Most parents who pack a car seat for a flight are not choosing on crash performance. They are choosing on weight. A 25-pound convertible seat plus a toddler plus two carry-ons is a three-item carry that nobody enjoys, and the seat is the item with no wheels. I have spent seasons comparing how these seats … Read more
Choosing a car seat for a baby who was born early is nothing like shopping for a seat for a healthy newborn. A preemie is defined as any baby born before 37 weeks of pregnancy, and a low birth weight baby is any infant under 2500 grams, or about 5 lb 8 oz. Those babies … Read more
A car seat protector for leather seats works only when it stops three separate failures: compression indentation from the concentrated weight of the seat base, dye transfer from the plastic shell onto light hide, and slippage of the whole assembly on smooth leather during a hard turn. Most towels and thin pads solve none of … Read more
The best harness booster seats for carpools are the Safety 1st Grow and Go, the Graco Extend2Fit, and the Chicco MyFit. All three give a child a 5-point harness that converts to a belt-positioning booster, and all three install with either the vehicle seat belt or lower anchors so one seat can move between two … Read more
An audio baby monitor is a two-piece system: a plugged-in baby unit with a microphone in the nursery and a handheld parent unit with a speaker, carrying sound only. No camera, no screen, no Wi-Fi, no app and no subscription. In a small home the deciding factors are not the advertised 1,000 ft range figure … Read more
Two children, two rooms, one parent trying to sleep. The best baby monitors with split screen for two rooms are the units that show both camera feeds at the same instant instead of quietly switching between them, and after spending weeks reading through thousands of owner reviews and living with a two-camera setup of our … Read more
Can a non-WiFi baby monitor be hacked? Not remotely. A monitor without WiFi pairs its camera directly to a parent handset over a dedicated FHSS or DECT radio channel, so there is no app, no cloud account and no login for anyone to compromise. The signal still exists inside your home’s air, which is why … Read more
The alarm goes off at 2:14 in the morning and the screen on your parent unit is already black. That low-battery beep is the single most common complaint in every parent forum I read while writing this roundup, and it is the reason the best baby monitors with long battery life have become a search … Read more
Two babies wake at the same time and you cannot be in two rooms. That single fact drives almost every decision in this guide to the best baby monitors for twins, because the hardware that works fine for one infant quietly falls apart when a second feed appears on the screen. A parent unit that … Read more
The phrase sounds simple, but the gap between a crib advertised as convertible and the crib that actually works as a toddler bed comes down to one part: the guard rail. On most of the models we looked at, that rail ships in a separate box, sold separately, sometimes years after you bought the frame … Read more