The Pereira-Goldfarbs of Toronto kept a video baby monitor in their son Joaquin's room for five years and seven months. The monitor was a high-resolution model with night vision, two-way audio, and a temperature sensor. They turned it off on a Sunday evening in October 2025, when Joaquin was three months past his sixth birthday.
Sara Pereira-Goldfarb, an architect, told me that she had not realized until she did it how much of her own evening had been organized around the small screen on her bedside table. She had been falling asleep, for years, to the green glow of her son's image. She had been waking, multiple times a night, to check it.
The decision to turn the monitor off had been on the table for at least eighteen months. Joaquin had outgrown the developmental window in which monitors are recommended. He was a fluent talker who could come find them if he needed anything. He had a nightlight, a glass of water, and a bell beside his bed that he had used exactly twice in three years, both times for nightmares.
What kept the monitor on, Sara told me, was not Joaquin. It was her own nervous system.
She had been watching her sleeping child, every night, since she had brought him home from Mount Sinai Hospital in May of 2019. The watching had become a habit, then a ritual, then a small private compulsion she did not quite want to name.
Her wife, Hannah Goldfarb, had been ready to turn the monitor off when Joaquin was three. Hannah, a nurse at Sick Kids, had a more clinical view of the data. The monitor, she pointed out, did not actually prevent any of the things they feared. It only let them watch them in higher resolution.
Sara had not been ready. She had asked for another year. Then another. Then, on a Sunday in October, with no particular precipitating event, she had unplugged the monitor and put it in the drawer of her bedside table.
She told me she did not sleep well that first night. She woke up at midnight, at 2 a.m., at 4 a.m., and each time she had to lie still in the dark and tell herself, in the small voice of a person convincing herself, that her child was asleep down the hall and was fine.
The second night was easier. The third night, easier still. By the end of the week, she had slept through to morning twice.
The monitor stayed in the drawer for a month, in case she changed her mind. Then she gave it away, to a couple in their building who were expecting their first child.
I have asked a number of parents about the moment they stopped monitoring their sleeping children, and the answers are surprisingly consistent. There is the practical justification, which is always available. There is the emotional resistance, which is always private. And there is the small grief of letting go of an instrument that had let you see, briefly, into the otherwise unobservable interior of your child's night.
The monitor is a strange object in the long history of parenting. It is barely thirty years old in its modern video form. The parents and grandparents of the current generation raised children without it, and those children, by every available metric, were no less safe.
What the monitor offered, instead, was the illusion of vigilance. It let parents feel, in the absence of any reliable way to protect against the things they feared, that they were doing something.
Hannah, who has spent her career in the pediatric ICU, is skeptical of the monitor's value past the first year. She believes that the data overwhelmingly supports turning it off by the time the child is verbal, and that the persistence of the monitor past that point is about parental anxiety rather than child safety.
She does not say this to other parents, except when asked. She has noticed that the conversation tends to become defensive quickly.
Sara agrees with her wife now. She did not agree with her at the time. She believes, in retrospect, that the monitor was managing something in her own history more than it was managing anything about her son.
Her own mother, an immigrant from Lisbon who arrived in Toronto in 1978 with two small children and very little English, had not had a monitor. She had, instead, kept the bedroom doors open and listened for breathing across the hallway. She had developed, Sara remembers, an almost preternatural ability to wake at the smallest sound from her children.
Sara had not learned this. She had learned, instead, to watch the screen. When the screen went away, she had to learn the older method, slowly, in the dark, with her ears.
She is good at it now. She wakes when Joaquin coughs. She wakes when he gets out of bed. She has, in eight months, missed nothing.
She still has, occasionally, the impulse to reach for the bedside table at 2 a.m. and check on him. She lets the impulse pass. She listens for breathing across the hallway, the way her mother did. She goes back to sleep.
It is not a small change. It is, in its quiet way, a kind of growing up that the parent does, alongside the child. The child learns to sleep alone. The parent learns to let them.
