Tag: parenting

  • Designer Babies Are Teenagers Now—and Some of Them Need Therapy Because of It

    Designer Babies Are Teenagers Now—and Some of Them Need Therapy Because of It

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    In these homes, a high value gets placed on achievement. I think the way these kids are created sends the message: “You’re not good enough. You need to achieve. You’re not accepted.”

    When the kids struggle, it’s especially devastating. Some kids have disabilities from being born preterm, which used to be a big risk with IVF. Or they have learning differences or autism.

    Sometimes, parents chose an egg donor and then later found out that she had psychiatric problems. Then the kid gets viewed through that lens, which can be pretty devastating and traumatic: “Your donor is nuts, so you must be, too.”

    The child grows up feeling very different, knowing they were an experiment but not getting the proper support or acceptance they need to thrive. Because there’s not a caregiver who’s like, “I get you.” There’s none of that.

    In my work, I help parents accept: This is the child that you have. And I help kids accept the reality of their parents and forge a relationship that’s less hurtful—or build a life without them.

    Many of my families have neurodiverse members who need help making abstract concepts more concrete. Sometimes just explaining “you and your child are not the same person” does the trick. Or say a teenager doesn’t feel loved. I might need to clarify to them that “love” is not a tangible feeling, like getting pinched or kicked. It means someone feels fondness toward you like you feel fondness toward Legos or drones.

    In high school, a lot of teens are linking up with half-siblings through 23andMe, sometimes ones who live all over the world. It’s common in these families to have different egg donors for different kids because they’ve tried to get, say, a sporty son and an artsy daughter. What do you do when one of your children has found their half-siblings and is bonding, while your other child doesn’t have a good experience with their newfound relatives? Who do you invite to Thanksgiving?

    I really feel for the moms. They’re trying to balance everyone’s expectations and hold it all together. But it’s unfair to the dads, too. Because I’m not sure the dads can accurately predict human behavior. They probably can predict stocks, but human behavior has way too many variables. I don’t know if anyone’s making sure parents understand that they can’t test-drive a child and then return it.

    Trying to control your child is a recipe for disaster. The kid is going to rebel. If you have a preconceived notion of how they’re going to be, either you’re going to be severely disappointed or you’re going to shove them into a mold and it’s not going to work.

    Maybe sometimes it does work, but those people don’t come to me.

    —As told to Emi Nietfeld

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  • Cradlewise Smart Bassinet and Crib Review: AI to Help Infants Sleep

    Cradlewise Smart Bassinet and Crib Review: AI to Help Infants Sleep

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    Your baby’s bassinet or crib doesn’t only impact their sleep, it also impacts yours. I’m a new mom, with my little one having been born at the end of September, and we’ve been using Cradlewise’s smart bassinet consistently for the past month. While it’s not a foolproof method of getting your baby to sleep (is any crib foolproof?), it has helped reduce the need to intervene. Less intervention means more sleep for both me and my babe, so I’m a fan of Cradlewise.

    Cradlewise has all the gadgets built in: a baby monitor, a sound machine, and even a bouncing motion to soothe Baby. The latter two are completely customizable from the Cradlewise app. But it’s not just gadget-packed—the app has AI within it that will use the camera and microphone to track and categorize Baby’s sleep, and react when Baby is fussy.

    Cradlewise has worked to help keep my baby asleep, oftentimes responding to him before I do. On his most recent nap, I watched him through the app as he went in and out of fussing, eventually being soothed back asleep by the crib’s bouncing. During that time, I was able to write this review. I’m sold.

    Baby’s First AI

    Cradlewise’s AI is designed to learn your baby’s sleep habits so it can respond appropriately. Considering I’m in the thick of the newborn haze, I’ll happily welcome anything to help with sleep at this stage. The crib’s monitor, built into the crib’s overhanging arc, uses 3D-image mapping technology to detect the baby’s sleep state from quiet, active, or crying. AI interprets and categorizes this information to respond by either bouncing Baby, kicking on the sound machine, or both. The more the built-in AI is able to understand and predict your baby’s sleep habits, the more it can take a preventative approach to your baby’s fussing and stirs.

    I was hesitant to rely on AI for my baby’s sleep, but Cradlewise is designed to respond like a parent would to a baby fussing. It’ll start soothing with a gentle bouncing motion and turn on the sound machine. If your baby is still protesting sleep, it’ll respond by increasing the bounce motion and volume of sound. When the crib recognizes your baby is soothed back to sleep, all functions turn off. If the baby can’t be soothed by these actions, it’ll send an alert through the app.

