[color-box]60 Days to Positive Parenting is my crash course for parents ready to make an immediate and lasting change to a joyful, cooperative, respectful relationship with your kids. Learn more here about doing the work to become a positive parent.[/color-box]After I reviewed my Moby Wrap, Baby K’tan contacted me to say that they were interested in a review of Baby K’tan from me as an experienced Moby user. I jumped at the chance to try it out, because I’m really enjoying learning lots of different carriers. I was provided a Baby K’tan to try out so I could review it, and this review is entirely my own opinion. The links in this post to the Baby K’tan on Amazon are affiliate links, which means I get a commission if you choose to buy through them.

The big selling point of the Baby K’tan is that you get a wrap-style carrier (like the Moby) without having to do all the complicated wrapping. As I said in my Moby review, I don’t think the Moby is all that hard to learn, but some people do get really frustrated with it, and some people are too intimidated to try it at all. When I’m wearing my Moby in public, a lot of people love it, but they ask if it “comes like that” or if I have to tie it like that, and I have to say that I have to tie it like that. The thing with the Baby K’tan is that it pretty much comes like that!

Description

The Baby K’tan is two large loops of soft, stretchy fabric attached with a smaller loop, plus some carries require the included sash.

When I first read that I needed to use a sash, I thought the sash was missing from my box. I was kind of skimming the instructions, and thought, “Sash? What sash?” A closer examination of the contents of the package revealed that the bag the Baby K’tan comes in transforms into a sash with a pocket, which is cleverness I really appreciate. You can carry your Baby K’tan around in its bag, and then when you’re wearing it, there’s a pocket to stick your phone in (or whatever). The Baby K’tan comes with a matching little hat, too, so all-in-all it’s quite the winner in the super-cute category!

Price

The basic Baby K’tan is about $55. You can get the Breeze, which is part breathable mesh for around $60. This is a great price range for a carrier. Check out Amazon for reviews and a selection of Baby K’tan carriers.

Comfort

Comfort is my top concern with any carrier, and three aspects of comfort come to mind.

• Construction – does the carrier dig into me anywhere? In this regard, the Baby K’tan is completely pleasant. There are no buckles, straps, rings, or ties to dig into you.
• Distribution of weight – does the weight of the baby hurt my shoulders or back? Here, nothing really competes with the Moby, where the fabric can be spread out wide across your whole back. The Baby K’tan is a little less even, since the loops are attached to one another at your back, pulling them in a bit. That being said, wearing the K’tan was still more comfortable for me than any other style of carrier, such as a mei tai, ring sling, or soft structured carriers.
• Temperature – am I burning up? The Baby K’tan is a slightly thinner fabric than the Moby, and there’s definitely less of it, so the Baby K’tan is lighter and cooler to wear and would be much more pleasant in the heat of summer.

Practicality

• Washing: The Baby K’tan is easy to wash, since it’s all cotton fabric. There are no creases to try to clean out or parts you can’t put in the washing machine. Unlike the Moby, parts of the Baby K’tan won’t be dragging the ground, so it will stay much cleaner. On the other hand, you may want to wash and dry it frequently to help it keep a snug fit.
• Sizing: The Baby K’tan can fit people of most sizes. It’s not adjustable, though, so you have to order the right size for you. This part is extremely important and is probably the hardest part about successfully wearing a Baby K’tan. They recommend getting the size of your fitted T-shirt size. When I did that, my Baby K’tan was still a bit big for me. When in doubt, get a smaller size, and don’t be shy about exchanging it if you get the wrong size.

Difficulty

If you want to try a wrap but are worried about how hard it looks or you want to give a gift to someone who’s skeptical of baby wearing, the Baby K’tan is a great choice. When I got the box in the mail, I took a glance at the included instructions and had Dylan riding in it in literally seconds. It is completely easy to put on. There’s no complicated tying, looping, or wrapping, and the few simple instructions were very clear.

