Are wireless baby monitors a good choice to help keep your child safe while you are out of the room? What about digital or video-based monitors? Well, consider this…
If a mobile phone company applied for a permit to install a cell tower next to a school in your community, do you think there would be a large public outcry?
Most likely there would be very vocal outrage from the surrounding neighborhoods and the story would be featured prominently in the local news as many concerned and informed parents are increasingly taking precautions to minimize their children’s exposure to any sort of microwave technology.
The fact is that the long term effects of microwave radiation on children’s developing brains are completely unknown.
What is known is that a child’s brain is not fully developed until about age 20 and until that time, the skull is thinner to permit its continued growth and development.  Hence, a child’s brain is extremely sensitive to the effects of any type of EMF radiation (1).
Wireless Baby Monitors: Â The Elephant in the Nursery
While most parents would agree that installing a cell phone tower next to a school would be dangerous and definitely not a good idea, many of these same parents are unaware of the very similar danger posed by baby monitors, devices ironically designed for child safety!
When my first child was born, like all the other mothers I knew, I had a baby monitor on my baby shower list.
At that time, baby monitors were corded and plugged into a wall outlet, so I was very careful to keep it away from the baby’s crib and on a bureau across the room out of concern for strangulation risk from the cord.
In recent years, however, corded baby monitors have all but disappeared in favor of the new wireless models which pose a very severe risk of continuous microwave radiation in your child’s room.
According to Wired Child, a wireless baby monitor at less than 1 meter away from the baby’s crib was roughly equivalent to the microwave radiation experienced from a cell phone tower only 150 meters away.
With most baby monitors now wireless and the risk of strangulation from the cords no longer an issue, many parents are putting them right in the crib so a distance of 1 meter or less is not so far fetched. Even a wireless monitor across the room would still pose a danger, albeit a reduced one.
How to Keep Tabs on Your Baby Without Wireless Baby Monitors
The best way to keep tabs on your baby is to have the child’s nursery next to the master bedroom and use your ears.  It’s how Grandma did it after all!
If you absolutely must have a baby monitor for when your child is napping during the day and you are elsewhere in the house doing chores, then use one of the old-style corded (analog) monitors that you can probably find at a garage sale for next to nothing.
While all wireless baby monitors are a problem, the high-frequency digital models are the absolute worst.  Analog monitors are a better choice than digital and if you can find one that is non-pulsing and low frequency in the 35-50 MHz range then that would be the only wireless option that should be considered. Typically, these analog monitors only have a few channels.  Even analog monitors, however, should be kept at least 3 feet from the child’s bed and if possible, used sparingly.
According to PowerWatch, parents that switch out wireless baby monitors for an old-style plug-in monitor or none at all report the child crying less, having less irritability and sleeping better.
Taking care to get the microwave radiation out of your baby’s room to protect her developing brain may have the distinct advantage of a better night’s sleep – for everyone in the house!
References
Digital Cordless Baby Monitors (PowerWatch)
More Information
Reducing Exposure to Dirty Electricity
Are AMR Devices Safer than Smart Meters?
Harvard Medical Doctor Warns About the Dangers of Smart Meters
Fitbit Health Dangers
How to Protect Yourself from a Smart Meter
We live soooo close to a cell phone tower:(
I will be shutting off the WiFi in my home at night from now on, thank you!
I soo want to but my inpataincte hubby has a fit if he has to wait a whole 5 to 10 min for the online to come up. so He wont let me.
there is notice also when you go to bed you have to put your phone away becouse also effect on your sleep and let you nervous after wake up
Michelle, in this day and age, we all do. Just not withing 150 meters or around 500 feet. I just do things the old fashioned way and run back and forth into the room, which works out to be about every 5 minutes.
Wow! I had never thought about the baby monitors. I had a corded one with my first but really never used it. I was always close enough time hear him cry. I haven’t used one at all since him. Thank you for sharing. This is info I will pass along to others.
How do you know if you live near a cell phone tower?
Michelle, you can also look on antennasearch.com.
@Michelle if you google cell phone towers and your local area you can find a map where they are all located. The fact is that we are ALL exposed to microwave radiation, but we can minimize it in our homes at least. I don’t sleep well in hotels I think because of the WiFI which we turn off at night in our home and have no EMFs in the bedrooms at all. WiFI (another form of microwave like cordless phones and baby monitors) really disturbs my sleep.
@Chi Chi LOL!
“What is known is that a child’s brain is not fully developed until about age 20 and until that time, the skull is thinner to permit its continued growth and development. Hence, a child’s brain is extremely sensitive to the effects of any type of EMF radiation.”
That is an extremely invalid argument. The only conclusion that can be drawn based on those facts is that a child’s brain MAY be more sensitive to the effects of emf radiation IF AT ALL I worry more about babies being parented by people like you. And unfortunately the size of one’s skull doesn’t relate to the amount of idiocy that one is exposed to, and many of the adult readers of this blog will accept your conclusions because they too are idiots. Anyone who excepts the conclusion that babies’ brains are sensitive to EMF radiation doesn’t have a grasp of basic elementary logic. Worse is someone who rights an entire article based on a falsehood.
Perhaps. Difference is, though, that the spelling mistake(s) didn’t result in any incorrect claims or conclusions, whereas Sarah’s logic mistake did. I also don’t have a following of mindless drones believing everything that I write, so even if I do/did make a mistake I’m not impacting anyone’s life very much.