    Screenshots of the app for the Cradlewise Smart Bassinet and Crib showing the feature of video and audio monitoring as...

    Photograph: Cradlewise

    Through the app, you have full control of everything from the intensity of the bouncing motion to the sound machine’s volume. Neither is constant, so your little one is less likely to become reliant on either to fall asleep. I’ve been using the sensitivity setting on high so the bassinet responds almost instantly to my child’s stirring or sounds. When he stirs, I wait to see if Cradlewise can soothe him back to sleep. About half the time, it will. On the downside, sometimes the bassinet will increase the bouncing motion too soon, from a gentle bounce to a level three or four (level four being the highest bounce intensity), which often feels too aggressive and even counterproductive to get my baby to sleep. When this happens, I turn the intensity down myself. Hopefully this is a pattern the AI will eventually pick up on and readjust to, but so far, it hasn’t.

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  • It’s Time to Make the Internet Safer for Kids

    It’s Time to Make the Internet Safer for Kids

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    In the real world, we have more than a century of experience figuring out how to share the world with children in order to keep them safe while still allowing adults to engage in adult-only activities, particularly those involving sex, violence, and addictive substances.

    In 18th and 19th century America, there were essentially no restrictions on children’s consumption of alcohol. However, following the temperance movement’s efforts to publicize alcohol’s harmful effects on families, women, and children, and after the failed experiment of Prohibition, states took on the responsibility of regulating alcohol. Each state eventually passed laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to those under a certain age, usually 21. This established the principle that enforcement responsibility falls to the bars, liquor stores, and casinos profiting from alcohol sales. The idea that parents alone should manage their children’s access to alcohol would have struck most people as absurd.

    Likewise, it will soon seem absurd that we once allowed children of any age to go everywhere on the internet that adults go, doing everything that adults do, without the knowledge or consent of their parents. The year 2025 will be the one where humanity remembers children are different from adults and that they need protection and age-gating in some parts of the digital world.

    The dangers are now undeniable. From the dawn of the internet through to 2024, any child who knew how to lie about their age could open an account on nearly any platform used by adults, except for those that require a credit card. This included hardcore pornography sites such as Pornhub, and the now-defunct site Omegle—where children could video chat with strangers, some of whom were naked masturbating men. It also included social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, all of which are full of content that is wildly inappropriate for children, and all of which incorporate design features that harm children in a variety of ways.

    Concern among parents and educators is now widespread.

    In 2023, a survey on children’s health conducted by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital showed that the issues that most concern parents—ranked above school violence, drugs, and bullying—were the overuse of smartphones, social media and internet safety. Another 2024 survey of school principals showed that they were similarly alarmed by the effect of smartphones on students, with 88 percent stating that they were making children tired and distracted, and 85 percent believing it was amplifying violence and bullying in schools.

    No wonder that, in 2023, a major Unesco report considered the overwhelming evidence that excessive phone use was correlated with lower school performance and poorer mental health, and called for the ban of smartphones from schools. In 2024, France, Italy, Finland, and the Netherlands followed through on those recommendations, banning digital devices in classrooms. In the US, the states of Ohio, Indiana, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Florida have also imposed restrictions on smartphone usage in schools, while the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for warning labels for social media platforms. Bipartisan legislation addressing these concerns—the Kids Online Safety Act—has also passed the Senate. This new law would, for instance, force tech companies from targeting kids with personalized algorithms designed to hook them.

    In 2025, parents will no longer be alone in tackling this problem. They will be assisted by concerned politicians and by phone-free schools. Social media companies, on the other hand, will finally acknowledge—or be forced to acknowledge by juries and legislatures—that they now own childhood, and they bear at least some responsibility for what they are doing to children.

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  • As Schools Ban Phones, More Kids Are Using Smartwatches

    As Schools Ban Phones, More Kids Are Using Smartwatches

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    “It seemed like I was opening Pandora’s box, when it wasn’t absolutely necessary,” she says of purchasing a smartwatch. (Still, she didn’t forswear technology entirely. Her daughter now bikes with a Wi-Fi–only tablet, connects it to the internet when she arrives at a friend’s house, and sends her mom a message on Facebook Messenger Kids letting her know she arrived safely.)

    The possible drawbacks of smartwatch use extend beyond stunting character growth. Even though smartwatches are virtually unexplored in academic research and will require further study before anyone can say, conclusively, how they may affect kids and childhood, it’s clear that screens, in general, can cause children harm, Perry of Children and Screens argues.

    “They interfere with so many aspects of child development,” she says, rattling off some examples: cognitive development, language development, social emotional and behavioral development, mental health.

