How To: Dehumanize Parenthood
“Both the Radio Nurse and the Owlet Smart Sock are examples of products that attempt to design certainty into the inherently messy condition of parenthood.”
By Emily Kwok
On March 1, 1932, an unidentified figure crept into the unmonitored nursery of the world-renowned Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s home in Hopewell, New Jersey. The trespasser aimed to kidnap the couple’s 20-month-old baby for ransom, leaving behind only a pair of unidentifiable muddy bootprints and a note on the nursery windowsill demanding $50,000.
An article published by The New York Times in 1973 reveals the staggering amount of press attention the crime received. While reviewing Anne’s book Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, writer Alfred Kazin reflects, “The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby was the occasion of hysterical mass interest in every detail, whipped up by tabloids that had extras ready at every hour announcing the safe…return of the baby.”¹
As media coverage stoked the flames of concern over children being kidnapped, Eugene McDonald, president of Zenith Radio Corporation, hired artist and sculptor Isamu Noguchi to design the external housing for Radio Nurse, the first version of the modern baby monitor. Influenced by the moniker of the revolutionary productand guided by his philosophies of form and surface, Noguchi styled the chestnut brown Bakelite into an abstract ovular dome meant to resemble the human head, a noticeable deviation from the ubiquitous Bauhaus-inspired Streamline Moderne style prominent in the 1930s.²
Sculpturally exquisite, the Radio Nurse is speculatively inspired by masks worn while practicing Kendo, the Japanese martial art of swordsmanship. A large, circular grill with brown cotton underneath is the only feature on the otherwise featureless face. Creating an eerie uneasiness when staring at it for too long, the grill resembles a gaping mouth on a silent victim. Radio Nurse was an eye-catching oddity, deemed “most exotic” by the Times while on exhibit at the 1939 exhibition for sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art.³
Nearly 80 years later, electrical engineering student Kurt Workman was inspired to create a different sort of baby monitor, one that would attach directly onto a baby rather than observe it; the idea came to him while watching his aunt’s premature twins be placed on oxygen monitors at home. Workman, along with Zach Bromsta, Jacob Colvin, and Jordan Monroe, band together to start a company called Owlet, creating the world’s first medical-grade, wearable baby monitor.⁴
Made out of a lightweight woven fabric, the sock is sewn into a configuration reminiscent of a foot brace. Tucked underneath a thin layer of fabric is a circular white disc with a metal core that protrudes away from the foot like a wayward belly button. The disc itself is only about an inch in diameter but takes up considerable visual real estate when compared to the size of a baby’s foot. Far from the menacing presence of the 1938 Radio Nurse or the typical video monitor with camera and video screen, Owlet’s Smart Sock comes in a wide range of pastel colors, the most popular being a baby teal device that looks more medical than domestic.
Both the Radio Nurse and the Owlet Smart Sock are examples of products that attempt to design certainty into the inherently messy condition of parenthood.
Like many baby products, the device adheres to the type of pastel coloring associated with baby nurseries and child products. Because of this, the device is not intimidating, just mildly unorthodox, looking more like a Band-Aid than a sock. A small white Velcro patch fastens a strip of fabric to the wrap, while a preformed fabric booty holds the rest of the baby’s foot. Besides the Velcro and monitoring device, the fabric used for the device is incredibly soft.⁵
Both the Radio Nurse and the Owlet Smart Sock are examples of products that attempt to design certainty into the inherently messy condition of parenthood. They are a microcosm of how technology’s expansion into our day-to-day lives has altered the velocity and the amount of information we are able to receive and an interrogation into how we keep turning to technology to control things we cannot control. Relationships between humans are complex, and the tie between parents and children is altogether a more difficult one to navigate. Like particles caught in a vortex, we spin in and out of each other’s orbits, often not really understanding what the other needs before it’s too late. A parent places a monitor on a child because they want to know how he/she is doing, but also because they want to know how well they are parenting their child.
Our society seems to have an unwritten rule that automatically pairs technological innovation with progress. We shudder anytime someone mentions a data breach or talks about the dangers of polarized media content, but somehow we continue to post, search, and consume. We continue to create new accounts, blindly agree to the latest terms and conditions, and buy the newest phone, all with the understanding that if something is new, then it is incumbent upon a person to adapt to the latest trends in order to not be seen as lagging behind or out of touch.
For those who can afford to be technologically current, the benefits of exploiting user-data to optimize services create a world that is awfully simple to exist within. But at what cost? A strong opposer of technological development branded as progress is the French architect Paul Virilio (author of Open Sky and Speed and Politics), who sees the fixation on acceleration as a recipe for more serious accidents to occur.
Virilio is known for his excerpt from Open Sky, stating, “Unless we are delib-erately forgetting the invention of the shipwreck in the invention of the ship or therail accident in the advent of the train, we need to examine the hidden face of new technologies, before that face reveals itself in spite of us.”⁶ Virilio’s opinions on technological causality can come across as radical and apocalyptic, but beyond the philosopher’s theatrics and old-fashioned cynicism is a profound Icarus-like sentiment. To use the example of a shipwreck, one would not have been so far out to sea and vulnerable to the dangers of drowning if the ship hadn’t been invented in the first place. In the case of the Smart baby monitor, the spectacular advancement of being able to quantify the heartbeat of your infant or know the patterns of their breathing comes at the price of unnecessarily regulating the emotions and decision-making processes of a parent.
What began as a radio monitor invented to soothe mass hysteria caused by the inflated coverage of a kidnapping has gradually transformed into a wearable device capable of leading parents to rely solely on metrics to dictate the humanly imprecise task of raising a child. As our ability to surveil and record information about our kids becomes more calibrated, greater discernment is needed to keep parents from treading water in a bottomless ocean of information.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
- Read: Cozy Tech by Kelly Pendergast.
- Read: Inventing the Shipwreck by Zachary Loeb.
- Read: The Incomplete Chronicle of Léonie Gilmour by Lisa Yin Zhang.
- Kazin, Alfred. Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1929–1932. 1993.
- Pulos, Arthur J. American Design Ethic: A History of Industrial Design. 1986.
- Isamu Noguchi for Zenith Plastics Co. “Radio Nurse.” Victoria and Albert Museum. 1937.
- “The story of Owlet.” Avnet. 2017.
- “OWLET — Produced by Weapon Agency Commercial Video Production Team.” Youtube. February 6, 2022.
- Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. 1997.
