Last spring, when my wife and I were preparing to welcome our first child, we started our baby gear list. The difference from our list was examined by me as a technical columnist with 20 years of experience test products, so I thought only the best ones were included.
After the baby arrived in the summer, I learned I was wrong.
There is no best baby gear as what worked for other parents often didn't work for us. Despite my choice of top-class stroller, the wheels were inadequate for the nearby pothole-covered streets. Listed as an essential item by many redditors, the electronic bottle warmer was too slow to heat milk for the vocal newborn. SNOO, a $1,700 robot bassinet with cult supporters, did nothing to put our little ones to sleep.
Now, after a sleepless night in the newborn stage, my wife and I were caught up in with a child with well-thought-out content. Partly helpful was pivoting into a different approach in baby gear, analyzing specific problems as new parents and looking for ways to solve them.
My highs and lows in baby technology may not be the experience of all parents. But the lessons I learned from my unfortunate adventures, from internet-controlled night lights to nanny cams, should be universally applicable.
Here's what you need to know.
Knowledge of flashy Gizmos including Snoo wins
When our daughter was first born, she snoozed effortlessly in a no-frills bassinet that I bought from another parent through the Facebook market. However, when she was three months old, she began to protest loudly to her nap. It made me think of Snoo, the chic-designed white bassinet automatically sways and makes a sound.
Among parents, SNOO is not just its price ($1,700 or $160 per month for rental) but also a polarized product. Some of my friends have the privilege of owning something called a device. Others said the kids hate it. I read a book about soothing newborns written by Harvey Karp, creator of Snoo, and wanted to give them a shot.
Luckily my friend lended me a snoo. I downloaded the companion app and paid a $20 subscription to access additional perks, including bumps in my car and rocking motions that mimic the Jostles.
My baby was initially freak out when we tied her down. But she screamed even more as she began to cry and responded with the bassinet shaking and playing white noise. After a few weeks of experiments, we returned to her old-fashioned bassinet.
A spokeswoman for Happest Baby, behind Snoo, said it would be ideal to adapt the baby to the product as soon as it was born, as it simulates and hears the movement of experiencing the baby inside the mother's uterus. However, the company touts SNOO as suitable for babies up to six months old, and her daughter meets this standard.
The technology that ultimately helped? E-book.
One night, I downloaded a $14 e-book from a pediatrician about psychology and sleep in toddlers. I began to understand why my three months are asleep and how to predict when she should take a nap. We tried the book method, but within a few weeks my baby started taking regular naps and started sleeping all night.
Knowledge is stronger than a flashy bassinet and cheaper to access.
The best technology helped parents with broken brains
My wife and I have found the most useful baby technology, a smartphone app that can help you process information while you're not getting enough sleep. Huckleberry, a free app that is a tool for parents to keep bottles, change diapers, and record baby sleep duration, was important for communicating their baby's needs to each other when their wife and I were changing work shifts. They also provided useful data for pediatricians.
Also, the Centers on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Free Milestone App, including learning to roll in six months, provides a checklist of expected developmental milestones at each age.
When she was about 7 months old, our daughter began to crave. We could no longer take our eyes off her, so we moved to consuming more parenting literature through another medium: audiobooks.
No single-task baby technology required
Many of the popular baby technologies are gadgets that serve a single purpose.
The $60 Hatch Rest, a night light that emits white noise, is a product on many parents' essentials listings to help babies sleep. The $250 Nanit Pro, a webcam that can alert your baby's movements and screams, is another. So does the $50 Philips Avent Electronic Bottle Warmer. This will heat a refrigerated milk bottle while pressing the button in a few minutes.
All of these products were received as gifts through the registry. I liked to use them, but eventually I realized that other products I already own can accomplish the same task.
Nanitt's webcam had an impressive set of features to monitor our babies. This includes a tool that automatically detects when I put her to bed and woke up. But that feature required the camera to be attached to a tall tripod on the wall to take in views of bird-eyed eyes in the crib, which was impossible to do with the bedroom layout.
We used Nanito like any webcam to check the video feed of children in our cribs regularly. You can also do it with a general-purpose security camera, such as a $100 indoor nesting cam.
Our baby slept well on the dark patch, so the hatch proved that the night light on the hatch rest, which could change via the smartphone app, was useless. (Maybe when our daughter gets older, she will appreciate that she can illuminate when the time comes when she wakes up so that she can set the light on the timer.) We used the feature to play white noise. When I traveled, I used my tablet or smartphone to play white noise in my hotel room, making it extra for my dedicated sound machine.
The Phillips Avent Bottle Warmer initially seemed useful, but all caregivers for our daughters, including relatives, my wife, me, and now our nanny, have stopped using it. We each independently realized that metal coffee mugs partially filled with hot water from the sink are faster.
This does not mean that none of the aforementioned products work well for other parents. But the premise of the best baby gear is that it requires two infants to be the same.
It's best to start getting to know your baby before you start the list.
