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The baby technology that a parent found helped the most

    Last spring, when my wife and I prepared to welcome our first child, we started a list of baby stuff – a transition ritual for parents. The difference with our list, I thought, was that it would only contain the best things because it was screened by me, a tech columnist with 20 years of experience in testing products.

    After our baby arrived in the summer, I heard that 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 I had chosen a top store, the wheels were insufficient for the racks of our neighborhood. The electronic bottle warmer that was mentioned as a must-have by many redditors was too slow in heating milk for our vocal newborn. De Snoo, the $ 1,700 robot -like basinet with a cult supporter, did nothing to shuffle our little one asleep.

    Now beyond the sleepless nights of the newborn phase, my wife and I ended up with a well -equipped, satisfied child. What partially helped was running a different approach with baby equipment, analyzing our specific problems as new parents and looking for ways to solve them.

    My highlights and lows with baby technology may not be the experience of every parent. But the lessons I learned from my setbacks, from internet -controlled night lights to nanny cams, must be universally applicable.

    This is what to know.

    When our daughter was born for the first time, she effortlessly snoozed in a no-frills cradle that I bought from another parent via Facebook marketplace. But when she was about 3 months old, she started protesting loudly against naps. That made me consider the snoo, the chicly designed white cradle that automatically waves and plays sounds to calm a picky baby.

    Among parents, De Snoo is a polarizing product, not just because of the price ($ 1,700 or $ 160 per month for rent). Several of my friends with the privilege to possess one, called the device a solution that saved them from the edge of insanity. Others said their child hated it. I had read the book about soothing newborns written by the maker of the Snoo, Harvey Karp, so I wanted to try it.

    Fortunately a friend borrowed a snoo. I have downloaded a accompanying app and paid a $ 20 subscription for access to some of its extra benefits, including a fluctuating movement that simulated the bumps and driving in a car.

    My baby was initially not raised when we tied her up. But when she started crying and the cradle reacted by waving and playing white sound, she cried even louder. After a few weeks of experimenting, we returned to her Old-School Wieg.

    A spokeswoman for the 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 simulates a baby experiences in a mother's womb. However, the company advertises Snoo as suitable for babies up to 6 months old, and my daughter fitted in with this criterion.

    The technology that ultimately helped? E-books.

    On a late night I downloaded an e-book of $ 14 from a pediatrician about psychology and sleep from children. I started to understand why my 3-month-olds are fighting old sleep and how to anticipate when they need a nap. We tried the methods of the book, and within a few weeks my baby started to sleep regularly and sleep all night.

    Knowledge is more powerful – and cheaper to gain access – than a chic cradle.

    My wife and I found the most useful baby technology to be smartphone apps who helped us process information in our sleeping state. The free app Huckleberry, a tool for parents to log bottle feeding, diaper changes and sleep duration for their babies, was crucial for my wife and me to communicate the needs of the baby when we turn services. It also offered useful data for our pediatrician.

    Also useful was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Free Milestones app, which shows a checklist of the expected developmental mile poles of a child at any age, such as learning to roll after 6 months.

    When she was about 7 months old, our daughter started to crawl. We could no longer keep our eyes off her, so we shifted to consuming more parenting literature by another medium: audio books.

    Much popular baby technology are gadgets that serve a single purpose.

    The $ 60 hatch support, a night light that plays white noise, is a product on the lists of many parents with must-haves to help babies sleep. The $ 250 Nanit Pro, a webcam that you can warn of the movements and cries of a baby, is another. This also applies to the $ 50 Philips Avent Electronic Bottle Warmer, which warms up a bottle of cooled milk with a pressure at a few minutes.

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

    • The Nanit Webcam Had an impressive set of functions for monitoring our baby, including a tool that automatically discovered what time I brought her to bed and what time she woke up. But that function required the camera to be mounted on a long tripod against a wall to get a bird eye view of the cradle, which was unfeasible with the layout of our bedroom.

      We used the nanit just like every webcam to periodically check our child's video pattern in her cradle. This can also be done with any general security camera, such as the $ 100 indoor nest cam.

    • Our baby slept better in pitch dark, so the Hatch Rest's Night LightThe colors can be changed via a smartphone app, turned out to be useless. (Perhaps if our daughter is older, she will appreciate that the light can be set to a timer, so that it is enlightened when it is time to wake up.) We only used the function to play white noise. When we traveled, we used a tablet or smartphone to play white noise in the hotel room, making a special sound machine superfluous.

    • The Philips Avent bottle warmer Initially it seemed useful, but every caregiver for our daughter, including family members, my wife, myself and now our babysitter, no longer stopped. We each realized independently that a metal coffee mug that was partially filled with hot water from the sink was faster.

    This does not mean that one of the aforementioned products does not work well for another parent. But the problem with the starting point of the best baby equipment is that it requires that two babies are the same, which is rarely the case.

    It is best to start getting to know your baby before you start a list, instead of the other way around.