As children return to school this fall, their parents’ attitudes toward technology may well shift. The 18 months of the pandemic and lockdown have revealed both the astonishing ability of computers to connect us and their troubling inability to teach children, especially younger ones, much of anything. For many older children—even if they were indeed able to learn something on Zoom—the substitution of screens for in-person socializing seems to have led to mental-health problems.

Journalist Sophie Brickman was on the verge of completing her examination of technology’s effects on children and child-rearing when the pandemic hit. Fortunately, the unusual circumstances didn’t shake her from her well-researched and unvarnished conclusions. As the months stretched on in self-quarantine, she writes in “Baby, Unplugged,” she found herself grateful for “researchers who’ve hammered home that for young children, particularly the preschool set, free play and imagination and even boredom are the best activities to fill the day.”

Ms. Brickman acknowledges that working parents—really, most parents—must occasionally make use of screens. But she doesn’t allow herself (the book’s subtitle is “One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age”) or any of her parent-readers to give up on the task of setting screen limits simply because they are stuck in an apartment or house all day with small, needy children.

Early in her narrative, Ms. Brickman describes herself as the Luddite in her own marriage. Her husband is perpetually bringing home new gadgets. Little wonder that a man who judges the previous night’s sleep based on messages from his wristwatch has no problem with using technology to monitor and entertain the children. But Ms. Brickman begins to wonder why she suddenly finds herself eager to measure her newborn’s weight, feeding habits and sleep schedule with a slew of apps and devices. Maybe there’s some evolutionary drive to gather information, she thinks, but she is disturbed to see how obsessive she has become: She wants to know, for instance, whether her left breast or right breast produces more milk. There is merchandise on offer for people who are thinking in this way, she notes: changing tables that measure a baby’s weight with each new diaper, “smart socks” that keep track of a baby’s vital signs when he is asleep. Ms. Brickman concludes that, far from aiding in the rearing of a child, such products will only serve to make parents crazy.

Ms. Brickman offers reports from pediatricians who explain that if a child really needed such a precise level of monitoring, he would probably be in a hospital. She draws a similarly skeptical conclusion about the many other products that parents can now choose from, products that, quite apart from monitoring and measuring, will supposedly make their children happier and healthier. Each is designed in ways that, it is claimed, will improve a baby’s habits or make life easier for parents—from the Wi-Fi-enabled FormulaPro, which can be programmed by a smartphone to prepare bottles, to a $1,300 smart bassinet, “which adjusts its rocking and white noise to soothe fussy babies.” One psychologist, adding some perspective on the wide array of products, tells Ms. Brickman: “Appreciate that good enough is almost always good enough.”

The questions that most parents fret over, though, are the ones that involve giving children screens, and here Ms. Brickman has truly done her homework. She tries to discern whether educational apps are really going to improve a child’s academic skills or whether, in their busy graphics and flashing images, they’re no different from Mario Bros. or any other videogame entertainment. Even well-meaning designers of educational apps, she notes, seem caught between wanting to keep the attention of children with endless clicking opportunities and giving them a chance to explore fairly simple and quiet worlds.

Sandra Boynton, the author of the bestselling board book “Moo, Baa, La La La!”—showing animals and describing the sounds they make—tells Ms. Brickman that she has mixed feelings about the way her work has been turned into e-books with buttons and features everywhere. She fears that computer devices “shanghai a young child’s brain. . . . It’s not normal for a young child to be undistractible.” Reading physical books to children, Ms. Brickman concludes, is not just an exercise in nostalgia. She quotes an expert saying that “it’s probably the only unhurried time during the day.”

Still, Ms. Brickman concedes that it is not at all easy these days to ensure that children have this unhurried time, and the natural range of emotions that children experience—including frustration, excitement and boredom—has always been taxing to parents. Thus it is hard to resist the temptation to just give kids a screen whenever things seem to be going south. Ms. Brickman advises parents to understand that the “friction” of parenting is beneficial to both adult and child. “Embrace the middle-of-the-night wake-ups,” she writes, “the tantrums, the fourteen minutes it takes to choose a sock, and you’ll become the kind of parent who really knows your child.”

Like many other recent books on child-rearing, “Baby, Unplugged” offers passages in which we are told that things would be better if we all lived in Scandinavia. According to Ms. Brickman, the political solutions to the stress of parenting include, among much else, longer mandatory parental leave and universal day care. When experts tell her that educational television is actually meant for children to watch with a parent, she notes that it is easier to accomplish this task in a socialist society. Such political commentary feels dropped in, and it is the least researched element of the advice and analysis she provides. One can’t help thinking that, if raising children well means (as she suggests) embracing the parent-child friction of everyday life, then handing young children off to professional caretakers for much of the day might be self-defeating.

Ms. Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “Be the Parent, Please: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat.”