Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age

A charming, meticulously researched, and illuminating look at how technology infiltrates every aspect of raising children today, filled with helpful advice parents can use to best navigate the digital landscape, and ultimately learn to trust their own judgment.

There’s an app or device for nearly every aspect of parenting today: monitoring your baby; entertaining or educating your toddler; connecting with other new parents for tips, tricks, and community—virtually every aspect of daily life. But it isn’t a parenting paradise; the truth is much more complicated. 

The mother of two young daughters, journalist Sophie Brickman wondered what living in a tech-saturated world was doing to her and her children. She turned to experts, academics, doctors, and innovators for advice and insight. Baby, Unplugged brings together Brickman’s in-depth research with her own candid (sometimes hilarious) personal experience to help parents sort through the wide and often confusing tech offerings available today and to sort out what’s helpful and what’s not.

Filled with relatable and entertaining stories as well as practical takeaways, Baby, Unplugged is destined to become a touchstone for parents today, giving them the permission to forge their own path through the morass of technological options, to restore their faith in themselves, and to help them raise good, social, and engaged people in the modern world. 

But how do you cut through the noise of babytech and find what truly works for your family?

• Data Tracking vs. Intuition: From smart socks to sleep trackers, discover which data is actually useful and when to trust your own gut instead of the numbers.
• The Virtual Village: Can 38,000 strangers in a Facebook group replace your real-life friends? A candid look at the pros and cons of online parenting communities.
• Smart Toys & Analog Play: An honest comparison of digitally enhanced plush dogs and a simple set of wooden blocks to see what truly fosters child development.
• Navigating E-commerce: Learn how to escape the middle-of-the-night Amazon binges and endless product reviews to find what your family actually needs.
• Preschool Programming & Apps: From Mister Rogers to interactive apps, an investigation into which screens are helpful, which are harmful, and what "quality content" really means.