🖐️ Here’s Five Bits of Parenting Tech I Couldn’t Live Without

Gotta have my mod cons

This is the first in a new series of posts where every Wednesday, I’ll break down a list of five things on any topic either directly, indirectly or even vaguely related to parenting and raising kids. We’re kicking off by looking at some helpful bits of tech that have helped me while raising my two kids.

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God knows how people parented before electricity, hot water and Disney+. Seriously, technology has made our lives as parents a hell of a lot easier, especially in the past 20 years or so. Parenting tech can give us peace of mind through things like video baby monitors, and it can help with the most repetitive of parenting tasks with products like bottle sterilisers and formula prep machines.

But the greatest role that tech has played in my parenting journey? Without a doubt, it’s been to keep me ✨SANE ✨

So without further ado, Here’s Five pieces of tech that really stepped up and solved seemingly insolvable issues for me during parenthood:

Toniebox

My three-year-old is one of those kids that has made mealtimes a rather arduous endeavour. There’ll be once in a blue moon where she’ll eat most of what’s on her plate without encouragement or comment—which is what we’re meant to do, I know. Most of the time though, we have to resort to tactics like making up games with the food, delivering sweet treats after particularly controversial vegetables, and—in the most desperate of times—the iPad.

Being so heavily involved in her eating process is obviously unsustainable—but she’s just one of those kids that seems to want that kind of stimulation when eating. But we don’t want to stick her in front of a screen while she eats.

Enter the Toniebox.

It’s like a cube with a speaker in one side (and it’s padded as well to protect against drops) that’s got a magnetic pad on top. On there, you place little characters that are sold separately. When you do, the box chirps into life and it either plays songs or tells stories based on the character. For example, we have a Moana figure that sings songs from the movie, then an abridged narration of the film.

It’s a really good alternative to screen-time, especially when they have figures for almost all of kids favourite shows, films and books—like Paw Patrol, Disney princesses, the Gruffalo and—shudders—Peppa Pig.

The existence of that last one will be a secret I take to my cold, cold grave.

Wireless earbuds

I’ve written a bit before about my struggles with the night-shifts with a newborn. Our second has actually been quite good in the night, settling into a regular rhythm of wakes and feeds at quite consistent times. Plus, once you go through the newborn night-time experience once, you’re a light sleeper for life.

The first time around, I hadn’t realised the incredible lulling power of the yoga ball, and so I was walking around the bedroom in the dead of night, rocking and swaying our baby to sleep for half an hour to an hour at a time. Not only was this murder for my knees and lower back, but god almighty was it boring. I toyed with using my wired headphones to listen to an audiobook or a podcast while I did it, but that meant having to hold my phone awkwardly in one hand or in my pocket (which, depending on your preferred pyjama configuration, you might not even have), and it meant draping a wire over the baby, which would inevitably get tangled in their arms when you did come to put them down to sleep. It wasn’t worth the fuss, but I really needed something to quell the boredom and monotony.

My awesome wife got me some AirPods Pro for my 30th birthday, when our daughter was around nine months old. In hindsight, I can’t believe I lasted a whole nine months without these things, because they truly do make those long night-shifts go so much quicker.

They don’t have to be fancy Apple ones, either. My wife picked up this set for herself for labour, and the sound quality on them is very good for the price.

Don’t make the same mistake I did by going nine months without these—if you’re the one waking up with the baby every night, these are a godsend.

A quick note to say that the links in this article are Amazon affiliate links—if you happened to buy a product through any of these, it helps support my writing without costing you anything anything extra.

White noise machine

Through a whole heap of trial and error with all kinds of sleep aids and techniques, we realised that our firstborn really responded well to white noise.

There’s a whole manner of ways you can create white noise for your child. There’s white noise tracks on YouTube that come with a black screen so the light doesn’t wake up your baby (although be careful as some of these dastardly videos have adverts right in the middle of them!). There’s smartphone apps as well that will give you a whole host of sounds for a small fee.

