The Brutally Honest Truth About the Nanit Baby Monitor System

When I was pregnant with my first, I got three entirely different pieces of advice about watching your kid sleep in the span of one afternoon. My mom, bless her heart, told me to just leave the bedroom door cracked and listen for crying because that’s what they did in the eighties and we all miraculously survived. My best friend told me to buy the absolute cheapest audio-only box from the big box store because video screens make you crazy. And some Instagram influencer popped up on my feed aggressively implying that if I didn't track my newborn's oxygen levels with a thousand-dollar device, I was basically negligent.

I’m just gonna be real with you, I ignored all of them and bought the Nanit.

With my oldest—who's now five and is my walking, talking cautionary tale for first-time parenting mistakes—I was an absolute wreck. I'd physically walk into his room forty times a night to put my hand on his chest just to make sure he was breathing, which of course woke him up, which meant nobody slept, ever. I was so sleep-deprived I couldn't remember if I was shopping for a baby monitor or a baby m-something else entirely, my brain was just absolute mush. By the time my third kid came along, I was running my Etsy shop out of the garage, wrangling two toddlers, and living in rural Texas where the internet goes out if a squirrel sneezes on a power line. I needed something that actually worked without making me crazier than I already was.

Let's talk about the price tag because lord have mercy

Look, I'm a budget-conscious person, and shelling out nearly three hundred dollars for a camera made my eye twitch. That's a lot of money when you're also buying diapers by the truckload. But here's the financial hack nobody tells you about until you've already spent your cash: the Nanit camera and the breathing wear are actually HSA/FSA eligible. If you've a health savings account from your job, you can use that pre-tax money to buy the system, which takes a massive bite out of the actual cost.

But we need to talk about the subscription trap, because it makes me want to scream into a pillow.

When you buy the camera, they give you this free six-month trial to "Nanit Insights," which sounds fancy and gives you all these video histories and sleep coaching analytics. You get completely addicted to waking up and checking your app to see exactly how many times the baby woke up, how long they slept, and what their sleep efficiency score was. It feels like you're winning a game you didn't know you were playing.

Then, right when you're at your most vulnerable and dependent on this data, usually around the six-month sleep regression when you're losing your actual mind, the trial expires. Suddenly, the app locks you out of your historical data, and if you want it back, you've to hand over your credit card for an annual subscription. It's infuriatingly clever marketing, and I fall for it every single time because I'm weak and I like seeing the little timeline of my baby sleeping.

It also tells you the temperature and humidity in the room, but honestly, I just look at the thermostat in the hallway so I really don't care about that part.

The whole breathing band situation

The main reason I went with this specific system instead of the ones that make you strap an electronic sock to your kid's foot is because I didn't want batteries touching my baby's skin. The Nanit uses this thing called Breathing Wear, which is basically just a fabric band or swaddle with a specific black-and-white geometric pattern printed on it.

The way I understand it—and I'm an Etsy crafter, not a computer scientist—is that the overhead camera reads the pixels or the microscopic movements of that pattern going up and down to figure out if your kid is breathing. There are no wires, no sensors, and no false alarms because the baby kicked a sock off into the corner of the crib at 3 AM.

Texas summers are aggressively hot, so layering clothes is always a nightmare. I'd put the patterned breathing band directly over our Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit, because it’s sleeveless and breathes better than anything else we tried. I'm gonna be honest, the snaps on that bodysuit are a little stiff for the first few washes, but the organic cotton is so incredibly soft that it was the only thing that didn't give my middle child a heat rash under the monitor band.

When the internet completely dies

Living out in the country means our Wi-Fi is held together by duct tape and prayers. The biggest fear I had with a smart camera was that our internet provider would decide to do "routine maintenance" at midnight, the Wi-Fi would drop, and I’d be left staring at a blank screen while my kid was crying in the other room.

Turns out, the camera has this local connectivity feature. If your house's main internet connection to the outside world goes down, but your home Wi-Fi router is still plugged in and broadcasting its little internal signal, the camera and your phone will still talk to each other. It basically reverts to being a standard, old-school video monitor. You don't get the fancy sleep data when it's offline, but you get the video and the audio, which is all you actually care about when the power flickers during a thunderstorm.

Keeping the weirdos out of your nursery

I watch way too many true crime documentaries while I'm folding laundry, so the idea of a Wi-Fi camera in my baby's room gave me severe anxiety. We've all seen those news stories about hackers talking to kids through their monitors.

If you get this camera, you've to turn on the Two-Factor Authentication in the app immediately, and you should use a password that isn't just your dog's name and your birth year. It has a physical sliding shutter, so if I’m in there nursing or changing a blowout and I don't want the app recording, I just push the plastic slider up and it physically blinds the camera lens.

