In the fall of 2018, my husband and I decided to take a trip to Europe with our 1-year-old in tow. The flight was predictably exhausting. But when we arrived in Rome, we were delighted to discover that our Airbnb was on the third floor of a building on a narrow, pedestrianized backstreet tightly packed with restaurants. After the long journey, we had no particular desire to dine out with our baby. So that night, instead of schlepping our little one to dinner or ordering in, as we had elsewhere, we fed our daughter early, put her down at 7 p.m., and brought our baby monitor with us to eat at the pasta place two floors down.

It worked perfectly. We kept it up. We ate out every night that week, even trying the places next door and across the street, which also fell within monitor distance. We popped up periodically to check on our daughter, and each time, the monitor had done its job. All was well.

We’ve since done versions of this elsewhere, where circumstances have allowed. It’s become a matter of routine that when we stay in hotels as a family, my husband and I will head to the lobby, bar, or restaurant with a phone or laptop set up as a makeshift monitor after our children—we now have two—go down for the night.

At the time, it never occurred to me that this might be controversial. I certainly didn’t think it was something people would consider reckless, neglectful, or warranting the attention of the authorities. That is, until I read about Matt and Abby Howard.

The Howards, a parenting influencer couple, probably just needed a relaxing hour away from their two sons, who were 1 and 2 at the time, while on a cruise. On the ship in September, they quickly found that dropping their kids at the cruise day care while they ate dinner proved stressful for everyone, kids included. “It became apparent that they weren’t enjoying it and therefore we weren’t either,” Abby wrote on social media, where she and Matt make a living documenting their experience as high school sweethearts turned young mom and dad. On the cruise the Howards came up with an inventive solution to their evening woes: The kids would eat first and go to bed in the cabin. Then Matt and Abby would go to dinner separately, and they would use FaceTime to monitor their sons. (Baby monitors are sometimes banned on cruises as the signal can interfere with ship communication.) “That worked out muchhhh better for everyone,” Abby wrote.

Well, it worked out much better for everyone … at first. After describing their parenting hack publicly, the negative response from followers and even other creators was swift and intense, attracting a write-up in People magazine. Their initial Instagram story (now expired) seemed to imply they’d left their kids alone, albeit under the watchful eye of the FaceTime screen. But the couple backtracked, insisting that there was an adult in the room with the kids the entire time. The FaceTime monitor was just additional surveillance. “We have not, would not, will not ever leave our children unattended,” Abby said.

And what could have happened if they had? Bystanders online imagined all sorts of terrible outcomes: The kids might be abducted, a fire might break out, or some other horrific tragedy might unfold that the distance from dinner back to the cruise cabin would prevent the couple from addressing. (The couple declined to be interviewed for this article.)

I had another question, though: What if kids are just fine when left a short distance away from their parents and closely attended to with technology? Would that really be so bad? My journey to find out led to me to learn just how deeply our concept of momentary risk to our children has changed in recent years—and what might really be behind those visceral reactions.

The first baby monitor of sorts, the magical concept that made our vacation date nights possible, was invented in 1937 by Zenith Radio Corporation. It was five years after the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old fueled a nationwide panic about the safety of children. The “Radio Nurse,” as it was called, allowed parents to listen in on their children by tuning in to a specific frequency, but the machine was too expensive for most families to afford. In the late 1950s and ’60s, some retailers started advertising the nursery-monitoring potential of generic intercoms. It wasn’t until about the 1980s that devices designed specifically as baby monitors became widely available, according to Alex Parry, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester who studies the history of public health. The first video-enabled monitor, which functioned as a closed-circuit television, came on the market during the 1990s, costing about $400 (over $800 in today’s dollars). But in the years following, cheaper models steadily emerged.

The lower cost represented a sharp deviation from how things have gone for most of American history, when close monitoring of babies or other young kids was a privilege of the upper classes, said Janet Golden, a professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of Babies Made Us Modern. Enslaved or working-class women on farms, by necessity, left their babies in the care of other young children as they went about their work; women working in factories left infants in the care of older women in their tenements, who often looked after several babies at a time. Mothers doing piecework at home might leave their babies in the cradle for long stretches of the day. Working-class women in this situation might “dip a rag in some milk and let them suck on the rag all day,” Golden said. “You didn’t supervise babies at all times.”