    True, the screen of a smartwatch is much smaller than that of a phone. Its functionalities are more limited. Some of the “irresistible” qualities of other devices are missing from smartwatches, Perry concedes. And even though most kids’ smartwatches come with games, they can be difficult to use and may deter kids from playing for long, or at all.

    Still, that doesn’t make smartwatches safe from some of the addictive, distracting tendencies of phones, experts say. Watches vibrate, chime, and ping with notifications. They, like other devices, are built with persuasive design.

    “The evidence is really clear that the notifications—the visual cues to look at your watch—those things are really disruptive and provide a real distraction from something else the child should be doing,” Perry says.

    Teachers and school leaders would vouch for that.

    “They’re disruptive, distracting,” says Joseph, the district leader in Maine. “It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.”

    She doesn’t see watches and phones as being wholly different from one another, especially in middle and high school settings where, increasingly, students have both devices with them during the school day. A phone may be put away, out of sight, but the watch on a student’s wrist will still be buzzing with news alerts, incoming text messages and photos, social media notifications, and the like.

    Joseph’s school district, RSU 1, encompassing a small coastal region of Maine, updated its device policy over the summer, at a time when many schools and districts opted to do the same. Except, unlike RSU 1, most districts are narrowly focused on the potential harms of smartphones, multiple people shared in interviews. Their revised policies may not even mention smartwatches, creating a loophole for those devices.

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  • 16 Best Gifts for Babies and Toddlers, Editor Tested and Reviewed

    16 Best Gifts for Babies and Toddlers, Editor Tested and Reviewed

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    One of the most intimidating things I ever did in my twenties was attend my first baby shower. I was still in college, and if there was an online registry of some kind, nobody bothered to share it with me, so I went in completely blind trying to shop for a random sorority sister’s baby. I went with a safe choice: A cute set of baby body soap and lotion. Now, I wish I could go back in time and help out overwhelmed college me. After both having my own child and spending my working hours testing all kinds of parenting gear, I’ve come to discover there are a ton of fun gifts to give little ones.

    This guide encompasses gifts ranging from the newborn stage all the way through finishing out 1-year-old-hood, so you can come back to this guide to shop for your favorite baby-to-be’s shower and first couple of birthdays. Babies change a lot, and ridiculously fast, so I’ve mentioned what ages or milestones I used as markers for some of these gifts. But don’t be afraid to gift something on the early side: Better to give something they’ll grow into for the coming months rather than something they’ll grow out of tomorrow!

    If you’re looking for more parenting gear, don’t miss our guides to the Best Strollers, Best Baby Monitors, Best Breast Pumps, and Best Travel Strollers. If you’re shopping for older kiddos, don’t miss the Best Subscription Boxes for Kids and the Best STEM Toys for Kids.

    Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting that’s too important to ignore for just $2.50 $1 per month for 1 year. Includes unlimited digital access and exclusive subscriber-only content. Subscribe Today.

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  • Most US Teens Use Generative AI. Most of Their Parents Don’t Know

    Most US Teens Use Generative AI. Most of Their Parents Don’t Know

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    A fresh wave of anxiety about children and technology is cresting, with parents and pundits increasingly interrogating how kids use smartphones, social media, and screens. It hasn’t stopped teenagers from embracing generative AI. New research reveals what AI tools teenagers in the United States are using, and how often—as well as how little their parents know about it.

    Seven in 10 teenagers in the United States have used generative AI tools, according to a report published today by Common Sense Media. The nonprofit analyzed survey answers from US parents and high schoolers between March and May 2024 to assess the scale and contours of AI adoption among teenagers. More than half of the students surveyed had used AI text generators and chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, as well as search engines with AI-generated results. Around 34 percent had used image generators like DALL-E, and 22 percent had used video generators.

    The survey indicates that US teenagers are embracing AI at pace with peers in the UK, where the Office of Communications found late last year that four in five teenagers used generative AI tools. It also shows that the pace of adoption is accelerating; in an earlier report on teenagers and AI released by Common Sense Media this June, based on responses from the end of 2023, only around half the respondents had used generative AI.

    The most common reason for using AI was school-related; more than half reported using it for “homework help,” primarily in “brainstorming ideas.” (Older teens were more likely to do so than younger ones.) The second most-common reason was good, old-fashioned boredom, followed by translating content from one language to another. One in five teens had used generative AI tools to joke around with friends.

