Peace and quiet: Why parents are reaching for noise

Feb 11, 2024

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Of all the paraphernalia recommended to new parents, Melbourne-based author Wendy Syfret hadn’t expected something she’d used when working to tight deadlines to be her saving grace in the early days of motherhood. But using noise-cancelling headphones in the 14 months since her daughter Beatrix was born has been pivotal in getting through the most isolating moments.

Wendy Syfret and her daughter Beatrix. Credit: Paul Jeffers

“When you’re first at home with a baby, it can be quite a grind. I spent hours just sitting awake at night with her, alone in the dark,” says Syfret. “But knowing I had a podcast to listen to or a show to watch helped me have something to look forward to, almost. It was a way for me to stay connected to who I was as a person outside of being a mum, without compromising the attention I was giving her.”

On a recent afternoon at her home in Sydney, Rebecca – who is using a pseudonym, out of fear of being judged by fellow parents – began to experience what she thought was a panic attack. It was a rainy day and, with her two young children at home on school holidays, the living room TV was booming a rerun of a particularly beloved episode of Dora the Explorer.

“I couldn’t focus on anything properly – it felt as if there were pins and needles throughout my entire body and like my brain was stuck in a fog,” she says. “I thought I was going to be sick at one point, it was searing and visceral. But as soon as I put in my headphones, it began to pass.”

Rebecca and Syfret are among a growing number of parents turning to noise-reducing and noise-cancelling headphones as a tool of parenting, not for their children but for themselves. “I hate to think about the kind of judgment I’ll receive for doing it, but it’s the only thing that stops me from going crazy,” says Rebecca.

Though using them for different reasons – and with children of different ages – both parents are adamant that when it comes to using noise-reducing or noise-cancelling headphones, there are clear rules, with the number one being: only when the children are in the same room.

“I would never use them when Beatrix is in bed or not in my line of sight; it’s more an escape when you can’t actually escape them,” says Syfret. “It allows me to be physically present but mentally somewhere else, which you sometimes need for your sanity.”

Rebecca agrees, saying, “I’d never use them to sleep, but I also can’t watch another episode of Dora for as long as I live.”

According to Professor Pamela Meredith from the University of the Sunshine Coast’s School of Health, aversions to particular sounds or noises – and knowing how to manage them – is a lot more common than most of us would realise.

“A lot of people think that if you’re sensitive to noise, you must be on the autism spectrum or have ADHD, but that’s not true. It’s certainly associated, but it can also occur with people with anxiety, PTSD, brain injuries – a whole range of things. It’s really very similar to how one person might love spicy food or how one person’s pain threshold is higher than others.”

While it’s easy to assume using headphones to drown out your children is yet another chink in the armour of modern parenting, Meredith says that so long as it’s being done in a way that ensures the child’s needs are still being met, headphones can have profound emotional and psychological benefits to parents who are noise sensitive and serve as a way to ensure their emotional wellbeing needs are met too.

“As we grow up, we tend to develop coping mechanisms and adapt to situations or experiences that make us uncomfortable. But when you have children, all of that goes out the window, and you can’t control your environment anymore,” says Meredith. “We saw this a lot during COVID when children were being homeschooled and, suddenly, many parents really began to struggle with their emotional regulation because the environment they were used to had completely changed.”

Jenny Davis, an Associate Professor of Sociology specialising in the intersection of technology at the Australian National University, says that while noise-cancelling headphones might be relatively new, the desire to switch off and drown out unwanted noise is anything but.

“There’s a need to carve out time for yourself, even in the midst of other people; that’s a human need. But parenting creates a really demanding and overwhelming environment, which means those needs are often overlooked and unmet,” she says, pointing to a study that interviewed women who read romance paperbacks. “When interviewed, what came out was that it wasn’t really about the novel itself; it was more that reading was a mechanism of carving out alone time for themselves in public. In a way, this seems to be a more modern version of that.”

But as with screens and tablets, countless parents I spoke with (mostly mothers) held deep fears about the judgment associated with technology.

This is nothing new, Davis says, with technology often treated as a “cultural bogeyman” to assess a person’s parenting ability.

“Family and parenting is something that already has a lot of anxiety and moral meaning around it, and then you introduce something new like technology – which people are already uncomfortable with – and there’s an easy opportunity to question the morality of others.”

For Syfret, headphones have given her the opportunity to feel like she’s walking into another room, even when she doesn’t have the ability to. “I’m there in body for my child in the middle of the night, but my head is with my Real Housewives podcast.”

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