Site Presented By
Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
More and more parents are using secret cameras to spy on the people who care for their kids. Are these "nanny cams" benign tools for concerned moms and dads -- or outrageous invasions of privacy?
Jul 17, 2003 | When it was time to arrange childcare for their 8-month-old son, Jake and Anna Barron (not their real names), did everything by the book. The Manhattan couple, both in their mid-30s, interviewed at least a dozen nannies, some referred by friends, others found through a bulletin board at their pediatrician's office and still others by responding to ads in a local newspaper reputed to be the place to find a nanny.
The woman they ended up choosing after weeks of interviewing was, says Jake, "the best of the lot." They spoke to her at length about her background and experience, scrupulously checked her references (all were glowing), and watched her interact with their son, Evan. "She sat right down on the floor of Evan's bedroom and played with him during the entire interview," says Anna, a high school social studies teacher. "She seemed genuinely involved and sweet."
But after the nanny had been on the job for about four weeks, Anna and Jake couldn't fight the feeling that something was amiss. When the nanny arrived in the morning, Evan acted uncertain. He didn't seem happy around her, wasn't affectionate toward her, and was generally upset to see his parents go.
"We didn't know if it was normal separation anxiety or not," says Jake, a researcher in developmental psychology. "But it didn't sit right with us."
Hoping to prove that their suspicions were nothing more than new parent jitters, Jake and Anna called up a surveillance company that dealt in nanny cams -- small hidden cameras often placed within a common household items like smoke detectors or teddy bears -- that are wired back to a VCR or computer that allow parents to watch how a caregiver interacts with their child in their absence.
A company technician came right over with a camera concealed inside a clock radio, aimed it at an active spot in the Barrons' living room, wired it to their VCR, showed them how to use it and left them to discover the truth about what was going on in their home.
It took only one day.
When Jake and Anna came home that first night, they hit the "play" button on the VCR with shaking hands. What they witnessed, Jake says, was "stomach-turning."
The couple saw Evan left all by himself on the living room floor, crying hysterically, craning his head around, desperately looking for someone to comfort him. Behind him, just out of his view, the nanny paced back and forth, talking on the phone. Eventually, the nanny left the room altogether, coming back only to yell at Evan.
"The person we saw on the tape was in no way related to the person who had interviewed with us and who reported to us at the end of every day," Jake says. "We realized that this had probably been going on for weeks."
Unwilling to leave the nanny alone with their child for even one more minute, Jake and Anna called her up that night and fired her on the spot.
Over the last few years, interest in nanny cams has risen steadily. In a recent study, the Dallas market research firm Parks Associates found that 19 percent of U.S. households with at least one child at home have expressed interest in using a nanny cam, up from 16 percent two years ago. A spokeswoman for CCS International, parent company of U.S. retailer Counter Spy Shops, told the Wall Street Journal in May that nanny cam sales at the chain's four stores have risen 25 percent in the past five years.
And as interest has climbed, prices have plummeted -- by about one-half in the last five years. Though it is still possible to spend several thousand dollars on a fancy, custom-installed multi-camera system from a high-end surveillance company or several hundred dollars on a camera concealed inside a stuffed animal or a tissue box from a company like TBO-TECH Hidden Cameras, a basic do-it-yourself wireless camera like the Xcam2 from X-10 Wireless Technology -- the people behind those persistent pop-up ads -- costs only about $80.
"In the last two or three years, our product has become somewhat ubiquitous," X-10 spokesman Jeff Denenholz says. "It's grown into a common household tool."
Indeed, in an age when more and more Americans rely on some sort of childcare and shocking tales of neglect and abuse flood the evening news, parents are turning to nanny cams for comfort and control in increasing numbers.
Stories like Jake and Anna's don't surprise Steve Sleicher, vice president of Kid-View, Inc., a child-monitoring service in Great Neck, N.Y. Sleicher says a full 70 percent of his clients fire their nannies after just one day of camming.
"We've seen everything: drug use, the liquor cabinet, the boyfriend over," Sleicher says.
Lori Berke, 42, started helping families outfit their homes with nanny cams in 1996, after she found out her own nanny was mistreating her daughter. Now president of Care Check, a New York company specializing in surveillance systems (and a Kid-View affiliate), Berke says her goal is to ensure that other parents don't experience the horror that she went through.
"My nanny had 17 years of experience and I thought she was just fabulous," says Berke, who has also coauthored a book, "Making Childcare Choices: How to Find, Hire, and Keep the Best Childcare for Your Kids." But after borrowing a camera from a friend who insisted that something seemed off about the nanny, she watched as her trusted sitter left her baby daughter bundled in a snowsuit for hours inside a hot apartment, left her alone in her crib with the side down and -- most horrifying of all -- slapped her daughter.
Although Berke's company initially emphasized background checks on nannies, the video surveillance part of her business has grown at a far more rapid pace and now constitutes the bulk of her work.
"There's been a regular increase in my business over the last few years, at least 20 or 30 percent a year," she says, crediting the growth to a weakening economy sending more and more parents back into the workforce and to an uptick in awareness thanks to the media.
"As 'Dateline' and other news magazines run stories on Jekyll-and-Hyde nannies, more people start talking about it and thinking about it," she says. "Every time someone does a story about it, we see a spike."
Sleicher says his nanny-cam clients are typically middle-class parents in search of a little reassurance.
"Usually, wealthy couples can afford to have one parent stay home," he says. "We're getting more the younger professional couples who are both still forging their careers. I think parental guilt comes in. They want to do something to protect their kid and they don't know what to do. Then they find out about us."
Bill San Filippo, 44, a real estate agent in Queens, N.Y., and his then-wife, Tara, a nurse, cammed their nanny a few years ago after they came home several times to find their children -- then 2 years old and 6 months old -- with completely soiled diapers. They set up a video camera they already owned on a shelf under a pile of clothes and aimed it at their bed, which doubled as a changing area for their kids. Sure enough, within just a day or two of taping, their worst fears were confirmed.
