A Cell Phone Is a Lazy Parent's Best Friend
Your baby daughter is wailing. You'd really like to quiet her down, but you don't want to have to actually interact with her to make it happen. What to do? Let your cell phone do the work, naturally! As one dad tells it, when his infant daughter starts to get "fussy" in the car or during a walk, he simply turns on the free iPhone app "White Noise Lite" and drops it into her carrier. "It immediately relaxes her," he explains, which is nice since that makes two of them.
There are a few other options for moms and dads intent on using technology to make parenting less stressful. There's Baby Rattle Bab Bab Lite, for example, an app that sounds like a rattle and "shows spinning graphics and chimes." Sure, you could spend $3 on a regular rattle, instead of $300 on one manufactured by Apple. (And it's no fun when your baby spits up all over your new iPhone and you have to trek to the store to buy another one.) But parenting by cell comes with some unique advantages.
When one dad left his new iPhone alone with his 4 1/2-year-old twin boys for 25 minutes, they'd "figured out what many of the phone's touch-screen buttons did and started taking photos." They've since "improved their spelling with a hangman game and use an application that makes their parents' phones sound like lightsabers." Another dad says his baby has already figured out that each icon on his iPhone corresponds to a different application: "To be able to do that before you're 4 years old, just think what they're going to do," he says. Blow the savings her dad's set aside for college on ringtones, for starters?
