Surveillance as Care: Configuring Baby Monitors in the Home

Paper Title

Surveillance as Care: Configuring Baby Monitors in the Home

Publication Info

• Topic area: The use and implications of baby monitoring technologies (BMTs) in parenting and caregiving.
• Keywords: Baby monitoring technologies, surveillance, caregiving, privacy, emotional regulation, parenting, IoT, security, family dynamics, care infrastructure.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Limited understanding of how parents, as primary surveillants, configure and experience baby monitoring technologies (BMTs) in daily caregiving, including the emotional, cognitive, and relational impacts.
• Significance: Early parenting involves intensive caregiving, where BMTs play a critical role in supporting safety, caregiving routines, and emotional reassurance. However, their use raises concerns about privacy, security, and emotional strain.
• Motivation and related work: Prior studies have explored surveillance technologies in domestic settings and their impacts on privacy and caregiving. However, these studies often focus on technical features or user attitudes, leaving a gap in understanding how parents actively configure and experience these technologies in practice.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The study investigates how new parents perceive, configure, and experience BMTs through an inductive thematic analysis of Reddit discussions, focusing on their role as primary surveillants.
• Novelty:
  1. Provides an in-depth understanding of how parents actively configure BMTs as caregiving infrastructures.
  2. Explores how BMTs redistribute vigilance and accountability across parent–device systems.
  3. Examines the emotional, cognitive, and relational impacts of BMTs on parents.
  4. Offers design implications for BMTs to better support caregiving while addressing privacy, security, and ethical concerns.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Data collection from 4,535 Reddit threads across 23 subreddits using keywords related to BMTs.
  • Stratified, iterative batch sampling to ensure diversity in subreddit, engagement levels, and time periods.
  • Reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) to identify themes related to surveillance as caregiving infrastructure, emotion management, privacy negotiation, and security concerns.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • BMTs function as caregiving infrastructures, requiring ongoing configuration to align with caregiving needs.
  • Parents use BMTs to manage emotions like anxiety and reassurance but also report amplified anxiety due to false alarms or information overload.
  • Privacy frictions arise in multi-caregiver households, requiring boundary negotiation and access control.
  • Security concerns, such as hacking, are perceived as failures of caregiving, leading to emotional distress and proactive security measures by parents.
• Advantage over baselines: Provides a nuanced understanding of the relational, emotional, and technical dimensions of BMT use, which are often overlooked in prior studies focused on technical features or user adoption.
• Experiments / evaluation: Analysis of 721 threads and 12,310 comments from Reddit, focusing on parents’ lived experiences with BMTs.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Data is limited to Reddit users, who are predominantly Western, educated, and technologically literate, potentially excluding diverse perspectives.
  • Self-reported, pseudonymous data limits representativeness and verifiability.
  • Future work should explore diverse populations and contexts using complementary methods.

Summary

This study examines how new parents configure and experience baby monitoring technologies (BMTs) as caregiving infrastructures. It reveals that BMTs redistribute vigilance and accountability across parent–device systems, shape emotional and cognitive experiences, and mediate family dynamics. The findings highlight privacy, security, and ethical concerns, such as amplified anxiety, boundary frictions, and hacking risks. The study provides actionable design implications to support caregiving while safeguarding privacy, autonomy, and well-being for both parents and children.