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
Does grounding or the EMF shields that Dr. Getoff endorses http://www.bioelectricshield.com/?gclid=CPO01K_g-rMCFQ-e4AodDX0A2Q help?
It’s hardly “unfair” to rip into this. I’ll gladly agree that though mainstream science doesn’t recognize EMF to be generally hazardous, there’s plenty of other evidence suggesting that it really is harmful, and I’ll gladly agree that it has in fact harmed some people. But to claim sensationally that baby monitors are equivalent in radiation to a cell phone tower, without mentioning how common those towers are, or how rarely they’re even accused of harm, is doing the readers a disservice. To fail to point out how many cordless phones, wireless internet devices, cellular telephones, and hundreds of other household devices contribute to EMF is disingenuous. To fail to describe the problem is the worst abuse of the readership; the type of electromagnetic radiation accused of harm is short-wave, high-frequency radiation, most common digital models whether corded or otherwise. In other words, it makes no difference if your monitor plugs into the wall or uses batteries (as so many readers seem to think). The problem is if it transmits its signal over radio waves, or not, and what frequencies it uses. Sarah correctly points out that digital devices are more likely to use high-frequency waves than analog ones are. Monitors with cords, no matter what sorts of electromagnetic radiation they emit, present their own hazards, as parents regularly put them near cribs, where babies can reach the cords and chew on them or become tangled. An unlikely hazard, perhaps, but far more common than EMF radiation damage.
I especially took exception to her incorrect statement that lower frequency would somehow be safer than newer high frequency digital transmitters. That simply isn’t true. I’m not making a judgement of whether or not EMF is harmful, I was stating she discredits her message when making blatantly incorrect statements and her incorrect words have consequences with the droves of people that read this and buy into it without researching and understanding the science of radio waves.
WIFI and most other radio sources are such low wattage and at a reasonable distance that before I believe there is any real risk, I will have to see some imperial evidence (beyond placing your router under your pillow at night) there is some measurable risk.
That being said if there is some proof that WIFI in my home is dangerous then I will be happy to remove.
It’s hard to say what is and isn’t true, when you’re talking about something science largely discredits anyway. My experience has been that those that fear EMF fear higher-frequency radiation more than lower frequencies, and Sarah follows that trend. Since neither is proven damaging, it’s hard to state with any authority that one is more harmful than the other. But high-frequency waves receive more blame, at least as far as I’ve seen.
They removed the WIFIs in the French national libraries. This report from 2008:
http://www.next-up.org/pdf/FranceNationalLibraryGivesUpWiFi07042008.pdf
But, go ahead, keep to your magical thinking.
Ankle, please see my note above with information from the American Academy of Environmental Medicine on the adverse effects well documented in the scientific literature.
The hard truth is that if you’re going to get rid of baby monitors you need to get rid of the rest of the wi-fi junk in your house and make sure you don’t have a smart-meter installed on your home by your power company. ALL wi-fi stuff runs on frequency beams and they’re everywhere. That includes most cell phones, unless you have the older “bag phone” kind, but even they run on a frequency, albeit lower.
No, there’s just no getting away from it. You can take it out of the kid’s room, but that won’t protect them anymore. We’ve already gone down the rabbit hole.
Nice blog post, I really like it thanks for sharing this information with us.
I cannot believe the gullibility of the people that read this non-science! This person discredits herself in several statements. 1st comparing the cell tower to the baby monitor is like comparing a nuclear power plant to the wind up generator in a LED flashlight. But less about my opinions of this kind of junk article and more about facts and science.
Please don’t believe me (or especially Sarah): READ FOR YOURSELVES…do a search on the effects of low frequency vs high frequency on the body.
Lower frequencies are much more penetrating to the human body and therefore have the potential to be more damaging to biological tissue. Higher frequencies tend to bounce off because their wavelink is tighter and not as penetrating.
Next lower frequencies require more wattage to be carried; higher frequencies require much less wattage.
I loved the statement that higher frequency digital monitors were less safe because they had more channels (haha!) the frequency range from one channel to the next is a matter of points of a MHz, it makes no difference.
This person did NO research in writing the article and yet droves of lemmings were throwing out their monitors and changing the safer high frequency monitors for the slightly less if not much less safe lower frequency monitors.
We have to stop believing these opinion articles and do some fact checking for ourselves.
It is sad to me the number of people who thanked Sarah for this article.
Good thing my house is small enough that I can hear my babe’s cry…without a monitor. Yikes!
Yes. It can go wireless. It’s the summer infant handheld slim and secure video monitor.
Eek! We love our monitor and it’s video but it happens to be corded (although can operate on the batteries) and analog! I guess those are the only good things about it. Its MHz is much higher than what you listed, if I understand that correctly. Thanks for highlighting this issue; I will need to consider it.