Today, baby monitors are a standard part of parenting little ones. A good, no-frills model can be had for $35. Most parents will use a monitor. “The central question is not whether to buy one, but rather which one to buy,” sociologist Margaret K. Nelson wrote in a 2008 study.

If which model of baby monitor to buy is the central question—and with models that have cameras that pan from side to side and Wi-Fi capability, it is not a small one—the next question might be: How much freedom do you allow it to give you? And what about the freedom you think it should afford to others?

When it comes to the question of what a parent loses through vigilance, no sacrifice is too big.

That second question can get sticky. In 2016, Barbara Sarnecka, a professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California-Irvine, conducted a study which asked survey respondents to assess the risk a child was in after having been left unsupervised by their parent for a short period of time. In each vignette, the reason for the parent’s absence varied. In one, the parent is hit by a car and knocked unconscious while returning a library book. In another, the parent pops inside the library to pick up a paycheck. In a third, the parent leaves the child to meet a lover behind the library.* The risk to the child should not be affected by the reason for the parent’s absence—in fact, in each, it’s likely minimal—but according to the respondents, it was.

“Everybody definitely thought that the kids were in more danger if the parent chose to leave than if the parents got hit by a car and knocked unconscious,” Sarnecka told me. “The more morally outraged people felt at the parent, the more danger they claimed the child was in.” By that logic, if you are in an accident and have to take your eyes off your baby for 15 minutes, everything will be fine. But if you purposefully take your eyes off your baby for 15 minutes, in service of doing something fun and adult, you’ll definitely be risking trouble.

Sarnecka suspects that the hand-wringing over the Howards seemingly leaving their kids “alone” is rooted in a similar moral assessment. Over the years, she’s observed that people are somewhat open to arguments against helicopter parenting on the grounds that fretful and constant monitoring is not actually good for kids. But when it comes to the question of what a parent loses through such vigilance, no sacrifice is too big. Sitting in a darkened hotel room for nights on end during your vacation while a restaurant serves drinks a couple floors below—for many, that seems to just be expected. To even consider risking a child’s safety, even a little bit, for the benefit of the parent is itself an indication of bad parenting. “You shouldn’t take any action on the grounds that it would be better for you,” Sarnecka said, describing this mindset.

But in theory, even a careful parent can go to dinner very close by without leaving their child unsupervised. That is the magic of technology. I can stare at my child while I twirl pasta onto my fork at a two-top with my husband.

When baby monitors first appeared on the market, companies typically marketed the devices as offering parents both rest and peace of mind, according to Parry. But as uptake rose, concerns quickly emerged about whether the machines were really resolving anxiety or heightening it. The press and parenting advice columns started to note the need for parents to balance the desire to keep an eye on their kid against the pitfalls of over-surveilling them, Parry told me. And all along the way, the technology itself produced various worries. Concerns cropped up about the potential for a child to grab at the cord and strangle themselves, or for the monitor to simply stop working. “The monitors, which are supposed to be this anxiety-relieving device, sort of create these other anxieties,” Parry said.

It’s a common pattern for technology: The washing machine increased the ease of cleaning clothes, Golden told me, but also raised the expectation that our clothes will be clean all the time. Before bathroom scales became a household item, parents might take their kids to the butcher to be weighed once a month. Afterward, parents started weighing their babies every single day, and every “ounce gained or lost was a cause for glee or concern,” Golden said.

So it is with the baby monitor. Prior to its invention, you put the baby down for the night and counted on the fact that they were safe in their crib if they woke up. “But now, with the baby monitor, every time they make a little gurgle, you’re on high alert,” Golden said. “Hypervigilance is driven by technology’s availability.”

Even so, Golden isn’t entirely convinced that parenting behavior has changed as much as the way we talk about it has. She mentioned that in the early 20th century, baby books typically included a page for “Baby’s first accident,” where parents would detail the first time a child fell out of a high chair or tumbled downstairs. She doesn’t think that babies have stopped having accidents; what’s disappeared is the impulse to treat such incidents as the sort of inevitable occurrence one might record, akin to first steps or first words. Likewise, she thinks plenty of people still leave their sleeping kids with a baby monitor to go for a walk or visit with a neighbor. It’s when these matters are discussed in public, she says, that “the hypervigilance comes on.”

