The Bassinet That Costs More Than Rent: Did It Work?

Sort of?

Welcome to Did It Work?, where I write about something we bought or did for our baby and let you know whether or not it worked. Today's subject: The Snoo bassinet.

Because I'm psycho, I started putting a list of baby items we'd need last summer, months before my due date and weeks before I'd even talked about my pregnancy with people beyond my immediate family. I researched the hell out of baby gear-- everything from strollers to carriers to articles of clothing-- and infant development, thinking that this would put me in a foolproof position to have the best possible experience with new motherhood. I was crafting my own baby instruction manual and all I had to do was follow it.

One thing I saw touted left and right was something called the Snoo, a "smart bassinet" that was developed by Dr. Harvey Karp, who, if the hype around him is to be believed, is the Tom Brady of getting babies to sleep. "Parenting is about to change!" claimed the Snoo website.

The Snoo promised to give parents an average of an extra two hours of sleep per night while their little one sleeps soundly and safely swaddled and on their back, thanks to the fact that the crib mimicked the movement and sounds of the womb in response to the baby's agitation. It had been shown to reduce the risk of SIDS. Reviewers raved about it. It's a miracle! It's the only thing that works!

The first issue with the Snoo is that it cost $1500, thus rendering its purchase all but inaccessible to many single parents or parents who work low-wage jobs-- you know, people who probably could use the extra sleep the most. The fact that it was even possible for me to consider it reminded me that I was lucky in ways that many parents are not.

A new Snoo bassinet cost more than the rent I used to pay for a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago in 2011. It cost more than my queen sized bed frame and mattress cost in 2018. It cost months of car payments. It cost more than my wedding dress. It cost more than a round trip plane ticket from LAX to Kathmandu. But it was the best! Didn't I want the best for my baby?

I wanted the cost to make sense, so I did some wacky math; I figured that if the baby used the Snoo for six months and parents got an average of two extra hours of sleep per night, that's 365 extra hours of sleep, which would mean that each extra hour of sleep cost about $4.11 if I divided $1500 by 365. If the baby used the crib for three months, that would be $8.24 per theoretical extra hour of sleep. If there were a sleep vending machine and I could put money in and get extra time, I'd probably pay about $10 an hour. Plus, the baby needed a safe place to lie down, and the Snoo checked that box.

The cost made slightly more sense when I thought of it that way, but I still couldn't bring myself to shell out when there were other potentially exorbitant surprise costs associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and early parenthood. And we weren't even 100% sure that it would work.

But then somebody tipped me off to the fact that I could rent it for significantly less, and just return it when we were done. So that's what we did.

In the terrifying first days after bringing Juniper home, I felt like it was working. All we had to do was strap her into the special Snoo swaddles and clip her to the side of the mattress and the bassinet would do the rest. Sometimes it would calm her down, but other times the rocking and white noise would just make her angrier, and I'd get an alert on my phone that the Snoo had upped its attempts at soothing, and I'd enter the bedroom to the sight of Juniper strapped into something that reminded me of of HAL the computer for babies, being jostled back and forth to a soundtrack of loud whooshing as she screamed, wide-eyed and purple-faced, at the ceiling. Get your baby to sleep? I'm sorry, Erin. I'm afraid I can't do that.

Other times, I would hear her start to cry from the bedroom and the Snoo would do its thing, and within a minute she'd settle back into a state of non-agitation. For that first six weeks, it was a passable piece of baby gear for us. Maybe not miraculous, but it got the job done, the baby slept about as much as an average baby sleeps. I have no idea how things would have been different if we'd gotten a regular analog bassinet.

And then we moved.

The most annoying thing about the Snoo is that it requires WiFi to connect to a cell phone in order to work remotely. Mabye I'm a luddite, but I fucking hate when things require WiFi to function properly, because that renders my access to various household items partially dependent on the reliability of my internet and my internet service provider, which is one of the worst companies in America. Even living in the second largest city in the country, our WiFi was often unstable and would sometimes go out for hours, which meant I'd lose access to its controls and have to reboot my baby's bed with WiFi mode deactivated. Annoying!

When we moved, wouldn't you know it, the router the ISP provided at the new place is incompatible with the Snoo. And so, since late December, it's been just a plain old un-smart bassinet. A stupid bassinet. Like the one I slept in when I was an infant in the 1980's, except way, way, way more expensive.

Our Snoo was a smart bed, it was a regular bed, and now it's not even a bed at all. As of last week, Juniper has fully rebelled against the Snoo and wakes up the second we put her down in it (we've had to use her travel crib, because her regular-sized crib isn't assembled yet. Whoops.). The fact that the Snoo won't work unless the baby is swaddled and clipped in limits its use to babies below a certain height; Juniper, at just over 3 months old, is now almost too long for it. She may suddenly hate the Snoo because of her size, or she may hate it because she believes that her life's purpose is to stay awake for as long as possible and never, ever be set down. Impossible to say.

Did it work? The answer to that is: sort of. Would I recommend it? Also sort of. I have friends who swear that it's the "miracle" that some of its marketing material implies. I know other people who had passable but meh experiences. I don't know anybody who had a terrible experience with the Snoo, so choosing to buy or rent it is a bet that your newborn will be one of the babies for which it really matters. But it might not really matter. As with so many things about babies that have yet to be born, it's impossible to guess.

I'm glad we had the Snoo for the first weeks of Juniper's life. Even if it didn't help her sleep better, it helped me feel a little less anxious about SIDS, and any reduction in anxiety a new parent can get is precious. However, I have gradually grown less glad to have the Snoo as she's gotten bigger and started considering sleep an enemy that must be vanquished, and it's become a piece of furniture taking up space in an already-small house.

We're returning it two months earlier than we'd planned, which is next week. Maybe I'll use it to store burp cloths until then.

Image via Shutterstock