees decide to procreate — disturbing their capacity to produce value for employers — are now offering the bassinet as a contractual benefit. Béhar’s design and consultancy firm Fuseproject is one of them. “I had a first-hand experience with it — it was so amazing,” Béhar says. “We’ve been giving them to the whole team ever since. Our CFO just went on maternity leave and she told me that it definitely convinced them to have a second child.” Facebook, Google, Snap, Activision, Weight Watchers, Button, Hulu, Qualcomm and Newscorp are among the more than 30 US corporations that arrange for a loaned Snoo for employees when they get home with their newborn.
These mostly West Coast tech companies communicate their benefit scheme online and internally as a form of benevolent paternalism: patting employees on the back by giving them a tool to make it through difficult parenting moments. But by offering the Snoo as an employee benefit they are also making a hardline, return-on-investment calculation that their employees will return to work sooner, better-rested, happier and, above all, more efficient. “For these companies, the return on investment is immediate,” says Karp. “These returns include higher employee retention and productivity, as well as reduced errors, accidents and absenteeism.” Rahab Hammad, the benefits manager at Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, says that “we’ve been told by our employees that the Snoo is by far the best benefit we’ve ever offered.” She adds that supporting parents “is part of the company’s DNA”, pointing to a trend in US start-up culture that seeks to fill the void created by the government’s lack of parental leave policy. As it stands, the US is one of only eight countries that do not mandate some form of paid parental leave.[1]
On the East Coast, the NYC-based software company Button has been particularly vocal on social media about offering the Snoo to its employees, going as far as creating a media campaign based around employee and recent father Dan Lee. Happy pictures shared on LinkedIn and the Snoo website show Lee’s well-slept family in their home — a telling example of the continual blurring of the lines between work life and private life, of which the Snoo as an employee perk is only one example. “Snoo has helped me maintain a certain degree of consistency with quality of work,” Lee says in a blogpost, adding that the “Snoo is another thing to help keep me sharp and focused.” The post itself and its associated hashtags #companyculture and #worklifebalance show how companies are seeking to attract talent by offering alluring family benefits. But it also illustrates how market-based solutions only emerge when having children is seen as being an obstacle to employee efficiency, instead of a social and economic good in itself.
“One of Button’s guiding principles is ‘Family first’,” says Button’s co-founder Stephen Milbank. “We work to make building a family the best experience possible for our employees because we recognise that our people must be happy at home to be able to provide their full contributions to Button.” The paternalistic sleight of hand lurking behind “Family first”, however, helps hide the fact that the majority of US workers who have children are expected to bear the costs of childcare and maintain the home economy without social services to mitigate the economic risks of raising children. The burden of producing the next generation of workers is placed entirely on the shoulders of parents. Even if there is an uptick in companies offering decent paid leave and benefits such as the Snoo, the spectre of economic recession and company downsizing will continue to haunt young families until a non-market-based solution is firmly established.
Having grown up in the United States but raised my children in my wife’s native Switzerland (which has the least progressive social plan for new parents in Western Europe, with one day of paternity leave and a meagre 14 weeks of maternity leave), I often wonder what family life would be like in a country that guarantees a year to both parents, free childcare from ages nought to seven, and which structures society around the perception of raising children as a social good instead of a hindrance to career advancement. In the absence of comprehensive, state-guaranteed childcare and progressive parental-leave policies, we feel forced to sacrifice to ensure our children’s upbringing and feel punished for contributing to the population of our tiny alpine country.
In the US, if you are not lucky enough to have the Snoo provided by your employer, you can now rent one from Karp’s company, Happiest Baby. Priced from $3.50 per day, the rental Snoo is described by Karp as “the daily price of a cup of coffee you’d buy to stay awake anyway”. Happiest Baby initially tried out the rental scheme with companies local to its Santa Monica headquarters, making sure the refurbished Snoos were safe on a small scale before offering the service to the general population. But at $112 a month for five to six months, the product is beyond the budget of many US parents. While one could argue that market-based solutions like this can help to soothe the woes of early parenting, those who work in the service industry, for instance, and other impoverished parents working multiple jobs pay cheque to pay cheque, are not likely to be reached by this kind of approach.
“My goal is to get it into 100 per cent of homes with children,” says Karp, who is hopeful that governments and insurance companies will subsidise the Snoo for parents who cannot afford it, “not only as a way to treat sleep deprivation and postpartum depression, but as a preventative measure as well.” But there is still a significant portion of parents who fall between the two categories of “those who can afford it, and those who cannot afford to not buy one,” as Karp puts it, referring to those parents who are so desperate they pay the price no matter how high.
