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Do baby gadgets increase new moms' burnout?

You won't read this in the glossy ads of a pregnancy magazine, but motherhood often leaves women feeling burned out, disappointed at times, and confused about who they are anymore.

As a writer on this topic, one of my major conclusions is that it's not our reality that is necessarily so difficult, but rather the gap between our expectations and reality that drives us crazy.

What creates this gap? It begins with the romanticization of motherhood, the buildup to the "big day" of childbirth, like the idealization of a wedding as opposed to the reality of a marriage. Mothers-to-be are marketed to like crazy, and I am concerned that high-tech gadgets have a particular role in this problem. The marketing of gadgets raises the bar of expectation even higher, and gadgets tend to promise new parents an unrealistic level of control and certainty.

Take the BabyPlus "prenatal education system." Hey, I guess a regular baby isn't good enough any more. You need to produce a baby PLUS. This little pod is the latest gadget that a pregnant woman is supposed to strap to her belly to give her fetus a jump-start on academic achievement. The device "introduces patterns of sound to the unborn child in only the language he or she understands - the maternal heartbeat." The promised benefits include better sleep, better nursing, more self-soothing...right up to improved school readiness.

Now I can't say whether this program has any effect or not, but the marketing really bothers me.… Read more

Loving: Babygadget.net holiday gift guide

If you're the kind of parent who spends $245 on red wooden stilts for your child (and who isn't, really?), you have got the check out the Babygadget holiday gift guide--this is the "big things" installment, but there's a link to the whole shebang in there, too. OK, I'm underselling it. Even if you're not going to spend $245 on red wooden stilts, it's fantastic and, I'm betting, largely lead-free reading. I love, love, love the polar bear rocker, too, and it all makes me far less furious than reading … Read more

Gadgets for grandparents

It's getting down to the wire for holiday gift-giving. I am afraid I missed the boat for making recommendations in time for Hanukkah, and I am just starting on my Christmas list. With online shopping, I go right down to the deadline that regular shipping service can handle.

I've been looking for some cool gift ideas for the grandparents in our lives. The seniors I know are fairly tech-savvy in at least one area of their lives, if not totally enamored with gadgets. My Mom still doesn't like her cell phone but she is an eBay maven, … Read more

Diaper companies wrap up funding

Two companies that deal in diapers have attracted notable funding within the past week, leaving Dan Primack of Private Equity Hub to muse about the rise of a "diaper bubble."

gDiapers, which makes eco-friendly diapers, announced yesterday that it raised an undisclosed sum from 2x Consumer Products Growth Partners and Golden Seeds angel investors. gDiapers' hybrid diapers, perhaps the Prius of the Pampers world, consist of a flushable, compost-ready insert that fits inside decorative cloth panties.

Online marketplace Diapers.com raised $7 million in Series B funding last week, mostly through Bessemer Venture Partners. The Web site sells … Read more

Robotic cockroaches and electronic babysitters

The New York Times reported last week that led by robots, roaches abandon [their] instincts. Specifically, when left to their own devices, groups of cockroaches followed their instincts and natually preferred a darker hiding place to a lighter hiding place virtually all the time. And when a minority group of robotic cockroaches replaced some of the bugs in the cohort and followed natual cockroach rules, again virtually all cockroaches sought the darker hiding place. But when the robots were programmed to seek the lighter, rather than a darker hiding place, fully 60 percent of the wild cockroaches teamed with the robots rather than obeying their instincts, thus demonstrating that even cockroaches are susceptible to bug peer pressure.… Read more

'Baby Laptop' will whip that 1-year-old into shape

Now that the OLPC is finally becoming a reality, it's time to get your kids up to speed so they can compete in the global economy--and it's never too soon to start.

Hardware and software for preschoolers have been around for years, of course, but do you really want to wait that long before they become computer-savvy? To give them a running--or crawling--start, there's always Discovery's "Baby Laptop" as seen on Random Good Stuff.

The Baby Laptop helps teach numbers, colors, shapes and the alphabet, at least in concept, in six learning activities. And … Read more

'Sometimes the best deal is no deal at all'

Words to live by from CD Baby founder and president Derek Sivers.

I've blogged enthusiastically about CD Baby before: I've used the service and recommend it without reservation. Artists who own the distribution rights to their music--which includes just about any unsigned artist--can send as few as 5 CDs (or as many as they like) to CD Baby. For a one-time fee of $35 and 9% of all sales, CD Baby provides an online store front and handles fulfillment. They also have a digital distribution service that places your music in iTunes and other online stores, and takes … Read more

Facebook gets more VoIP with babyTEL

VoIP and telephony service babyTEL is launching a new Facebook application this morning called Telephone that gives you access to a phone and answering machine without leaving Facebook. Instead of going the embedded route, like YackPack, babyTEL instead relies on a small Java runtime that sits in your computer's taskbar, or the dock if you're on Mac OS X. Once you fire it up, there's a simple authentication process to pull up your list of friends on the social networking service, and allow you to call them for free--assuming you have a headset or speakers and a … Read more

Steve Ballmer is woefully underpaid

Of course, it's all relative, as The Register points out in citing an article from The Times on Ballmer's pay relative to Larry Ellison's.

As The Register notes:

Ballmer got a pay package worth a paltry $1.3m. The poor little rich boy received a salary of only $620,000 and a $650,000 bonus. He's practically a monk. What could motivate a man to wake up each morning knowing he could afford only a medium-sized fleet of solid gold luxury jets? His [9].3 per cent of Microsoft shares.… Read more