Shopping for Baby

The Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association has a baby safety section with tips for selecting and using all sorts of products, such as cribs, strollers and changing tables. Scroll down to read up on all of them, or choose from the list of products on the right.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has several free brochures available on its site addressing many aspects of safety, such as creating a safe nursery for your baby, tips for safely shopping for baby gear and other items at thrift stores and warnings about baby rattles. To keep tabs on products you buy or receive, sign up for the recall alerts. One list is exclusively for infant and child products. 

Consumer Reports is an independent nonprofit that subjects products to extensive quality testing. In this short video, a stroller tester shows that some of the more expensive models aren’t necessarily the easiest to use. A separate release describes how some of the least expensive strollers performed the best. The crib buying guide discusses safety, value and assembly. Another section on car seats has a video on installation that suggests some best buys.

Pronto.com is a shopping site with a number of buying guides, including this one for cribs. Besides describing the different types available, this site also provides a list of its favorites, and a list of products recommended by other sites like Parents.com, as well as an explanation of what products are available in different price ranges. Other guides are devoted to strollers  and infant car seats. In the stroller guide, see what celebrities are using these days.

Parenting.com previews its book, Parenting Magazine’s Baby Must-Haves. Although essentially a plug for the book, these pages are worth a read, as they cover a variety of products including high chairs, pacifiers and strollers, and offer advice from other parents.

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration introduced a new system to rate how difficult it is to install or uninstall a particular car seat; the scale goes from one to five stars, one being the most difficult, and five being the easiest. Every car seat sold in the United States has to meet federal safety regulations, but the NHTSA is trying to alleviate some frustration for parents. A three-minute video explains the ratings. NHTSA also has a searchable database of inspection stations throughout the country. At those stations, parents can make sure their car seats are installed correctly.

Discovery Health has a series of short baby gear videos, starting with this video that walks parents through baby-proofing a home, room by room. Other baby gear videos are available from the list on the right, below the baby-proofing clip. One video discusses cribs, bedding, and nursery equipment, and offers tips from experienced parents. Another illustrates how to install a car seat.