Baby Mobiles

To have, or not to have a baby mobile.

There are two distinct schools of thought when it comes to the effect a baby mobile may have on your baby. The first, very logical, opinion is that the gentle floating motion of a mobile can soothe and entertain your baby as they drift off to sleep. It will be imbued with positive associations of relaxation, comfort and restfulness and will reassure bubs when they wake in the night. The other says that something as stimulating as a cot mobile changes their crib from a place to sleep to a place to play. Whichever effect the mobile has on your little one, it ought to keep them in bed a little longer, help them wait a few more moments before needing attention, and make their cot a happy place to be in.

Whether their mobile affects your little one’s sleep or not will be a largely personal effect. Some babies will stare at it lazily while drifting off to sleep, while others might fight sleep in favour of a few more moments of playtime. The only way to know which camp your baby will fall into is to try it out.

We have carefully chosen particularly soothing mobiles, steering away from brightly coloured or especially stimulating models, so hopefully they’ll be just the thing to lull your little one calmly into dreamland. Could there be anything more tranquil than gazing up at Charlie Crane’s beautiful bentwood swallows swaying slowly in the breeze? Even writing that sentence is making our eyelids droop! 

Are baby mobiles safe?

Best practice parenting has seen a slew of accessories banished from the bedroom of late. Gone are frilly covers, fluffy loveys or loose blankets, in favour of much more high-tech baby bedding options. The Singapore Consumer Product Safety Office recommends a firm sleeping surface free of bumpers, pillows, cushions or soft toys. But what about a baby mobile? While removing things from the cot, we need to decide how far we go.

The short answer is that a properly installed, well-secured cot mobile is perfectly safe for a newborn. It must hang well out of bub’s reach so that they can gaze at and reach for it, but as it is a piece of baby gear that they will use totally unsupervised, they must not be able to actually touch it. This is very straightforward in those precious first few months while bubs is largely immobile on their back. Still, once they start to sit and stand, we just need to make sure that the mobile’s stand, if you use one, is secure enough to withstand the most vigorous wiggling, fiddling and wobbling and that the mobile itself hangs high out of reach of our little one’s fingers even when they’re right up on their tippy toes!