Smart Socks, Sleep Sacks, and the Death of Parenting

How American's have tried replacing love and care with gizmos, gadgets, and minimum wage employees.

Sep 28, 2025

Trolley Problem

A runaway train is speeding down the tracks towards your future children who you have not yet had. You are standing next to a lever. If you pull the lever, it diverts the train. And instead, it will run over the career you’ve currently planned for yourself.

Do you pull the lever and destroy your chances of having your career, or let the train keep going and end the chance of you having children?

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I ask a lot of questions to those around me about parenting. I am one of the rare Americans who actually wants to have kids one day, and ideally a lot of them (I’ve gotten my girlfriend to agree to four but shooting for five (she’ll come around)). Since I’m a personal trainer in Naples, Florida, most of the people I speak to about parenting are Boomers and Gen Xers. But I have one pregnant client and a sister who just had a baby.

And from these conversations I’m growing increasingly excited about what I hear. Parents are growing cleverer over time to raise their children to not only be more capable on their own, but also to have their children be less of a burden on them. Just read below about some of these clever parenting hacks that I have had the privilege of learning about.

I recently heard about how parents are having their kids spend more time barefoot to make them more tactile. There’s actually some good research to back this up, as being barefoot in early childhood can lead to the development of balance and jumping ability.

Then there’s a new craze traveling around the parenting watercooler about white noise machines, which supposedly can improve a baby’s ability to fall asleep by up to 55%, according to a study.

And, how could I forget the Owlet “smart sock” or the Snuza “diaper clip” that tracks your baby’s tiny little vitals to alert you when they’re sleeping if something goes wrong to their tiny little cardiovascular system. Now, there isn’t any evidence that these devices prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, but it is reported to help parents sleep better at night knowing their baby isn’t having a tiny little heart attack.

I’ve also heard about “sleep sacks”. They were described to me as little baby straitjackets that are all the rage for the babies in my client’s granddaughters daycare. According to a guy somewhere, these are better for babies to sleep in because they feel like they are being held by their parent, who is actually working from home on a proposal for the private equity firm they work for, but can’t have their newborn son around because he would be too much of a distraction.

I’m even lucky enough, before I’m a parent myself, to know about the SNOO Bassinet. This is another straitjacket-like bassinet that you strap your ever-so-small infant child into before she knows what the arms of her mother feel like versus Velcro strapping. It rocks your baby and even makes shushing sounds to keep her quiet at night. According to SNOO’s internal data, it gives the parents hours more sleep at night. Data is not currently available on the baby’s sleep quantity (but does that even matter, really?). Now, the SNOO Bassinet might cost $1,695. But, on two incomes, you can afford it.

And my personal favorite is sleep training. This is the medieval … sorry, um, modern parenting practice of having your tiny baby, who doesn’t even know how to say “Dada, why are you doing this to me?”, sleep in another room, and when they cry, letting them just continue until they’ve learn to shut up already.

All these clever hacks are also being implemented at a time when 50-60% of children are being placed in daycare either part-time or full-time as both parents work to make ends meet (or, to keep up with their spending habits).

I was under the impression that having children was a sacrifice. A sacrifice that one makes for the future of humanity. To raise the next generation, with love and care, so that they can prosper at a level that we only dreamed of ourselves. That the next generation, that we actively raise, can lead a life far grander, and with more progress than we can imagine happens today.

But all these parenting tips and tricks are making me realize that no, actually, this is the first time in the world where you can have your cake and eat it too. You can essentially not raise your children, replace the love and care typically provided by you, the parent, and outsource it to gadgets, gizmos, and minimum wage employees, and live the life you want. Meanwhile, your child grows up to have no developmental consequences whatsoever.

Or can you?

On top of listening to Boomers discuss how their Millennial children are raising their grandchildren while also juggling two full-time careers, I also listened to a TRIGGERnometry episode with psychoanalyst and parenting coach Erica Komisar. In this podcast, she said that parents are actually important to a child’s development and that we were all lied to about it being otherwise. According to Erica, it is important for a mother to be present for her baby. Especially in the first three years, she said that it is important for babies to be in low stress environments. When they are crying, they should be held. Ideally, by one or two primary caregivers (the mother and the father, ideally, probably.)

Komisar mentions cortisol, the hormone released in times of stress. She claims that babies in daycare environments have higher levels of cortisol and that these prolonged years of elevated cortisol could have negative consequences for a child’s mental development. And with adolescent prescriptions of antidepressants rising a staggering 66% between 2016 and 2022, I’m getting the impression that maybe she is right.

This was also talked about in a Psychology Today article by Corinne Masur, another psychoanalyst, who advocated that parents should think long and hard about, if they even decide to at all, what kind of daycare to send their child to. She had this novel idea in the article that parents should deeply consider the needs of their children before chucking them into some daycare that their friend Stacy told them about, whose four-year-old now has a biting problem.

Masur mentioned a Canadian study that tracked the cognitive outcomes of the children who attended Quebec’s universal childcare system that was rolled out in the 1990s. According to the research, the children who attended the government-funded daycare system had higher rates of aggression, anxiety, and hyperactivity. And yes, many became biters. But that was just a phase.

As they grew older, these young people had lower life satisfaction, worse health outcomes, and higher rates of criminal activity. All while having no cognitive gains. Which, unfortunately for the pro-daycare camp, is typically argued as a benefit of daycare because it socializes children (while they are all trapped in their sleep sacks in cheap bassinets).