And by the way, the article you linked to isn’t without spelling/grammar mistakes. But who’s counting.
Perhaps if you had a baby that was crying and sleepless with a wireless monitor in the room who became much less irritable and slept well after having it removed you might be less prone to calling people idiots.
I do currently have a baby with a monitor in her room, and I know that it’s really hard to tell what actually is causing her to cry. We can change one thing and it’ll work for a few days and then she’ll be back to crying. And then when we change it back she’ll stop crying again. There have been nights when we’ve removed the monitor and she has cried worse, and been up more often. Parents that report changes in their babies sleep are just assuming that it was related to the lack of a wireless monitor. Maybe the light on the monitor was the problem? Or they prefer the light on the new wired one. Who knows. My point was, and is, that you can’t say, as a matter of fact, that because their skulls aren’t fully developed that they are bothered by the wireless waves. And even if babies are bothered by wireless waves it does not imply that they are harmed by them. You can only make assumptions, and you should clearly state that you’re making an assumption at the beginning of your articles.
Just because you haven’t seen definitive and lasting improvement in your child’s crying habits from removing a wireless monitor doesn’t mean the same for other parents. And yes, a thinner skull would definitely mean that wireless would have a greater impact on developing brains of children … some European communities have taken the precautionary step to remove ALL wifi from school grounds based on this. In addition, preliminary evidence is that wireless technology does indeed have a significant negative behavioral impact in children .. it is preliminary however and I chose not to address it in this post. You can google Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt if interested. I personally feel it is foolish to risk the microwave radiation exposure in a child’s room when safer alternatives are readily available. There is NO DOUBT there is an effect .. how much likely varies from child to child but who is willing to risk their own baby? Not me.
I have to partially agree with Rob here. My wife sent me a link to this blog post and I really couldn’t believe the level of ignorance regarding the dangers of EMF radiation. Read this article on Non-iodizing radiation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation). If you are really worried about EMF you should probably turn off every electrical device in your house, including your radios. Calling out baby monitors is just ludicrous.
I don’t agree with Rob entirely that we know all we need to know about the long term effects of EMF exposure, but to pin it on a baby monitor ignores the more useful wider debate of how do you generally keep your baby safe from high-emitting EMF fields.
A lot of the parents who read this are going to thing they are doing a great job turning off their monitors, only to put their baby on their lap and talk on their cell phone, or hold their baby while using a computer, one one of a hundred ways to expose them to more radiation.
Did you seriously just post an article from Wikipedia as a valid source of information?
did you seriously just criticize him without reading it?
Rob, according to the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, adverse health effects from wireless radio frequency fields, such as learning disabilities, altered immune responses, and headaches, clearly exist and are well documented in the scientific literature.
Consider this quote from their position paper on Electromagnetic and Radiofrequency Fields Effect on Human Health:
“In the last five years with the advent of wireless devices, there has been a massive increase in radiofrequency (RF) exposure from wireless devices as well as reports of hypersensitivity and diseases related to electromagnetic field and RF exposure. Multiple studies correlate RF exposure with diseases such as cancer, neurological disease, reproductive disorders, immune dysfunction, and electromagnetic hypersensitivity.
The electromagnetic wave spectrum is divided into ionizing radiation such as ultraviolet and X-rays and non-ionizing radiation such as radiofrequency (RF), which includes WiFi, cell phones, and Smart Meter wireless communication. It has long been recognized that ionizing radiation can have a negative impact on health. However, the effects of non-ionizing radiation on human health recently have been seen. Discussions and research of non-ionizing radiation effects centers around thermal and non-thermal effects. According to the FCC and other regulatory agencies, only thermal effects are relevant regarding health implications and consequently, exposure limits are based on thermal effects only.1
While it was practical to regulate thermal bioeffects, it was also stated that non-thermal effects are not well understood and no conclusive scientific evidence points to non-thermal based negative health effects. Further arguments are made with respect to RF exposure from WiFi, cell towers and smart meters that due to distance, exposure to these wavelengths are negligible. However, many in vitro, in vivo and epidemiological studies demonstrate that significant harmful biological effects occur from non-thermal RF exposure and satisfy Hill’s criteria of causality. Genetic damage, reproductive defects, cancer, neurological degeneration and nervous system dysfunction, immune system dysfunction, cognitive effects, protein and peptide damage, kidney damage, and developmental effects have all been reported in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.”
Source:
You may want to do some more exploration on the topic.
OK I agree with Sarah’s artical but Rob spelling doesn’t make him dumb. the smartest people in history are dyslic as I’m sure from my bad spelling you can see i am too. that hurts when someone calls someone dumb/stupid just becuase they can’t spell. That has NOTHING to do with smarts!!! Your rude!
Rob, I’m curious what your degree is in, or what research you have done to prove the information in this article is not true. I was at a conference taught by pediatric chiropractors, scientists, radiologists, and medical doctors, and one of the points made there was that you can see how the brain is affected by a cell phone on a brain imaging scan. They tested both adults and children, and in adults, only the part of the brain by the ear lights up, whereas in children, half the head is lit up. I think it’s worth looking into at the very least. I would be happy to consider any facts you present to prove your points, but calling people who are concerned about their children’s safety when it comes to the unproven possible effects of technology is very rude and unfounded.
Actually, there’s a TON of science globally that proves that radiation impacts a child’s brain more deeply than a full grown adult. You should do some research before you make comments like this.