Resist the urge to buy everything in sight for your precious little one! As a mom of two, I’m always sharing my essential tips for expecting parents by looking for ways to save time, space, and money. Here are 10 baby items you don’t need as a new mom, and why.
Flashy Toys
Newborns can only work on one sense at a time, so flashy toys with colours, lights and sound can be overstimulating for them. A ball, a teether, black and white high contrast cards, a rattle – these are all simple toys that can help your baby develop one sense at a time.
Smart Bassinets
High-tech bassinets with built-in monitors, soothing sounds, and automated rocking features might only be marginally better than a traditional bassinet, yet cost 10x the price. We have one, yet every time our baby cries, we still pick him up. More often than not, he ends up in our bed, not the expensive bassinet!
- More on Embark: Five Ways to “Sleep Train” Your Baby
3 in 4 parents find it hard to save for their child’s future. If you’re going to invest in a smart bassinet, try buying used (like we did). Babies only sleep in a bassinet for 5 to 6 months, so when you buy second hand, you’re pretty much getting an almost-new product.
It's Never Too Early to Get Started!
Crib Bumpers
Crib bumpers are used as padding on the inside of a crib, preventing your baby from getting hurt if they bang their heads against the crib slats. However, despite the good intention of this product, they are actually considered a safety hazard. Skip the crib bumpers – babies in a crib should sleep on a firm mattress with a fitted sheet, and nothing else.
Baby Scale
With regular check-ins with your midwife or doctor for postpartum support and baby vaccines, you’ll be getting regular measurements (weight, length, head circumference) of your baby anyway. The day-to-day weight fluctuations of your baby doesn’t matter as much as the overall growth pattern of trending upwards. Plus, there are other ways to ensure your baby is getting enough to eat: through wet diapers and poops!
Wipes Warmers
We didn’t use a wipes warmer for our first (a summer baby), but we did for our second who was a fall/winter baby. If you have space by your changing table and a convenient place to plug it in, this could be a purchase that adds to the comfort of your baby’s changetime, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Plus, you can’t avoid cold wipes completely. When you’re changing diapers on the go, you’re not going to have your wipes warmer with you. So I’d say this is a nice-to-have, but don’t get used to it.
Bottle Sterilizer
While cleanliness is necessary for bottle feeding, a clunky bottle sterilizer is not. Boiling your bottles in a pot of hot water, washing bottles with bottle detergent by hand, or putting them in the dishwasher will clean them just fine.
A baby timer, feed tracker, or ‘pocket nanny’
Why buy a product, where there’s an app that can help with the same purpose? We loved using Huckleberry (you can track everything from feeds, to wet diapers, to sleep – all for free!) but for our second, there simply wasn’t time to record all of these stats so we went with the confidence of second-time-mom-intuition instead.
White Noise Machine
White noise can help prevent environmental noises (i.e.. dog barking, cars on the street, etc.) from disrupting your baby’s sleep. Instead of spending on a white noise machine, you can play white noise for free on your existing Spotify or Youtube account instead.
Bluetooth enabled pacifier
Wow, they have a gadget for everything, don’t they?! First of all, your baby may not even take to a soother. So having a Bluetooth enabled pacifier is completely unnecessary if you don’t have a “pacifier baby”. My first didn’t take a pacifier, but my second loves it. Every baby is different! Bluetooth-enabled pacifiers track your baby’s sucking patterns. To me, this is just another data point that I don’t have time to analyze.
Baby puree blenders
When it came time to start solids at around 6 months, we followed the “Baby Led Weaning” method (Solid Starts is a great resource for that), which is feeding your baby big chunks of food to, among other benefits, improve their independence and dexterity for eating. If you’re choosing to make your own purees instead, just use a regular blender – there’s no need to spend extra on something specific for your baby.
Wondering when to start saving for your little one?
There’s a lot of big purchases that come with a baby; we hope this article helps you save money by identifying unnecessary items so you can better financially plan for your baby and meet your budgeting goals.
Since 2008, Vanessa has kept her readers and followers ‘in the know’ on local happenings, facilitating for the discovery and support of brands, businesses, and experiences available in Vancouver and beyond. Now as a new mom, she shares her journey of motherhood, inspiring modern women and their families to think... "Hey if she can do it, I can too!"