I didn’t have much trouble finding parents who pull the monitor trick—though I did have trouble finding people who wanted to discuss it in an open forum. A number of people I heard from skipped engaging publicly with my callouts on Facebook and X, instead opting to message me privately, and often—though not always—on the condition that I not publish their full names in this piece. These parents described using the monitor trick in a variety of settings. Some lived in apartment buildings or townhomes and would leave their kids sleeping in bed while they ate dinner or watched football at a friend’s apartment on another floor or a few homes over. Those living in suburbs went for walks or to hang out with other parents in the street. And of course, some mentioned eating at restaurants in hotels or at resorts.

None of the parents I interviewed seemed blasé about their kid’s safety—they just didn’t believe that it was really in jeopardy in these scenarios. Most found the threat of abduction, for example, too low to take seriously. “Feeding a 4-year-old popcorn is statistically a much higher risk than something like Madeleine McCann’s abduction happening to my child when I’m out of the house for 15 minutes,” Jessica S. a mom of two said. (Popcorn can be a choking hazard for kids under 4; McCann disappeared from an apartment while on vacation, while her parents were eating dinner with friends 100 yards away.) The risk of a fire likewise seemed minimal enough not to worry about, especially given the short distance between them and their kids. “You leave your apartment all the time, and it usually doesn’t burst into flames,” said Daniela, a mom of two in New York City.

The world of manageable parenting hasn’t entirely disappeared, but moved behind closed doors.

Where parents did express hesitation, it typically involved much lower-level concerns. Katelyn Walls Shelton, a Maryland-based mother of four who considers the ability to eat and socialize with adults after kids’ bedtime one of the most appealing aspects of hotels, told me that her only real concern for her kid’s safety was that one of her boys might wake up and try to open the door and walk down the hallway. But, in that event, she was pretty sure she’d hear that on the monitor and return to the room before he wandered too far. In her view, the most plausible bad outcome was that her kids would feel a little scared waking up without her in the unfamiliar room. “It wasn’t enough concern for me to not make the trade-off,” Shelton said.

In having these conversations, I got the sense that Golden is correct: The world of manageable parenting hasn’t entirely disappeared, but moved behind closed doors. As for why that is, Golden blamed a certain “policing culture” that has emerged as the volume and variety of parenting advice has grown. In the early 20th century, when parents looked for advice from someone other than a relative, most turned to a single source: the U.S. government. But after World War II, a cacophony of voices offering guidance emerged: There were physicians, books like Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, advice columns in women’s magazines, and more.

The internet, of course, majorly ramped all of this up, giving voice to a broad variety of different schools of thought on how to properly raise kids, whether it’s gentle parenting, authoritative parenting, lighthouse parenting, or free-range parenting, with rules delivered in frenetic short-form videos or provocative statements designed to attract engagement. Plus, it’s simply a fun and rewarding forum in which to judge other parents. Few parents are totally innocent of that.

More generously, Golden thinks that the sheer volume of advice, rather than any particular strand of it, makes people feel like they need to pay attention to it. It also further ennobles people to offer advice to others. “Everybody feels free to give everyone else advice,” Golden said. We see a young, telegenic couple sharing how they made a challenging vacation with two kids under 2 work for them—and we hop in with (to put the backlash charitably) our own take on how we think they should handle child care.

What’s more, the nature of the internet means that when something horrific happens to a child anywhere in America, we all find out about it. It’s disturbing, and unnerving, and scary. Finding a way to blame the parents involved is a way of reassuring ourselves that nothing of the sort will ever happen to our own kids. So is watching the behavior of other parents and labeling them as “bad” or “wrong.”

Those tendencies, combined with the permanency of the internet, can make it hard for parents to be transparent about how they are managing risk. By admitting publicly that I have left my kids unattended as they slept, I not only open myself up to immediate scrutiny, but equip future critics with ammunition in the event that some harm does eventually befall my kids. In other words, the internet emboldens the neurotic, and encourages everyone else to keep quiet. Our actual system for policing parents arguably does the same thing.

All states are required by federal law to operate hotlines that make it very easy to report suspected abuse or neglect. “One in three U.S. kids will be reported or will experience a Child Protective Services investigation at some point, by age 18,” said Kelley Fong, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. This scrutiny does not fall evenly across demographics: “It’s one in two Black kids.”

The vagueness of the statutes on child abuse and neglect mean that ultimately, neglect is in the eye of the beholder.

