Have you ever considered how baby monitors work? The reason we have them is obvious. But you need to consider that if you have the listening unit downstairs in a public place and the other unit upstairs with your children, anyone else downstairs will be a captive audience to whatever they hear on it.
Many parents have gone up to their children and had a nice conversation with them or sung them back to sleep – only to discover everyone else downstairs was listening to every word of it. This can be nice of course but it always pays to remember that you aren’t simply chatting to your child. You might also have one or two other people listening in.
This might be amusing at times but if you have older children who are downstairs at the same time, you do need to be careful what you say. For example supposing your youngest child asks you a question in confidence. You would answer them but it wouldn’t be in confidence if the people downstairs heard it as well. In this situation you need to be aware of the potential of people listening in – particularly siblings.
Always make sure you remove or unplug the device in your child’s room before anything like this occurs. Once you have finished talking you just need to remember to plug it back in again. This shows your child that you take their concerns or questions seriously and you want to keep the conversation between the two of you as you had promised.
If you have a two way monitor you also need to be careful of talking downstairs when your children can hear you upstairs. The idea is that you can talk to elder children without always having to go up to them, but you do need to be aware of the benefits and the limitations of such a device.
Of course baby monitors are invaluable in lots of situations and you will always make sure you have one in place every night so you can check your children are safely asleep. If they wake up you will know about it immediately, and if you need to go into them you will be nearby to do so.
But as we said, it does pay to remember that there is a line of communication there. Provided you always remember it you shouldn’t have any problems at all.