 [♪ Music with a drum beat and drums flowing out of the machine. This is Ben Popper. He's an editor at The Verge, which means he's pretty dialed into the cutting edge of tech. But when he gets home from work, he's a dad. Ahh! And as far as parenting goes, he thinks of himself as a Luddite, except when it comes to occupying his kids with an iPad. I feel a little embarrassed to be a tech writer who has barely any baby gadgets. I mean, I guess I think that for the most part, I assume technology can add a lot of pleasure, value to my life, but also a lot of work. My oldest is now almost 10, and so when she was first born, it was like, whoa, video monitors. So we've come a huge way, and I think absolutely it's making parenting easier. This is Liz Gumbiner. When it comes to combining technology and parenting, she's pretty much an expert. I'm a publisher of CoolMomPicks Network, which includes CoolMom Tech, which is a site that we designed specifically to present tech, tech tips, apps, helpful resource for parents from a parenting point of view. CoolMom Tech pegs itself as a site that gives parents common sense information about tech. You can go there for information about educational toys, calendar apps that keep your family organized, and private social networks that let you share pictures of your kids with family. It's technology applied to parenting in every way imaginable. Moms really want things, and dads, that are practical, that have a purpose in their life, that will keep them organized, that will make their life easier, that will make them feel cooler, that will keep their kids entertained. They're very purposeful with their technology choices. Are there certain tasks that you wish were just easier? Changing diapers, making bottles, giving baths. I could probably go on for a long time. You could just keep going. Last night I had to get up at 3 in the morning in the dark and try to warm up a bottle without making any noise, and that was pretty tough. If I had a bottle that I could just shake to activate, and a couple minutes later it would be warm, that would be amazing. So, Oliver is opening the Yamago self-warming baby bottle. The bottle uses pods filled with a salt and water solution that, with a shake, can warm up a bottle in about four minutes. My kids need milk all the time, when they wake up, before they go to bed, sometimes in the middle of the night. I spend a lot of time filling bottles, cleaning bottles, heating up milk, and doling it out. This would be great because I can just put the milk in, shake it up, and there's a little chemical reaction with salt and water. A couple minutes later the bottle is ready to go. I could also see it being really great for a road trip when I'm flying solo without my wife and I don't have a stove handy. The only thing that really bothers me is having to use these bulky plastic pods and throwing them out after every use. That feels pretty wasteful to me. We use a baby monitor, but we're definitely set apart from people who have much more intense baby monitoring setups. Yay! The Withings Smart Baby Monitor gives you a high definition view of your baby while she's sleeping. The app can send you automatic alerts when your kid is crying, and you even have the option of talking to her. A huge part of parenting, especially in the early days, is training yourself not to rush into your kid's room the second you hear them cry. So for me, not having tons and tons of data about them was actually a good thing. But I just used this Withings Smart Baby Monitor and now that I've tried one, I could see how it would sometimes save me. Like, in the middle of the night, I hear him cry. Okay, are his legs stuck in the crib? I need to go in. Is he about to fall back asleep? Great, I'm not getting out of bed. It feels like the kind of thing you don't need, but once you have it, you could never go back to living without it. We've always done like baby-led feeding where whatever we're eating, they eat. But I think there are definitely lots of times when we're eating something that isn't quite right for them. So if we had something that we're eating and then you could just like steam it or blend it up and it would be a lot easier for them, that would be great. The Beaba Baby Cook Pro is what happens when you combine a steamer with a food processor. It's designed to help you make baby food quickly, all while minimizing mess. I'm a pretty terrible cook, but to me this seems like kind of an ideal way to go about it. A lot of the time I'm looking through the fridge thinking, okay, what in here can my baby eat? With this you pour in the water, you do a little chopping, and voila, you've got mush that a baby could ingest. This is easy to clean, it's kind of like a one-pot meal. Honestly, if I was still a bachelor, I might use this for myself. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Now, when I first had Oliver and I would take him out for a walk by myself like in the carrier, I would stop at the end of every block and like check to make sure he was breathing. Which is totally crazy, like there's no reason to do that, but you do do that. Like you feel, you know, neurotic about all that stuff. Yeah, no, that's true. The Mimo Smart Onesie sends information about your child's breathing patterns, body position, and body temperature right to your smartphone. To me, it epitomizes the conflict that I have around baby tech. Would it be awesome to know when my son is getting a fever in the middle of the night? Absolutely. But I've also gotten a lot of alerts while I've been testing this saying he's awake when he's actually asleep, that he has an abnormally low temperature when he's fine, and then just the app disconnecting at random and now he stopped breathing. If I relied on it and took every warning at face value, I feel like it would end up adding a lot of stress to my life. The hard thing is that there's more out there to sort through. You know, there's not like the one baby book from Dr. Spock or like the one high chair that everyone gets. There's so many options that the hard part is weeding through all of it. And that's what I found too. I would go on Amazon and there would be hundreds of options. It was overwhelming and I wasn't sure which one to pick. So a lot of times I would just fall back on my iPhone, you know. It could be a gaming device if the kids are bored. It's a white noise machine if we need to sleep at somebody else's house. It's a baby monitor and a pinch. I mean, there's just an app for everything. At this point, I feel like screens are just a part of people's lives. Glenn Whitney is the president of the National Museum of Math in New York City. He spends a lot of time thinking about what it takes to keep kids engaged when brushing complicated concepts. This means that he knows a lot about how children and parents interact with technology. There's a lot of different ways that people learn. People are visual learners. People are tactile learners. People are auditory learners. So we try to use touch and sound and sight. You know, the more ways you have experienced something, the more engaging it is. You can create a similar environment on an iPad and a good piece of software can really get you engaged and get you wanting to explore. It's creating that drive and that curiosity to know more that I think is really the key of getting kids to learn more. I have an iPad One. We spend a lot of time researching which apps to get him, and we spend a lot of money on some very fancy apps. In the end, it's kind of like a kid with a cardboard box. He prefers the free ones that we think are junk. But I do see him really learning about letters and shapes and colors, all kinds of concepts while he's playing on there. You know, the flip side of that is I go into his room in the morning and before he says, Daddy, I love you, it's want my iPad, want YouTube, and then I'm pretty sure I failed as a parent. The tablet can be a great parenting tool for videos, for the car. You know, it takes the place of a lot of other devices. But as long as it's not the expense of your kid also interacting in the real world. You have to look at it with a critical eye and say, you know, what is my child or what am I really doing or getting out of this particular program? If you're looking for that active learning, it's the question of how does it get you involved? I think sometimes technology can be a substitute for parenting. An iPod is not a parent. Like, parents are parents. So while technology can do some things that make your life easier, I think it's a matter of finding the balance between all these amazing tools that can be educational and support us as parents and support our kids' growth, and then using the old school stuff. Like, kids still like to play with the cardboard box more than whatever came in it. That will never change.