For many parents, baby monitors are more useful appliances than televisions or washing machines. A baby monitor frees parents to do the things they need to do around the house, without worrying that their child is crying for attention but can't be heard. But can baby monitors be overused?

There's a lot of debate about the various devices used to help care for children. In reality, this debate is nothing new; it goes back for centuries. In the 1700s, the French philosopher Rousseau argued against the current practice of swaddling—that is, putting a baby in an extremely tight-fitting garment so that he or she cannot move. Many parents and nannies would even take the swaddled baby and hang him or her on a wall while they did housework. Rousseau argued that this deprived children of their developing sense of freedom, and would lead to adults who were too easily cowed by authority.

Nowadays, critics worry about the potential psychological damage that things like playpens, pacifiers, strollers, or baby monitors might pose. Plenty of ordinary people have wondered out loud whether it really is a good thing to put a pacifier into a child's mouth to keep him or her from crying. Of course, pacifiers can be a joy for teething children, but then again, what if the baby is crying for a reason? Until we can read babies' minds, there probably won't be a definitive answer to this one.

The argument over playpens, strollers, and baby monitors has to do with a similar issue of whether these devices keep parents separate from their children. The thinking is that our ancestors, for tens of thousands of years, were forced to hold babies close to them when the baby wasn't sleeping. Over time, this constant human contact could have become an important part of our emotional development. Now that we can monitor babies while keeping them at arm's length, are we adding to our convenience at the expense of their emotional development?

Baby monitors do not figure as prominently into this kind of argument as playpens, which have often been thought of as almost a new kind of swaddling, since it supposedly restricts children's movement too much. Perhaps what makes baby monitors a little less worrisome is that they are intended to be used while the child is asleep anyway, so not so much contact with the baby will be lost.

Perhaps then, baby monitors are the one convenience you can use without any guilt about shortchanging your child's development. That is, as long as your baby monitor is just a way of monitoring on your sleeping child, and not a way to keep a waking child in a crib or playpen in another part of the house.