Versatility

You can use a Baby K’tan with newborns and older babies, in front and side positions. The box had a picture of a back carry, but that’s no longer recommended for safety reasons. They also include instructions for a front forward facing position, but this puts the baby in the dreaded “crotch dangler” position, and I don’t recommend it. I like Dylan facing me, in either a back or front carry. At first I didn’t try the side carry since I like the Maya Wrap for side carries. But, I decided to give it a try so I could give a more complete review, and I actually love it more than the Maya Wrap! It’s easier to put on and the fabric is nicer around my shoulder and against my neck.

I wasn’t able to try the Baby K’tan with a newborn, but I think I can say that I might like it even better than the Moby in the early days. The Moby can seem like an awful lot of wrap for a tiny baby, where the Baby K’tan seems much more compatible with carrying a little one. The ease of putting it on and the lighter weight fabric seem to make it a great option for small babies.

Protip

Sizing is the most important aspect of getting a Baby K’tan. Be sure to read their sizing info here. For reference, I wear a size 20 or 22 so I got an XL. It’s a bit big, though, and I wish I’d gotten a Large. I have huge boobs, which may be what throws off my sizing. If I didn’t have 42G boobs, maybe I’d wear a 16 or 18 shirt/dress, which would put me in range of a Large Baby K’tan. You can wash your Baby K’tan to tighten it up a bit, but if it doesn’t fit well out of the box, return it for another size. When you put your baby in it, it should feel very snug, because the fabric is going to loosen up as you wear it. The looser it is, the harder it will be on your body to carry the weight and the less safe it becomes for your baby.

Bottom Line

My Baby K’tan isn’t going to replace my Moby as my general powerhouse carrier, but I’ve been wearing the Moby for years and am not at all bothered by having to wrap it. Surprisingly, Baby K’tan is going to replace using my Maya Wrap for side carries!

Remember that the best thing about the Baby K’tan is that you don’t have to adjust it, and the worst thing about it is that you can’t adjust it. Two people of different sizes (like Joshua and me) can’t share the same carrier.

If I were looking for a wrap for a parent of a newborn who might be a bit nervous about getting into baby wearing, the Baby K’tan would be high on my list of recommendations or first in my mind as a good gift. It’s a quality product that delivers on the promise of making wrapping your baby extremely easy.

[color-box]60 Days to Positive Parenting is my crash course for parents ready to make an immediate and lasting change to a joyful, cooperative, respectful relationship with your kids. Learn more here about doing the work to become a positive parent.[/color-box]

I’ve started looking into cosleeping in the wake of the Milwaukee anti-cosleeping billboards. I said to a friend recently that there’s something fucked up in Milwaukee to have caused all of their recent deaths, so that’s where I started in my research: what the fuck is happening in Milwaukee?

I started with the 2010 City of Milawukee Fetal Infant Mortality Review (FIMR) Report.

It’s immediately apparent that Milwaukee has an abysmal infant death rate, which is sharply divided by race and location. That report breaks out two zipcodes, their racial makeup, and their death rate for 2008. One zip code is 97.6% white with an infant death rate of zero. The other zipcode is 94.9% black with an infant death rate of 17.6, which is a shockingly high number. 73% of Milwaukee infant deaths are caused by complications of prematurity and congenital abnormalities. 18% are attributed to “SIDS, overlay, accidental suffocation”. SIDS is a really tricky diagnosis to research, because it has different definitions and is inconsistently applied, but I’m setting that aside for now.

For the deaths in the “SIDS, overlay, accidental suffocation category”, there are several “risk factors” that have been identified as being present in these kinds of deaths. (It’s important to note that “risk factor” doesn’t mean that factor caused the death, just that those factors were present.) The risk factors present in the Milwaukee deaths were 1) pillows, blankets, soft things present with the baby 2) bedsharing 3) secondhand smoke 4) baby placed prone or on side 5) baby was born prematurely 6) alcohol or drug abuse by caregiver 7) baby sleeping on a couch, chair, carseat, or swing. The average number of these risk factors present in each death was four. I can’t tell from the report quite how these risk factors tended to occur together.