They also include these hard plastic tracks that stick to the wall to completely cover the power cord. Cords terrify me. My oldest used to reach through the crib slats like a little prisoner trying to grab anything he could reach. We genuinely paired down the whole nursery just to keep things safe and simple. I was way more focused on making sure her play space wasn't an ugly plastic nightmare covered in wires, which is why we got the Wooden Baby Gym instead of some loud battery-operated thing. Honestly, the wooden gym is gorgeous, but my middle kid only ever cared about chewing on the elephant and completely ignored the geometric shapes.

Is it honestly gonna stop SIDS?

My pediatrician, Dr. Miller, who has the bedside manner of a drill sergeant, looked me dead in the eye at our two-week checkup and told me that no consumer gadget on the market prevents SIDS. The medical community doesn't consider these things medical devices.

She told me that parents buy them for their own psychological relief, not because they're life-saving hospital equipment. And you know what? She was right. Having that little icon on my phone showing me the breathing motion allowed me to seriously close my eyes and sleep for two consecutive hours without physically hovering over the crib like a ghost. Instead of staring at the screen all night, obsessing over the numbers, and forgetting to breathe yourself, just put the baby on their back in an empty crib and trust your gut.

Things I wish I knew before drilling holes in my wall

If you buy the standard wall mount version, you're going to have to drill actual holes into the drywall directly above the center of the crib. If you're renting, or if you're like me and you rearrange your furniture every time you get bored, this is a terrible idea.

Get the floor stand instead. It's a heavy, freestanding pole that you just slide under the crib. We had to move our crib entirely when my daughter started pulling to a stand and grabbing at the wall. When she was actively teething, she would stand up and try to shake the camera pole like it owed her money. I eventually just chucked our Panda Teether Silicone Chew Toy right into the crib with her so she'd have something safe to gnaw on instead of trying to eat my expensive electronics. That little panda teether was a lifesaver, mostly because it's flat enough for her to really hold, even if I did have to wash dog hair off it fifty times a day.

The accessories you really need (and the ones you don't)

You don't need to buy twenty different breathing bands. You need two. One to use, and one to have in the drawer for when the first one inevitably gets covered in spit-up at two in the morning. They also sell these specialized Nanit sleeping bags and swaddles with the pattern printed right on them, but I found them way too expensive for how fast babies grow out of them. Just buy the band that wraps around the chest and put it over whatever pajamas they're already wearing.

Eventually, they grow out of the breathing tracking altogether. Once my youngest figured out how to stand up, unzip his own pajamas, and aggressively chuck his Gentle Baby Building Blocks at the camera lens, we officially retired the breathing band. (By the way, those soft rubber blocks are great because when you step on them barefoot in the dark, you don't instantly start crying like you do with hard plastic bricks, though I wish they came in a bigger set).

Even without the breathing tracking, we still use the camera for my three-year-old. It has an "Ok to Wake" feature where the built-in nightlight turns a certain color when it's finally an acceptable time to get out of bed, which is incredibly helpful for toddlers who think 4:30 AM is morning.

If you're still on the fence about your nursery setup or what you honestly need to survive the first year, check out the answers to some of the most common questions I get asked about this monitor system below.

FAQs from the Trenches

Does the Nanit work if I put the baby in a bassinet in my room first?

Technically yes, but it's a huge pain in the rear unless you buy the floor stand or the travel mount. If you drill the wall mount into your nursery wall, you obviously can't use it in your master bedroom. We bought the flex stand (which is basically a little travel base) to put on our nightstand when the baby was in the bassinet next to our bed. But honestly, when they're that close to you, you can hear them breathing anyway.

Is the breathing band safe for newborns?

My pediatrician said it's totally fine because it's just a piece of fabric that velcros around their torso, not a heavy weighted blanket. It doesn't compress their chest or restrict their movement. It just sits there like a tight hug. Just make sure you get the right size, because if it's too loose, the camera gets confused and starts sending you alerts that the baby isn't moving, which will give you an unnecessary heart attack at 3 AM.

Do I really need a smart monitor or is it just a flex?

If you're an anxious person who's going to lay awake staring at the ceiling wondering if your baby is okay, spend the money. It buys you sleep, and sleep is priceless. If you're a super chill person who can just shut the door and pass out, save your three hundred bucks and buy a cheap audio monitor. There's no right answer, it just depends on your baseline level of anxiety.

Can my husband and I both have the app on our phones?

Yeah, and you can add grandparents or babysitters too. You set yourself up as the admin, and you can invite other people. The best part is you can restrict their access so they only get the video feed when they're physically connected to your house's Wi-Fi. That way my mother-in-law can't randomly check in on the nursery camera from her house while I'm in there folding laundry in my underwear.