Baby technology that a father found helped the most

The past spring, when my wife and I were preparing to welcome our first child, we started a list of baby equipment, a passage rite for parents. The difference with our list, or so I thought, was that I would contain only the best things because it was examined by me, a technological columnist with 20 years of product experience.

After our baby arrived in the summer, I knew I was wrong.

It turns out that there is no best baby equipment, because what worked for other parents often did not work for us. Although he had chosen a better qualified stroller, his wheels were inadequate for the streets full of bump in our neighborhood. He electronic bottles heater List as essential by many Redditors was too slow to heat the milk for our newborn vocal. The Snoo, the Robotic Moses of $ 1,700 with cult followers, did nothing to calm our little one to sleep.

Now, spending the insomnia nights of the newborn phase, my wife and I ended up with a well rested child. What helped, in part, was a different approach to the baby team, analyzing our particular problems as new parents and looking for ways to solve them.

My ups and downs with baby technology may not be the experience of all parents. But the lessons I learned from my misadventures, from Internet controlled night lights to nanny cameras, should be universally applicable.

This is what you should know.

Knowledge triumphs over Gizmos Fancy, including Snoo

When our daughter was born, he turned effortlessly in a Moses without luxuries that I bought another father through the facebook market. But when he turned about 3 months, he began to protest out loud. That made me consider the SNO, the white box designed with Chicly that sways and automatically touches sounds to calm a bkey baby.

Among the parents, the SNO is a polarizing product not only for its price ($ 1,700, or $ 160 per month per rent). Several of my friends with the privilege of owning one called the device as a gift from heaven that saved them from the edge of madness. Others said his son hated him. I had read the Reserve about newborns about soothing Written by Snoo's creator Harvey Karp, so I wanted to try.

Fortunately, a friend lent me a snoo. I downloaded a complementary application and paid a subscription of $ 20 for access to some of its additional advantages, including a motion of balancing that imitated the potholes and the phosphoros of traveling in a car.

Initially, my baby deflates when we attack her. But when he started crying and the Moses reacted balance and touching the white noise, he cried even stronger. After a few weeks of experimenting, we returned to his cradle of the old school.

A spokeswoman for Happiest Baby, the company behind Snoo, said it was ideal to acclimatize babies to the product as soon as they were born because it simulates the movements and sounds that a baby experiences inside a mother's uterus. However, the company announces SNO as suitable for babies up to 6 months of age, and my daughter fits this criterion.

The technology that finally helped? Electronic books

One night, I downloaded $ 14 Electronic book of a pediatrician about child psychology and sleep. I started understanding why my 3 -month -old son was fighting the dream and how to anticipate when he would need a nap. We tried the book's methods, and in a few weeks my baby began to take a regular nap and sleep all night.

Knowledge is more powerful, and cheaper to access, than an elegant fantasy.

The best technology helped parents with broken brains

My wife and I found that the most useful baby technology is smartphone applications that helped us process information in our deprived state of sleep. The free application BlueberryA tool for parents to record the food of bottles, diapers and sleep duration for their babies, was crucial for my wife and me to communicate the baby's needs between us when we take work shifts. It also provided useful data for our pediatrician.

The Application of free milestones of the centers for disease control and preventionwhich shows a verification list of the expected development milestones of an child at each age, such as learning to roll at 6 months.

When he was about 7 months old, our daughter started crawling. We could no longer take his eyes off her, so we change to consume more literature for parenting through a different medium: audiobooks.

Single -task baby technology is unnecessary

A lot of popular babies are devices that have only one purpose.

The $ 60 RESAPIEA night light that plays White Noise, is a product on the lists of many parents of essential to help babies. He $ 250 nanite perA webcam that can alert it to the movements and screams of a baby is another. They are also $ 50 Philips Avent Electronic Bottle WarmerThat heats a bottle of refrigerated milk with the pressure of a button in a few minutes.

I received all those products as gifts through our registration. Although I liked using them, I finally realized that other products I already had could perform the same tasks.

• He Webcam Nanit He had an impressive set of features to monitor our baby, including a tool that automatically detected at what time he lay it with what time he woke up. But that characteristic required that the camera be mounted on a high tripod against a wall to get a bird view. of the cribThat was unfeasible with the design of our room.

  We use the NANIT as well as any webcam to periodically verify the video feed of our child in its crib. That could also be done with any general purpose security chamber, such as $ 100 indoors Nido cameras.

• Our baby slept better in the dark tone, so the Hatch Rest's Night Lightwhose colors can be changed through an application for smartphones, are useless. (Maybe when our daughter is greater, you will appreciate that the light can be configured in a timer, so it lights when it is time to wake up). We use only the function to play white noise. When we travel, we use a tablet or smartphone to play white noise in the hotel room, causing a dedicated sound machine to be superfluous.

• He Philips Avent Bottle Warmer Initially it seemed useful, but all the caregivers of our daughter, including family members, my wife, me and now our babysitter, stopped using it. Each one realized independently that a cup of metal coffee partially full of hot water from the sink was faster.

This does not mean that any of the aforementioned products does not work well for another father. But the problem with the premise of the best baby equipment is that it requires that two babies are equal, which rarely is the case.

It is better to start meeting your baby before starting a list, instead of the other way around.