There are several scenarios I’m worried about with an alarmist campaign like this:

• Will parents who bedshare, smoke, and have soft things in bed with baby stop bedsharing but continue to put smokey soft things in a crib, not doing much to reduce overall death?
• Will parents who’ve been bedsharing without any other risk factors avoid bedsharing now, depriving them of the benefits of bedsharing without any decrease in deaths?
• Will parents not learn about how to safely bedshare and then do it unsafely when they fall asleep from exhaustion or take the baby to their bed out of desperation (which happens at some point or another for almost all parents)?

I’ve never understood the general panic over cosleeping. I mean, “crib sleeping” isn’t safe, either. For safe crib sleeping (or, I like to say “isolation sleeping”) you have to follow a long list of safety guidelines:

• Make sure your crib has a Consumer Product Safety Commission label or a Juvenile Products Manufacturer’s Association (JPMA) label and that your crib has not been recalled and that the bars are no more than 2-3/8 inches apart.
• Only use a mattress designed for your crib. Check that the mattress fits the crib perfectly.
• Do not accept hand-me-down cribs or buy secondhand cribs.
• Don’t use loose-fitting mattress protectors.
• Don’t put pillows, stuffed animals, toys, or bumper pads in the crib.
• Don’t place the crib near a heater, against a window, near any dangling cords from windows, or near large furniture.
• Use a baby monitor if you are not sitting right nearby while your baby is in the crib.
• Make sure there are no missing, loose or broken parts or improperly installed screws, brackets or other hardware on the crib or the mattress support.  Check the stability and hardware on the crib often. Check for loose threads and strings, holes and tears. Make sure there is no cracked or peeling paint, splinters or rough edges.

Huh. It’s almost like cribs aren’t really a safe place for babies to sleep. How come I haven’t seen any alarmist billboards about the dangers of crib sleeping? Safely bedsharing actually involves many of the same warnings: keep pillows and soft bedding away from baby, have a firm mattress, don’t have gaps between the mattress and the wall/headboard, etc. Why can’t we just let parents know the basic guidelines of safe bedsharing? A huge campaign was launched in 1994 to educate parents to put babies to sleep on their backs, and the campaign is credited with reducing the SIDS rate by 50%. Maybe it’s time for a safe cosleeping campaign.

The reality of bedsharing is that as almost 70% of American parents cosleep with their baby at some point. Why? Because there are strong benefits of cosleeping, both for the children and for the parents.

• Babies sleep better and enjoy going to sleep more.
• Mothers sleep better.
• Breastfeeding is easier, rates are higher, and duration is longer.
• Cosleeping fosters independence in older babies and children.
• Cosleeping has positive effects on the child’s overall emotional health.
• It is parenting. Many parents prefer to keep relating to their children during sleep.

For additional reading about these benefits, visit peaceful parenting, Natural Parents Network, and PhD in Parenting.

Instead of listening to alarmist news reports, I recommend that you listen to the research of Dr James McKenna from the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Lab at the University of Notre Dame. The Sleep Lab is a research and teaching laboratory that researches the safety, physiological, and psychological consequences of parent-child sleep choices. Digging into their published articles is a goldmine, but you can learn a lot just by checking out their website:

• “Mother-infant cosleeping with breastfeeding is humankind’s oldest and most successful sleeping arrangement.” The Western practices of formula-feeding and moving sleeping babies away from their parents and off of their backs is responsible for the SIDS epidemic. Likewise, mothers suffocating their babies while sleeping is also a Western problem that requires more explanation than simply blaming bedsharing alone.

