Last spring, when my wife and I prepared to welcome our first child, we began to make a list of baby articles, a passage rite for parents.
The difference with our list, or so I believed, was that I would only contain the best, because I was reviewed by me, a technology columnist with 20 years of experience testing products.
After the arrival of our baby in summer, I knew I was wrong.
It turns out that there is no best product for babies, because what worked for other parents often did not work for us. Although he had chosen one of the best strollers, his wheels were inappropriate for the streets full of potholes in our neighborhood.
The electronic calientabiberones that many Reddit users considered essential heated the milk too slowly for our newborn noisy. The Snoo, the Robotic Moses of US $ 1,700 with cult followers, did not serve to lulled our little girl.
After already the nights of the neonatal phase, my wife and I ended up with a well rested and happy baby. What helped us, in part, was to adopt a different approach to babies equipment, analyzing our particular problems as first -time parents and looking for ways to solve them.
My ups and downs with baby products may not be the experience of all parents. But the lessons that I learned from my misadventures, from Internet controlled night lights to children’s cameras, should be universal application.
This is what you have to know.
The knowledge update triumphs over extravagant gadgets, including Snoo
When our daughter was born, she slept her without effort in a Moses without ornaments that I bought another father through Facebook Marketplace. But when he turned 3 months he began to protest loudly for the naps. That made me think of the snoo, the elegant white Moses that automatically swings and emits sounds to calm the restless baby.
Among parents, Snoo is a polarizing product not only for its price (US $ 1,700, or US $ 160 per month for rent). Several of my friends who have the privilege of possessing one consider it a blessing that has saved them when they were on the verge of madness. Others said their children hated him. I had read the book on how to calm newborns written by Snoo’s creator Harvey Karp, so I wanted to try it.
Fortunately, a friend lent me a snoo. I discharged a complementary application and paid a subscription of 20 dollars to access some of its additional advantages, such as a swinging movement that imitated potholes and shaking in the car.
At first, my baby did not flinch when we tied it. But when he started crying and the Moses reacted swinging and reproducing white noise, he cried even stronger. After a few weeks of experimenting, we returned to his traditional Moses.
A spokesman for Happiest Baby, the company responsible for Snoo, said that the ideal was acclimatizing babies to the product just at birth, because this simulates the movements and sounds that a baby experiences inside the maternal belly. However, the company announces that Snoo is suitable for babies up to 6 months, and my daughter fulfilled this criterion.
The technology that finally helped? Electronic books.
One night, at the time of the morning, I downloaded an electronic book of 14 dollars written by a pediatrician about child psychology and sleep. I began to understand why my 3 -month -old baby resisted sleeping and how to anticipate when I would need a nap. We tried the methods of the book and, in a few weeks, my baby began to make the nap regularly and to sleep all night.
Knowledge is more powerful – and cheaper to access – than a luxury Moses.
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The best technology is the one that helps parents with decomposed brains
My wife and I discovered that the most useful babies technology were telephone applications that helped us process information in our lack of sleep. The free application Huckleberrya tool for parents to register bottle shots, diaper changes and the duration of their babies’s sleep, it was crucial for my wife and I could communicate the baby’s needs when we turned to work. It also provided us with useful data to our pediatrician.
The free application of the centers for disease control and prevention, which shows a control list of the expected development milestones of an child at each age, such as learning to turn to bed at 6 months, was also useful.
When he was about 7 months old, our daughter started crawling. We could no longer separate her eyes, so we went on to consume more literature for parents through a different medium: audiobooks.
Single -tasking babies technology is unnecessary
Many of the most popular baby technologies are gadgets that serve one thing.
The Hatch Rest, of US $ 60, a night light that reproduces white noise, is a product that appears on the list of essentials of many parents to help babies sleep. The Nanit Pro, of US $ 250, a webcam that can notify you of the baby’s movements and cries, is another. This is also the heat stroke philips advent, US $ 50 dollars, which heats a refrigerated milk bottle by clicking a button in a few minutes.
I received all those products as a gift through our record. Although I liked using them, in the end I realized that other products that I already had could perform the same tasks.
This does not mean that some of the mentioned products do not work well for another father. But the problem of the premise of the best product for babies is that it demands that two babies be the same, what rarely occurs.
It is better to meet your baby before starting a list, than the other way around.