Last spring, when my wife and I were preparing to welcome our first child, we started a list of baby gear — a rite of passage for parents. The difference with our list, or so I thought, was that it would contain only the best stuff because it was vetted by me, a tech columnist with 20 years of experience testing products.
After our baby arrived in the summer, I learnt I was wrong.
It turns out there is no best baby gear, because what worked for other parents often didn’t work for us. Even though I had picked a top-rated stroller, its wheels were inadequate for our neighbourhood’s pothole-riddled streets. The electronic bottle warmer listed as a must-have by many Redditors was too slow at heating up milk for our vocal newborn. The Snoo, the $1,700 robotic bassinet with a cult following, did nothing to lull our little one to sleep.
Now past the sleepless nights of the newborn phase, my wife and I wound up with a well-rested, content child. What helped, in part, was pivoting to a different approach with baby gear, analysing our particular problems as new parents and looking for ways to solve them.
My highs and lows with baby tech may not be every parent’s experience. But the lessons I learnt from my misadventures, from Internet-controlled night lights to nanny cams, should be universally applicable.
Here’s what to know.
E-books triumph
When our daughter was just born, she snoozed effortlessly in a no-frills bassinet I bought from another parent through Facebook Marketplace. But when she turned about three months old, she began loudly protesting naps. That made me consider the Snoo, the chicly designed white bassinet that automatically sways and plays sounds to soothe a fussy baby.
Several of my friends with the privilege of owning one called the device a godsend that saved them from the brink of insanity. Others said their child hated it. I had read the book about soothing newborns written by the Snoo’s creator, Harvey Karp, so I wanted to give it a shot.
Fortunately, a friend lent me a Snoo. I downloaded a companion app and paid a $20 subscription for access to some of its extra perks, including a rocking motion that mimicked the bumps and jostles of riding in a car.
My baby was initially unfazed when we strapped her in. But when she started crying and the bassinet reacted by swaying and playing white noise, she cried even louder. After a few weeks of experimenting, we reverted to her old-school bassinet.
The tech that eventually helped? E-books.
One late night, I downloaded a $14 e-book by a paediatrician about infant psychology and sleep. I began to understand why my three-month-old was fighting sleep and how to anticipate when she would need a nap. We tried the book’s methods, and within a few weeks my baby began napping regularly and sleeping through the night.
Knowledge is more powerful — and cheaper to access — than a fancy bassinet.
Tech for broken brains
My wife and I found the most useful baby tech to be smartphone apps that helped us process information in our sleep-deprived state. The free app Huckleberry, a tool for parents to log bottle feedings, diaper changes and sleep durations for their babies, was crucial for my wife and me to communicate the baby’s needs with each other when we took turns working shifts. It also provided useful data for our paediatrician.
Also helpful was the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s free Milestones app, which shows a checklist of a child’s expected developmental milestones at each age, such as learning to roll at six months.
When she was about seven months old, our daughter began to crawl. We could no longer take our eyes off her, so we shifted to consuming more parenting literature through a different medium: audiobooks.
Gizmo clutter
Lots of popular baby tech are gadgets that serve a single purpose.
The $60 Hatch Rest, a night light that plays white noise, is a product on many parents’ lists of must-haves for helping babies sleep. The $250 Nanit Pro, a webcam that can alert you to a baby’s movements and cries, is another. So is the $50 Philips Avent electronic bottle warmer, which heats up a bottle of refrigerated milk with the press of a button in a few minutes.
Though I liked using them, I realised other products I already owned could accomplish the same tasks.
The problem with the premise of the best baby gear is that it requires any two infants to be alike, which is rarely the case. It’s best to get to know your baby before starting a list, rather than the other way around.
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