Infant Sleep Scores are Just Another Way We Stress Out New Moms

I became a mom in 2018, shortly after the tech boom in the baby care space. 

There were bassinets that auto-rocked your baby, heart rate monitors that strapped into those tiny newborn feet, rockers that stimulated the motion of a mother's womb...and so on and so forth. I totally fell for it, too. I bought the gadgets and I felt a level of gratitude for the modern-day conveniences of new motherhood.

But like...have we gone too far? Because now there's literally a way to get your baby's sleep score via AI thanks to Nanit's new offerings. And I don't know....it just feels like one more thing that'll stress out already exhausted and overwhelmed new parents. 

I find myself wondering if, by making new parenthood so modernized, we're simply making life harder and more stressful for new parents. And, of course, when I say "new parents", I mostly mean new mothers. They are, after all, the ones being fed constant ads and reminders of these products. 

It's natural for new moms to feel like they need to invest in all the things in order to make the transition to parenthood more seamless, or even to give your children the best start in life. It's also natural to seek validation that we're doing it right, to crave tangible representation of our performance in motherhood...and, in an attempt to do that, to seek out this type of data. But the truth is, the things that can make new parenthood easier aren't high-tech. They're things like paid leave, proper postpartum healthcare, accessible mental health care, a village, adequate rest, and true human support. We don't need every new product or an app for everything or all the metrics. 

To me, having your baby's sleep score feels the intersection of all those things: Too much tech, too many products, and too many metrics ‚ and if you know me, you know I LOVE information! But do we really need to know our baby's sleep score, or is that just one more data point for us to (no pun intended!) lose sleep over? Perhaps I see it more clearly now, seven years into motherhood, but I feel like it's the latter.