The Latest in Baby Pictures Come From a Spy Camera

There are moments in the life of every new parent that even the most devoted readers of the “What to Expect” books rarely expect.

Maybe it’s the first time you hear yourself passionately defending disposable diapers to a group of environmentalists or wondering if the household budget can accommodate private school tuition, egalitarians be damned.

But one day it dawns on you that the cherub who has your heart locked in a full nelson has changed you in ways that are not always so flattering.

For me, one of those discomfiting moments occurred recently as I stood in the Woodland Hills showroom of the Privacy Connection, a store that rents and sells video cameras for home surveillance.

I was there because I planned to spy on my child’s baby-sitter.

My concern was which model of camera to use. There was the one appropriately hidden inside a teddy bear. But the store also has cameras concealed in smoke detectors, neckties, radios, pagers and wall clocks.

Sigh.

The Privacy Connection’s Ventura Boulevard storefront is tastefully shrouded by shrubbery. Inside, past the life-size mannequin in SWAT team regalia, executives worried about corporate espionage and spouses who suspect their mates of infidelity or murderous intentions can choose from a James Bond-esque array of debugging devices, bulletproof vests, fingerprint-lifting kits and palm-size cameras.

But increasingly, the customers are parents. Just about every TV newsmagazine has aired horrifying footage of nannies from hell, from nannies yakking on the telephone while unfed infants wail to nannies beating or choking the children.

Owner Phil Wolvek seemed nonplused, even vaguely bored, by this mother’s quest. In his line of work, nanny surveillance is child’s play. Stifling a yawn, he talked about the time he rigged a camera to tape a marital bed’s events whenever the weight on the mattress exceeded the wife’s 125 pounds.

Wolvek also revealed that he routinely employs the gadgetry he sells to keep tabs on his seven children.

“When my 15-year-old daughter started dating, I used to take out my guns and clean them in front of the boys. Now I take them down here” for a tour of the showroom, he said. “I say, ‘I know every move you are going to make, so you better treat my daughter with respect,’ ” he said with a chuckle.

I asked Wolvek about renting a long-playing audiotape recorder instead of a camera. Somehow, it seemed less odious to merely eavesdrop on the sitter than to watch her.

No dice. In California, it is an illegal invasion of privacy to record someone’s words without his or her knowledge, Wolvek said. But there is no such ban on videotaping someone in your home, consent or no consent, he said.

For that reason, all the cameras carried by the Privacy Connection have their sound functions disabled, greatly reducing their usefulness as far as I could tell. With pictures but no sound, how would I know the tone of voice the sitter used with my child, whether the baby’s squeals signaled joy or fear?

Sigh.

Up to that point, there hadn’t been any major problems with our son’s sitter, an efficient young woman--just a series of minor incidents that made my husband and me suspicious.

We wondered whether she was taking the baby out of the house when she said she hadn’t. Was her boyfriend visiting when he wasn’t supposed to? Was she ignoring my instructions not to put the baby to sleep with a bottle?

Perhaps we were being paranoid, but the truth was we were also growing weary of spending weekends analyzing the nanny’s every word and searching for clues. What we didn’t know was driving us crazy.

And that’s the crux of the dilemma in leaving someone too young to talk in the care of a stranger. From the moment you walk out the door with your commuter coffee mug and a dry-clean-only suit tattooed with spit-up stains, you just don’t know.

As distasteful as this videotaping business is, more than 70% of parents who take the plunge fire their care provider because of something they saw on the tape, according to a Child magazine survey.

Knowing that made it easier to believe that not spying on the sitter would be irresponsible.

From my baby-centric vantage point, I had almost convinced myself that our sitter would understand if, God forbid, she discovered the camera.

Still, I wanted to minimize that risk.

After examining the teddy bear and wall clock cameras, I determined that neither had giveaway clues. But then Wolvek delivered some bad news: The camera had to be connected to a videocassette recorder, a rig he assured me could be concealed. But I couldn’t see how it would work. The room where I planned to put the camera had no TV. How would I explain a VCR tethered to a smoke detector?

There are wireless hookups, but that would set me back about $900 a week, compared with $350 for the regular camera.

Sigh.

I needed perspective. I needed to talk to other paranoid parents.

The folks at Check My Baby, a new local company that specializes in surreptitious sitter surveillance by installing cameras in household items such as coffeepots, put me in touch with several customers. All said the cameras confirmed their fears that once they left, so did any pretense of Mary Poppins.

“Just be prepared to cry,” warned one father, a Westside actor with a 3-year-old daughter.

“Every night, my wife would come home from work and rush to put the tape on. For three or four hours she would sit there, going through this eight-hour tape,” the father said. “After a while I could not watch any more because I had seen enough.”

What they saw was minor league neglect, but no abuse worthy of hunting for a new sitter.

A Simi Valley mother of twins said her nanny “would completely ignore the girls and they were screaming for attention. My husband purposely put a lock on the TV, and you could see her fiddling with it.” She fired the sitter.

“You have one chance as a parent, I feel, and you just don’t blow it. You don’t have to apologize for anything when it comes to your child,” she said.

As it turned out, our sitter quit for her own reasons before we rented a camera. One Friday she was there, the next Monday she was gone.

We have a new sitter now, an enthusiastic young woman whom our son adores. So far, I haven’t felt the need to spy on her. But every so often, as I walk out the door with my commuter coffee mug and rice cereal stains on my dry-clean-only suit, I wonder what the two of them do all day while we’re gone.

A tiny voice replies: You just don’t know.