But if you’re anything like me, all you want to do after the baby is asleep is descend very quickly into a doom scrolling session on your preferred social media cesspit platform. Even if that’s not you, chances are you’ll want to keep your device on you for all manner of reasons, rather than leave it in your child’s room all night. You could always use another device, but sometimes it’s just easier to remove the dependency on them altogether.

That’s why dedicated white noise machines are superior. Not only do they free up your phones and tablets so you can actually use them whilst your child’s asleep, but most will have a set volume level on them, which keeps the track at a sound threshold that is not harmful to your baby’s ears.

There’s a heap of these out there, but we went for this one because it’s portable so that we can use it in the car and pram as well as at home—and it’s rechargeable via USB, meaning you’re not swapping out a fistful of AA’s every other week.

Guided Access

I’m not sure how well known this is, but I remember discovering it and being open-mouthed at how useful it was.

Ok, so let’s cut to it—sometimes our kids get screen time. On those days where they’re inconsolable, irritable and grouchy as hell and you’ve still got a 25 minute car journey until you’re home—we’ve all broken the emergency glass and reached for an iPad or phone as a last resort.

I just want to make sure that we’re all comfortable with this reality. Ok? Ok.

So on those occasions where my daughter’s been watching something in the car, every now and then I’ve become very concerned because I can hear the keyboard clacking away. I pull over, turn to grab my phone and yes—she’s ended up on Twitter and is tweeting out a load of random numbers and letters. I’ve had my covfefe moment.

Luckily, to prevent prying hands switching between apps and causing mischief, there’s a solution available on iOS and Android devices.

By following the instructions in the guides linked above, you can lock down certain apps to only allow certain inputs (or no inputs). For instance, I could apply Guided Access to a drawing app so that my daughter can only use the touch screen, and not the home or lock buttons. I can lock down Disney+ so that she can’t exit the app and get onto my WhatsApp, or accidentally stop whatever she’s watching and get upset because she can’t figure out how to get it back.

It’s intended as an accessibility tool, but this application to the use of screen time for kids is a lifesaver for parents at the end of their tether who’ve run out of options until they get home.

GroEgg

This one has helped me out twice—once in a way which the product was intended to help, and once maybe not.

The GroEgg is a brand of bedroom thermometer that changes colour depending on the temperature in the room. It gives a handy colour-coded guide to first time parents for how hot or cold the room is, and how they should therefore dress their baby safely for sleep.

This was great for us in the first instance of parenting, because as we all know everything worries us about babies when we first have one—one of these things being are they too hot or cold at night. The GroEgg also comes with a handy guide for telling you what kind of attire is appropriate for each colour. This greatly took the stress out of dressing our firstborn for the night, especially when things got really hot in the summer. It also doubles as a night light when your kid gets a bit older!

With our second born, we got the GroEgg back out of its box and plugged it back in our room, but to be honest we had much less worry about what to put her in. We just kind of instinctively know what’s appropriate and what’s not now, and that’s been working fine. The GroEgg stays on for peace of mind, but it felt a bit necessary.

Then a couple of weeks ago our baby starts rejecting the bottle that I give her at her first wake up. This stopgap feed was intended to give my wife a break from feeding through the night, as well as a chance for me to connect with the baby a little more, and so we were both really gutted that she started spitting out the bottle in the dead of night. She was irritable, distracted.

Then we had an idea. We took the GroEgg from the dressing table and popped it on my bedside table, directly in the eye line of the baby during her daddy bottle feed. The first time I tried it, her eyes locked on the soothing orange light, and she took the bottle just like she used to. Feeding crisis averted, thanks to a previously redundant light-up thermometer.

So there’s five bits of tech that have helped me along my parenting journey so far. What about you? Which pieces of convenient tech have helped you out of a parenting bind, or are first on the list of things you take on a trip with the kids? Let me know in the comments!