• Infants require continual proximity and contact with a caregiver’s body for their nutritional needs (breastfeeding) and also to promote proper functioning of their body temperature, immune system, heart rate, breathing, organ development, and central nervous system as well as their psychological and emotional development. For older children, cosleeping contributes to their “independence, social competence, feeling of high self esteem, strong sexual identities, good comportment…in school, [and] ability to handle stress…”

• “Sleeping through the night” is a completely emotionally, socially, and biologically inappropriate activity for babies. McKenna calls it “scientifically bogus”. Babies should wake frequently in the night to breastfeed, staying in the kind of “lighter sleep” for which they are designed.

• A breastfeeding mother is more physiologically and mentally in tune to her baby’s movements and sounds than a formula-feeding mother, and the breastfeeding baby is more physiologically tuned to her. The baby and mother in a breastfeeding dyad spend more time in “lighter sleep” that makes them more responsive to one another. Almost all bedsharing deaths involve non-breastfeeding babies.

• Bedsharing deaths are overwhelmingly associated with other independent risk factors, notably: baby placed on ou stomach in an adult bed with no supervision, lack of breastfeeding, baby placed on top of a pillow, maternal smoking, and drug and alcohol use. This was shown in the Milwaukee report, as well, where an average of four risk factors were present.

• If you aren’t comfortable with bedsharing, or if you’re formula feeding or otherwise can’t make the safest bedsharing environment, remember that cosleeping by having the baby in a crib or bassinet in the room with you gets the job done, too. The idea is to have the baby within sensory range of a parent. This kind of “separate surface” cosleeping is non-controversial and recommended by everyone.

The facts about formula-feeding really interested me. McKenna’s research on that was verified for a Fox6 news report. All the cosleeping deaths in Milwaukee in 2009 and 2010 up until the report were of formula-feeding babies. In the FIMR from Milwaukee, why isn’t formula-feeding listed as a “risk factor”? The Fox6 report talks about a woman who accidentally killed her 6 day old infant while sleeping with her while drunk. Why is that a “cosleeping death”?!

What’s clear to me is that Milwaukee has a serious infant death problem that highlights their larger problems of racial and income-based disparities. Why are 73% of babies dying from issues with prematurity or birth defects? And why are those deaths clustered in certain zipcodes? Putting scary images on billboards that point the finger of blame at individual parents is a lot easier than addressing economic inequalities or a failing health care system. In the Fox6 news report, Anna Benton of the Milwaukee Health Department says,

“I really don’t think that this is a problem of any specific cultural group. And I guess I don’t feel it’s the place of the health department to distinguish between different types of people.”

But shouldn’t it be the job of the health department to determine the real reasons for these deaths and to address the most important factors? In Milwaukee (and elsewhere), cosleeping deaths occur mostly in poor, black families living in what Pat McManus of the Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin calls “chaotic homes.” Addressing poverty in black communities and the substance abuse, poor health care, and difficult child-rearing choices that accompanies poverty are much harder to do than just creating mean billboards.

Members of The Milwaukee Health Department are not doing their jobs. They are cowards who are ignoring the real needs of their communities.

In conclusion, this quote from the Sleep Lab site stood out to me as the bottom line on the anti-cosleeping mania in which Milwaukee is currently leading the pack:

“Unfortunately, the rhetoric against bedsharing parents has turned very ugly, very vitriolic, negatively judgmental and condemnatory, and indeed, nothing less than threatening, of any and all bedsharing parents even when risks are minimized; and the zeal and imprecise language which is being used by many technicians involved in what is considered “safe infant sleep” campaigns is over simplified to the point that it is inaccurate, misleading, and inappropriate, and is itself dangerous on many different levels, both politically and scientifically.”

[color-box]60 Days to Positive Parenting is my crash course for parents ready to make an immediate and lasting change to a joyful, cooperative, respectful relationship with your kids. Learn more here about doing the work to become a positive parent.[/color-box]

I’m going to review all the baby carriers I use, and my clear choice to start with is the Moby.