Leaving a sleeping child alone in a hotel room is not illegal. Child abuse and neglect are of course illegal, but the laws defining them are typically broad and vague. While these laws vary by state, even in the most specific of them, there is nothing specifying that one can’t, say, leave a property without one’s child, said Diane Redleaf, a civil-rights lawyer and legal consultant for nonprofit Let Grow.

That doesn’t, however, mean that you can’t get in legal trouble for doing so—and indeed, people have. In 2023, a woman was arrested after she and her husband left their 5-month-old and 2-year-old sleeping at a hotel while eating dinner at a restaurant around the corner. Nothing happened to the kids, but the husband collapsed of a heart attack, and when his wife sent her parents and a close friend to check on the kids while she accompanied her husband to the hospital, the hotel called the police.

In 2021, a couple at a hotel in Palm Beach were charged after a maid discovered their 1- and 2-year-old sons sleeping in their room while the couple ate dinner at the hotel restaurant. And, in 2014, two parents were likewise charged after leaving their 11-year-old in a hotel room while they went out to dinner.

These cases, multiple experts told me, are likely not representative of the typical CPS investigation involving unattended children, which are far more likely to involve a low-income family than someone with the wealth to go to Italy or take a cruise. But they do happen. The vagueness of the statutes on child abuse and neglect mean that ultimately, neglect is in the eye of the beholder.

Whether or not you’ll be reported, investigated, or charged for hanging out in the lobby of a hotel while your kids sleep upstairs will depend on what the hotel staff, caseworker, or judge considers sufficient parental supervision. Parents are not wholly without rights in these matters—Supreme Court precedent gives parents “a fundamental liberty interest to raise their children as they see fit, unless the parents are unfit,” said David Pimentel, a professor of law at the University of Idaho. But with the threat of your child being taken away looming, defending your decision to authorities, rather than simply apologizing and promising never to leave your children unattended again, is a risky move.

I wanted to know, as I reported this story, what hotels and commercial enterprises thought about the monitor trick. Getting firm answers proved surprisingly difficult. Marriott, Hilton, Radisson, Best Western, IHG, Hyatt, Wyndham, and even Disney hotels all declined multiple requests for insight into their supervision expectations for guests with children. Multiple cruise lines—Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and Norwegian Cruise Line—did the same.

You’re on Vacation. You Leave Your Kid in Your Hotel Room With a Baby Monitor. What Could Go Wrong? I Should Be Happy My Parents Are Such Good Grandparents. But I Just Can’t Do It. We Live in a Big City. When I Let My 12-Year-Old Go Out Without Me, We Learned an Unfortunate Lesson. Is Your Attachment Style “Secure”? “Anxious”? “Avoidant”? The Answer Isn’t Your Destiny.

I got far more candid—and varied—responses by calling individual hotels. Of the dozen or so front-desk workers I successfully queried, the baby-monitor-in-the-restaurant idea was unfamiliar to many, but the majority seemed fine with it. “We should train more parents to do that,” one woman at a major chain told me. A gentleman at another reassured me that the hotel had 14 different restaurants, so I’d have plenty of suitable options. But not everyone liked the idea. One woman at the front desk of a third chain was so rattled by the question that, at first, she simply stammered “no” repeatedly. After collecting herself, she explained that while she couldn’t tell me what to do, the hotel would strongly prefer that I not leave a young child alone in my room. A worker at another hotel told me that although she’d never seen it happen at her hotel, she was certain it was not allowed and that if a guest was discovered doing such a thing that management would “definitely address the situation.” The sheer variety of responses made it hard to know how much stock to place in any one of them.

Out of curiosity, I decided to call a hotel where a couple had previously been arrested for using a baby monitor as a “sitter,” just to see what they’d say about the idea. The woman who answered the phone gave no indication that she was aware of the incident. She told me that she thought I might get different responses from different workers, and that she doubted the hotel would officially approve the practice, but “as a mom, to another mom,” she thought it was a great idea: “You gotta have fun yourself.”

In a landscape like this, I find it hard to blame the Howards for succumbing to public pressure to renounce the behavior they were accused of. But in Pimentel’s view, that’s the only mistake they made. The reality is that onlookers are learning from these dustups, and the lesson they are learning is that “you can’t trust your own instincts,” Pimentel said. “You have to think: How will this look to somebody else?”