Parents turn to cellphones as high-tech rattles
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- When Annamarie Saarinen needed to soothe her ailing daughter, she used a rattle — downloaded to her iPhone.
Jeff Hilimire uses a white noise application on his phone to make shushing noises for his infant daughter. And Tracie Stier-Johnson lets her young daughters answer trivia questions on her phone while waiting in the doctor's office or at parent-teacher conferences.
"You can only play 'I spy' so many times," said Stier-Johnson, 40, of Racine, Wis., whose daughters like the Who Wants to be a Millionaire game she loaded on her iPhone.
Parents have handed their cellphones to children as distractions since they were invented, and toy versions tap into kids' love of pushing beeping buttons and playing with electronic gadgets like the ones their parents have. But a mushrooming number of applications on smartphones have parents using them more than ever as modern baby rattles.
These wired-up phones allow parents to play number and letter games with their preschoolers or to get a few minutes of quiet when children watch movie clips on a plane or while waiting for a restaurant table.
Jenny Reeves, 34, of San Antonio, lets her boys — ages 3 1/2 and 2 — type words or flip through pictures of themselves and their dog on her BlackBerry when they have to pass time without books. Her older son is learning to send e-mails to his grandparents and dad that say, "I love you."
"It's almost as good as lollipops," Reeves said.
People also are making their phones parenting helpers, downloading applications to turn them into impromptu baby monitors, to research nutrition information in grocery aisles and to check their babies' growth rate compared to average measurements.
Hilimire, a 33-year-old father from Atlanta, started putting his iPhone to before his daughter was born, when he timed contractions with the phone's stopwatch and downloaded software that showed the size of the growing baby.
Now when his infant daughter gets fussy in the car or during a walk, he puts his iPhone in her carrier to play the free application called White Noise Lite. "It immediately relaxes her," he said.
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