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 learned 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 neighborhood’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, analyzing 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 learned from my misadventures, from internet-controlled night lights to nanny cams, should be universally applicable.
Here’s what to know.
Knowledge triumphs over fancy gizmos, including Snoo
When our daughter was first born, she snoozed effortlessly in a no-frills bassinet I bought from another parent through Facebook Marketplace. But when she turned about 3 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.
Among parents, the Snoo is a polarizing product not just because of its price ($1,700, or $160 a month for rental). 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.
A spokeswoman for Happiest Baby, the company behind Snoo, said it was ideal to acclimate babies to the product as soon as they were born because it simulates the movements and sounds a baby experiences inside a mother’s womb. However, the company advertises Snoo as suitable for babies up to 6 months of age, and my daughter fit this criterion.
The tech that eventually helped? E-books.
One late night, I downloaded a $14 e-book by a pediatrician about infant psychology and sleep. I began to understand why my 3-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.
The best tech helped parents with 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 pediatrician.
Also helpful was the 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 6 months.
When she was about 7 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.
Single-task baby tech is unnecessary
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.
I received all of those products as gifts through our registry. Though I liked using them, I ultimately realized other products I already owned could accomplish the same tasks.
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The Nanit webcam had an impressive set of features for monitoring our baby, including a tool that automatically detected what time I put her to bed and what time she woke up. But that feature required the camera to be mounted on a tall tripod against a wall to get a bird’s-eye view of the crib, which was unfeasible with the layout of our bedroom.
We used the Nanit just like any webcam for periodically checking on the video feed of our child in her crib. That could also be done with any general-purpose security camera, like the $100 indoor Nest Cam.
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Our baby slept better in pitch dark, so the Hatch Rest’s night light, the colors of which can be changed through a smartphone app, proved unhelpful. (Maybe when our daughter is older she will appreciate that the light can be set on a timer so it illuminates when it’s time for her to wake up.) We used only the feature for playing white noise. When we traveled, we used a tablet or smartphone to play white noise in the hotel room, making a dedicated sound machine superfluous.
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The Philips Avent bottle warmer initially seemed useful, but every caregiver for our daughter, including relatives, my wife, myself and now our nanny, stopped using it. We each independently realized that a metal coffee mug partly filled with hot water from the sink was faster.
This is not to say that any of the aforementioned products won’t work well for another parent. But 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 start with getting to know your baby before starting a list, rather than the other way around.