Isn’t the Snoo, then, an expensive band-aid for a deeply ill society that only the privileged can afford, or that the less wealthy have to overextend for? Is it yet another example of the growing divide between the privileged tech industry and the rest of the country, like Facebook’s private shuttles for workers’ commutes, or the rising costs and increased homelessness in San Francisco and Silicon Valley? And would the Snoo be as successful in a country like Denmark, where new parents are legally guaranteed 52 weeks of paid leave? When I bring up this line of questioning with Béhar, he bristles. “Both progressive child-care policies and new tools are needed; it’s not an either-or situation. I think progressive policies are crucial and I do think that tools such as the Snoo are important, and education is key as well.” But this combination of private and public solutions has historically failed the most vulnerable in the US, and it’s hard to see how a technological patch like the Snoo is a long-term and viable answer when taken in isolation. Béhar advocates a dual approach, but what happens when one half of that duality seems unlikely to arrive in the foreseeable future?
While the creators of the Snoo may have the best of intentions, a social product should be examined through its effects and effectiveness in the world. From a policy standpoint, creating an efficient robot helper to ease the pains of the first months of childcare — help only previously accessible to those who could afford a night nanny or who lived near willing grandparents — may produce the unintended consequence of the privileged losing sight of the travails of the most at-risk populations, further weakening the tenuous solidarity between social classes. This could translate into less political pressure to transform US child-care policies, leaving children in poverty even further excluded from basic necessities. Béhar likes to argue that design has the power to change society, but in a society as stratified as the United States, one must ask the question: which society do we want to change and for the benefit of whom?
In my conversations with Karp and Béhar, both seem genuinely concerned about the plight of modern parents, while being acutely aware of the business opportunity this affords. “When we were testing prototypes on grad students, before they tried it, we asked them how much they were willing to pay for this type of bassinet,” says Karp. “They said, ‘Perhaps $200 or $300.’ When we came back two weeks later, they were willing to give us $5,000 to keep it.” While there is no inherent contradiction here — but instead a keen and perhaps healthy entrepreneurial opportunism — I cannot shake the uneasy feeling that Karp and Béhar have gone somewhere they should not have. They have ventured into the sacred territory of the parent-child relationship to interject a foreign object between beings who are at the very beginning of the long road of trying to understand each other.
My intuitions about the potential developmental risks of Snooing are reinforced when I speak to developmental child psychologist Maureen O’Brien, who is based in New York state and often consults on baby-tech products. “A baby’s first couple of months are essential to their development,” she says. “We used to think that not much learning was going on during this period, but now we know that babies’ brains are in a state of hyper excitement, growing at an exceptional and unique rate in human development — the most meaningful relationships are built in their first year of life, it is how they create the meaning of their world.” O’Brien assures me that she has great respect for Karp and that his work has helped countless parents. “But the Snoo is an object, not a person. This must surely have some effect on the parent-child relationship over the long term.” For her, the big question is: “Are we going to use technology for quick fixes to problems when raising children, or are we going to work with baby to find a solution together, until that relationship is fully developed?”
When I ask Béhar about this, he is keen to draw distinctions: “You can’t just discount all technology wholesale, as all being the same thing.” Béhar tells me that he has been a vocal critic of the socially disruptive potential of some inventions and is adamant that his aim is to create robots to help those who are most in need. “Dr Karp’s techniques are extremely effective, the 5 S’s are very teachable and learnable technique — any parent can be proficient,” he says. “But late at night, your ability to deliver the technique is not optimal. People lose patience, feel defeated, all the way to postpartum depression.” This is where, for Béhar and Karp, robots can help the most. In a culture where people are no longer surrounded by a community to support their efforts, and there is no governmental structure in place to help, robotics can solve some of these specific needs. “Yes, the Snoo is a technological object, but so is the average baby crib that was developed in the Middle Ages. It’s just a smarter and safer baby swing,” argues Karp.
Focusing on the “robotness” of the product, however, would neglect the design effort involved in creating something that does not look or feel like a robot. “We wanted to turn Harvey [Karp]’s technique for calming babies to sleep into a robot for parents in need, but what should that robot look and feel like?” asks Béhar. “Yes, the Snoo is a technological object, but it needs to be integrated into the home and childhood in ways that provide a service but do not communicate its robotic self.” Seen from this perspective, Béhar’s design is extremely successful. People who purchase, rent or are loaned the Snoo most likely do not consider it a robot at all, given that it is designed with fabrics, wood and metal — much like a piece of furniture with extra capabilities. When I reach out to Andrea and Len to see how they are getting along with their boy, who just celebrated his first birthday, they recoil in mock horror at the idea that the Snoo is a robot-helper. “It’s a terrible idea to call it a robot,” says Andrea. “I didn’t see it as a robot at all but as the future of bassinets. As in: this is the way all bassinets are going to be in the future.” Len is more categorical: “No parent wants to call it a robot.”
