I sometimes envy my friends who went back to work immediately after becoming moms. After spending the first 2 years of motherhood being around my daughter all the time, I was not able to muster the courage to go back to a full-time job, since I now belong to that species of moms who like to micro manage. My husband even has a term for it – control freak! Yes, I admit, I am one of those who will go for a movie without my baby but will call home during the interval to find out if everything is alright at home.
I am grateful to have family members at home to watch over my child when I’m not around. Nuclear families nowadays have no one to watch over kids when they are away at work or go out for an evening away from their kids.
Enter the domestic help.
Keeping someone to watch over the kids is almost a must have accessory for urban parents nowadays. When both parents are forced to go back to work they are left with no option but to hire full time help. But with so many stories making headlines daily about abuse, assault and other crimes against children, even the most trusting of parents will need to step back and think of alternative reinforcements. And that’s where the next must have urban accessory comes into play. The CCTV or closed circuit television or video surveillance.
We all know shops, malls and commercial establishments to be equipped with Closed circuit cameras (CCTV). But did you know that the demand for CCTVs at home has increased? Working parents increasingly forced to leave their child at home with the domestic help have resorted to CCTVs to keep an eye on goings on at home in their absence.
A recent study on the online market for Video surveillance in India, conducted by Sulekha.com revealed that about 30% of the online CCTV searches came from working parents, this trend indicates the growing adoption of online surveillance as a remote parenting tool in India.
It seems to be working for everyone. Parents living in nuclear families with busy work schedules, parents of latch key children-i.e kids who return home when parents are not home or even those parents raising a physically or mentally challenged child are resorting to technology to keep a close watch on their kids activities as well as of the domestic help. Having access through technology provides some comfort and a sense of security to parents away from home.,
But there is a flip side to all this to. Can video surveillance prevent those “suspicious activitiesâ€_x009d_ that we keep reading about in the newspapers, can we install cameras in bathrooms or bedrooms? And what about older kids? Will they like being recorded all the time? What about their privacy and space?
As more and more parents ask for security cameras in day care, schools or even school buses, video surveillance is slowly cementing its place in our parenting world. Hopefully, we learn to harness the power of these tiny camera and not just use and abuse it as the latest trend.
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Janani S Koushik
Rohan Vyavaharkar