Now, it seems brutal to condemn daycare as the cause of all these things. And Masur doesn’t fully condemn daycare. She really condemns low quality daycare. This is the daycare where you have one caregiver for multiple children (four or more). These caregivers don’t have degrees, aren’t paid well, and the facilities they work in are not particularly nice (definitely no SNOO Bassinets lying around).

There’s an often-cited study done by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development that tracked 1,364 infants from birth to the age of 15 from ten different daycare sites. The study essentially found that the low-quality daycares have bad childhood development outcomes, while high-quality daycares have less of the bad outcomes.

Shocker.

But many daycare advocates point to this study as proof that daycare can replace parents. And this advocacy has allowed daycare usage to increase dramatically, from 6% in 1965 to around 60% today.

The issue is, I’m unconvinced that daycares, particularly the low-quality ones, are as good as they claim to be. I fear they lie to parents, who they know aren’t doing enough research anyway.

I had a client who was a caregiver in a daycare center in Florida. Now, Florida has a law that requires daycares to have a ratio of one caregiver to every four children. But these laws aren’t well policed, or my client is a massive liar, because she said that she was the only caregiver looking after thirty babies at once. All while she was getting paid only $8.50 an hour.

If you’re scared by that reality as a parent, you’re not really in luck. Because getting high-quality care is expensive. Inexpensive daycare can get to be up to $1,000 a month in some cities. High quality care, with credentialed caregivers and good caregiver-to-tiny baby ratios, can cost upwards of $3,500 a month. And that’s only for one child.

Now, you may have heard that the reason daycare is important is because in modern America, where things are admittedly too expensive, a family must have two incomes to survive. But, if they can afford $3,500 a month on daycare for their three-month-old, how the heck am I supposed to believe that they can’t afford to have mom stay at home and watch the kids instead?

I think there’s probably a more unfortunate reality here: Americans just don’t want to be parents anymore. They don’t want to sacrifice their life for the life of their children. They are deeply and horrifyingly selfish.

At the risk of losing you, my dear reader, I wanted to mention an anecdote to prove my point. I know a couple who are lawyers. The father makes $4 million a year. The mother makes $1.5 million a year. They have two kids. And instead of giving up the extra $1.5 million in income, they send their two young boys to daycare all day.

I get it, very few of us will ever have a net income of $5.5 million. But what I’m trying to say is that many Americans are not just choosing daycare because they couldn’t afford to have kids otherwise. They are doing it as means to outsource their parenting. And even though they probably chose an expensive daycare, is it really better than the love and care their mother would give them?

I know, what I said was so anti-feminist, but I don’t care anymore. I’m saying this because I think we are destroying the development of children by not having their mothers take care of them. And it’s time more people stand up (or sit down at a keyboard and type) and say something.

My guess is that Komisar is right. That parents are important. That a mother holding her child in the crucial first few years of the innocent child’s life is important. That when a child cries, it needs to be cared for. Not trapped in the “nursery” with a smart sock on while it cries until it gives up and falls back to sleep.

While some Americans are choosing daycare as a convenience, there are many who truly feel like they must for financial reasons. I get that. I personally don’t know how I’m going to afford children, if I’m being honest. I recently just told my girlfriend that I can’t cook her dinner on Sunday because the price of meat is getting too high. How am I supposed to afford a SNOO in this world?

But there are things people can do to avoid putting their children in daycare full-time.

Komisar has recommendations for those who truly need to outsource their parenting because they must work. She recommends doing everything you can to give your child access to only one or two caregivers before your child turns three. If you can’t stay at home with your baby, have your parents take care of him. If your parents live in Florida now and resent you and your baby’s existence, have a close family relative watch them. If not, co-parent with your local community. Do anything that gives your child the highest quality of care with the fewest number of people involved possible.

Komisar places the responsibility of properly raising a child in the hands of the parents. Another novel idea. She said that as a parent, “you are responsible for your child’s mental illness.” A damning claim. And one that parents today really don’t want to hear.

I think what is happening with all these gadgets and gizmos and parenting hacks is that they are compensating for the fact that parents know they are neglecting their child. A mother misses their baby every minute of the day while she types out a budget report for the pharmaceutical company she works for that sucks her life away. A company she feels obligated to work for because she was told by society that she would be an anti-feminist if she followed her natural urge and stayed home and cradled her baby in her arms and shushed it until it stopped crying.

Parents put their baby in a sleep sack and hand it off to the caregiver at the daycare center with ten other babies. And then they feel half-decent about it because ten other parents chose to do the same thing.

We can’t all be bad parents, right?

If everyone else is neglecting their children, how am I the bad parent?

I want to live my life. I want to have my career. I don’t want to sacrifice my night of sleep for my baby.

You want. You want. You want.

And your baby wants too. But you can’t hear her because you sound-proofed her nursery.

References

Komisar, Erica. Interview on TRIGGERnometry. Hosted by Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, TRIGGERnometry Podcast. YouTube, 2023.

Masur, Corinne. “Daycare: Yes or No? An Opinion Piece.” Psychology Today, 8 Oct. 2024, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-matters/202410/daycare-yes-or-no-an-opinion-piece.

Masur, Corinne. “What Is High Quality Day Care Anyway?” Psychology Today, 8 Oct. 2024, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-matters/202410/what-is-high-quality-day-care-anyway.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development: Findings for Children up to Age 15 Years. National Institutes of Health, 2006.

Baker, Michael, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan. “Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 116, no. 4, 2008, pp. 709-745.

Smart Socks, Sleep Sacks, and the Death of Parenting

How American's have tried replacing love and care with gizmos, gadgets, and minimum wage employees.

Trolley Problem

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