I’ve owned a Moby since my nanny days, because it’s my hands-down favorite of all carriers. For infants to toddlers, the Moby wins on comfort which is my top priority.

Description

The Moby Wrap is a baby carrier made from a single long piece of stretchy fabric.

Price

You can get a new Moby for $40+. To tell the truth, anything cheaper than the basic Moby is not going to be a quality baby carrier, so the Moby is a leader on price. If you need to spend less money but still have a quality carrier, look for a used Moby or look into the wrap style carriers you can make yourself. Check out Amazon for reviews and a selection of Moby Wraps. (That’s an affiliate link, as are the other links in this post.)

Comfort

The Moby is the perfect carrier if comfort is your goal. There are no buckles, straps, rings, or ties to dig into you. The weight of your baby is distributed evenly around your shoulders, across your back, and around your waist. The fabric is slightly stretchy, giving you and your baby a smooth, even fit every time. The only thing that might be less than perfectly comfortable about the Moby is the temperature. There’s a lot of fabric to this carrier. Between all that fabric and the heat of your baby, if it’s hot outside, you’re going to be roasting in the Moby. In the summer at home I stay naked under the Moby and in public, I wear the tiniest tank top underneath it. For winter wearing, the Moby Wrap sits snug against your body making it easy to wear under a coat.

Practicality

• Washing: The Moby Wrap is easy to wash, since it’s just a big piece of fabric. There are no creases to try to clean out or parts you can’t put in the washing machine. On the other hand, if you’re putting your Moby on in public, the ends are going to be dragging on the ground wherever you are: parking lots, restaurant floors, the ground at the park, etc, so they are definitely going to get dirty.
• Wearing: The Moby fits people of most sizes. It is extremely adjustable. Many women are able to nurse their babies in the Moby, although that depends on your size and shape; my ginormous boobs make that impossible. With tiny babies, you have to readjust the wrap position each time you take the baby out, which is a pain. With older babies, you can take them in and out without retying.

Difficulty

The Moby is known for having a bit of a learning curve. When you watch someone put one on for the first time, it looks like you’d need Boy-Scout-level knot-tying ability to get it situated right. If you buy a new one, it will come with clear instructions. If you buy a used one or if you need a bit of help, there are many YouTube videos showing different ways to wrap it. Although it looks tricky at first, it’s actually pretty simple, and all the different wraps flow from the same basic way starting position. Most people only take 2 or 3 practice tries before they get the hang of it. You might also find that it takes a few moments to get your baby situated just right. If you are only going to be using a baby carrier now and then, you might not get good enough at using your Moby to be happy with it. If you’re looking for a carrier to use a lot, though, you will be a pro in just a couple of days – it really isn’t that hard.

Versatility

You can use a Moby with newborns, older babies, and toddlers, in a front position or a side position. The ability to use it with newborns increases its versatility, although some people don’t like it for heavier kids. When I first bought a Moby, there was also a back carry position, but it is no longer recommended.

Protip

If your Moby isn’t comfortable or your baby doesn’t like it, you’re probably wearing it wrong. Even if you love it, you might be wearing it wrong. I consistently see people wearing their Mobys wrong, like the woman doing this review. If you look at the photos from the company, they look very consistent: the fabric is smooth and evenly spread out, wide across your shoulders, with the main panel horizontal across the outside. I know I said it isn’t really that hard to learn, but you do have to spend a few minutes paying attention to learn how to do it right.

Bottom Line

I own three Mobys and I never leave the house without one. Even if I’m planning to use another carrier because I want to use a back carry position, I still have a spare Moby in the truck with me. If something were to happen and I had to walk three miles to a gas station carrying Dylan, I couldn’t do that with any other carrier, but I could do it with a Moby Wrap. I recommend this carrier whole-heartedly.

[color-box]60 Days to Positive Parenting is my crash course for parents ready to make an immediate and lasting change to a joyful, cooperative, respectful relationship with your kids. Learn more here about doing the work to become a positive parent.[/color-box]