by ARWA MAHDAWI
Thanks to relentless marketing and advice our tiny apartment is already stuffed full of weird stuff, such as snot-suckers. But do I really need an AI-powered crib to be a good parent?
A boob. A bed. Maybe a bottle? In the early days of my wife’s pregnancy, I naively thought that was all a newborn baby would really need. After all, all they do is eat, poop, sleep, repeat. You don’t need an arsenal of complicated equipment to deal with that, right?
Wrong. Our first child is due imminently and, despite my best efforts to escape the evil clutches of the baby-industrial complex, our tiny New York apartment is stuffed with weird stuff. Reader, I have a snot-sucker. That’s not a euphemism – that’s a real thing you use to suck mucus out of a child’s nose. I asked a friend with kids: “Seriously? Do I actually need this?” She gave me a look a lot of parents have been giving me recently. It’s a look that says: “Damn, you really don’t know what you’re in for.”
I haven’t just become a person who owns a snot-sucker. I’m dismayed to say that I have become a person who knows far too much about the Snoo. The Snoo being a $1,495 (£1,145) artificial-intelligence-powered bassinet that uses algorithms to respond to a baby fussing and rock it back to sleep. “You absolutely need a Snoo,” some people have told me. “It’s a huge waste of money,” others have said. It’s like the Marmite of baby gear. Just a hell of a lot more expensive.
In Finland, supposedly the world’s happiest country, new parents are sent home with a cardboard box for a crib
While you may need slightly more than a boob and a bed to raise a kid, you don’t need an AI-powered crib to be a good parent. In Finland, supposedly the world’s happiest country, new parents are sent home from hospital with a government-issue cardboard box for their babies to sleep in. (In the US, which has the most miserable parents in the western world, according to a 2016 study, you’re sent home from hospital with a massive bill.)
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