Andrea and Len explain that parents are alreadyunder a lot of pressure to do everything perfectly and by themselves: pressure to breastfeed and not use formula; cook healthy meals and not resort to canned food; make sure the baby is developing on all levels by buying the right books and toys; ensure that the stroller, car seat and all the other parenting paraphernalia is the best and safest; and much more. According to them, any focus on the “robotic self” of the Snoo would increase parental guilt about delegating essential nurturing responsibilities to an automaton. “It’d be an especially bad idea in this moment when there is a lot of pushback on all of the smart-home, Internet-of-Things trends,” says Andrea. “An idea is really taking hold that we are losing the essential warmth of our house by interjecting these objects between ourselves and our living spaces.”
While companies and policymakers around the world increasingly sing the praises of artificial intelligence and hyperconnectivity, some on the West Coast who have lived this reality for the past 10 years are already wary. But what to make of my friends’ apparent cognitive dissonance? The Snoo is a robot, a connected thing doing some of the work of parenting for you, crunching algorithms instead of relying on human intelligence. It fits into the growing category of hyper-connected monitors, as the quantified baby becomes a reality in many households. Is Béhar’s design so triumphant that it masks a nefarious societal hubris, or is the Snoo so ahead of the curve as to avoid the pitfalls of less elegant connected products?
The answer might lie in how much we accept as truth or bluster what Béhar calls his ’10 Principles for Design in the Age of AI’. The three he mentioned in our conversation were: 1) Design solves an important human problem; 3) Design enhances human ability (without replacing the human); and 7) Good design brings about products and services that build longterm relationships (but don’t create emotional dependency). Looking closely at each one, I can only partially agree in regards to the Snoo. Yes, the Snoo solves an important human problem, but perhaps people consider waking up several times a night to take care of their child a problem because we live in a society that expects parents to be both devoted caregivers and efficient workers. Yes, it enhances human abilities without replacing them, given that the crib does turn off after three minutes, but have we thought enough about what it means to have an object put our baby to sleep for us? And, no, it does not create emotional dependency — because parents are forewarned that the crib is a six-month fix and much effort has gone into educating users on how to wean their baby into a regular bed — but what is the use of removing the emotional attachment to an intermediary object when emotions are the keystone to developing a healthy relationship with a newborn?
While the aesthetic design of the robotic Snoo does not evoke dystopian nightmares of humanoid machines enslaving humanity, the type of society it springs from and ultimately enables seems a more subtle type of dystopia. Béhar, however, remains positive in the face of my criticisms — perhaps a testament to his years in California, where the ideology of Silicon Valley remains optimistic at heart. His positivity may also be down to his own experiences with parenting and the reactions to the product that he’s received. “The reality is parents are mostly handling their baby by themselves,” he says. “My personal experience was one of exhaustion, having to get up between feedings at night and the baby not going right back to sleep — it’s the hardest part of having a newborn. The Snoo is game-changing.”
Béhar points me to the hours of positive testimony on the web and social media about how transformative his creation has been for tens of thousands of people. “Sleep deprivation is torture,” reads a case study from Kate in Minnesota on the Happiest Baby website. “Snoo is so worth it.” Jill from California concurs: “People said we’d never sleep with triplets, they didn’t have Snoo!” I both agree and disagree, stuck in the same intellectual bind that has gripped me since I first encountered the little robot I have come to love and hate, and which I secretly covet while still deploring the society that makes it so covetable.
Towards the end of our conversation, Béhar brushes off my criticisms emphatically. “The Snoo has really transformed the experience for parents, making having children easier, better,” he says. “They are happier and able to provide a happier first few months to their children, partner and baby. It’s [received] once-in-a-career, universal praise.” Still, even if the Snoo is a triumph of design, it is a triumph that has little to say about the social ills that afflict the vast majority of parents in the US. It is the ultimate design-techno-parenting solution for those who can afford it, or whose employers deem it an attractive employee benefit. But I worry about its contribution to the solution-based mode of parenting that risks supplanting deeply rooted parent-child relationship-building with technological quick-fixes. Maybe it’s a good thing that the first months of raising a child are hard. When I look back at that time, it seems to have gone by too quickly. And while sometimes unpleasant, it was a period of extreme growth for me as a parent and individual.
That said, Len and Andrea seem to be doing fine after their experience with the Snoo. Having survived the first months with much fewer torturous nights than my wife and I endured, they seem to be well-adjusted, aware parents who know how to listen to their boy’s needs even if he can’t yet express them verbally. In the end, we all fuck up our children, as our parents did us, just in very different ways — it’s what gives them their personality and fodder for years of therapy. Who knows how my kids or their kids will turn out? The only way to tell will be in a couple of decades, as they ask themselves the questions we all ask ourselves at some point: why the hell did my parents make the decisions they did while they were raising me? By then, the Snoo will be just another parental anecdote from a time they will never recall.
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[1] The others are Papua New Guinea, Suriname, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Tonga.
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This feature originally appeared in the Autumn 2019 edition of Disegno, the Quarterly Journal of Design.
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