    The survey results underscore how challenging and confusing educational institutions have found this moment. Six in 10 teens reported that their school either didn’t have AI rules, or they didn’t know what those rules were. There’s no clear emerging standard for whether teachers should embrace or reject AI use; nearly the same number of teenagers reported using AI without their teacher’s permission as the number reporting that they used it with their educator’s blessing. More than 80 percent of parents said that their child’s school “had not communicated” anything about generative AI. Only 4 percent reported schools banning generative AI. “We’re seeing an almost paralysis from schools,” says Common Sense head of research Amanda Lenhart.

    When teachers did have conversations with their students about AI use, it tended to shape how the kids viewed the technology. “Teenagers really listen and learn,” Lenhart says, noting that the students who were given instructions by their educators were more likely to grasp how the technology worked, and more likely to check whether it was hallucinating or generating factually accurate sentences. “It makes a big difference.”

    One notable finding from the survey was how clueless many parents are about whether their kids are using generative AI. Only 37 percent of parents with kids using AI tools were aware that they were doing so. Nearly a quarter of the parents with kids using AI tools had erroneously assumed that they weren’t. Most parents had not discussed AI with their kids.

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  • 7 Best Bassinets (2024), Tested and Reviewed

    7 Best Bassinets (2024), Tested and Reviewed

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    We’ve recommended the Snoo for several years. It’s the only true “smart” bassinet, designed by Dr. Harvey Karp, who is best known for his books on the “5 S’s” for getting kids to sleep. He described the Snoo to me as an extra pair of hands to rock a baby back to sleep and believes it can add an hour or two of slumber to an average baby’s night. In my experience, his claims check out.

    The Snoo listens to your baby and reacts. Motion starts off as a slow side-to-side sway with a subtle waterlike sound that’s meant to mimic the womb, then gets more vigorous if they start crying. The most intense phase is a Jello jiggle, accompanied by more white noise. It has a straightforward app for iPhone and Android phones that records sleep patterns and lets you tinker with how the bassinet responds to your baby. If your baby’s distress reaches Level 5, it automatically stops after a minute or so and sends you a notification. I liked to lock it to a low level and tinker with its sensitivity a bit.

    Unlike every other bassinet, it requires a special sleep sack that connects to its sides and keeps babies on their backs. If the sack isn’t hooked up right, it won’t operate, which the company claims makes it “the safest baby bed ever made.” Stomach sleeping, overheating, and co-sleeping are all possible causes of SIDS.

    At $1,695, it’s pricey, though you can also rent it for $159 a month from Happiest Baby. It looks the price, with a clean, modern metal-and-mesh aesthetic. But it’s not perfect. Sometimes it doesn’t react fast enough, and other times it seems too aggressive, particularly as your baby gets smarter. I also wish it had a cover to block some light. And since my child spit up a lot, I was sometimes short on sacks. (Be sure to get a couple extra.) The Velcro on the sacks could also stand to be a bit stronger. Finally, the Snoo is not completely invulnerable to hacking—no internet-enabled product can be. You can turn the Wi-Fi features off, though if you do, you won’t be able to tinker with the settings. As of September 2024, there are also certain features hidden behind the app’s new Premium subscription ($20 a month). If you buy the bassinet directly from Snoo or an authorized partner, you’ll get the Premium features for nine months—plenty of time for your kiddo to grow out of it, but it hurts the resale value, and means you’ll have to pay for it for your second kiddo. If you buy the bassinet secondhand, though, you’ll have to pay for the subscription the entire time.

    This bassinet should work “from birth to 6 months (or when baby can get on hands and knees).” Read its User Guide here.

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  • OpenAI Messed With the Wrong Mega-Popular Parenting Forum

    OpenAI Messed With the Wrong Mega-Popular Parenting Forum

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    Think of any topic vaguely related to raising kids imaginable, and there’s probably a post about it on Mumsnet, the long-running, enormously popular, controversy-spurring UK-based parenting forum for mothers. Over its more than two decade-long history, Mumsnet has amassed an archive of more than six billion words written by its highly engaged user base, on topics such as dirty diapers and lazy husbands. (Not to mention a bonkers rant about dolphins.)

    This spring, after Mumsnet discovered that AI companies were scraping its data, the company says it decided to try to strike licensing deals with some of the major players in the space, including OpenAI, which initially expressed willingness to explore an arrangement after Mumsnet first reached out. After talks with OpenAI fell apart, Mumsnet in July announced its intention to pursue legal action.

    According to Mumsnet, during those early conversations, an OpenAI strategic partnership lead told the company that datasets over 1 billion words were of interest to the AI giant. Mumsnet’s leadership was excited. “We spent quite some time in a back-and-forth with them,” Mumsnet founder and CEO Justine Roberts tells WIRED. “We had to sign some NDAs, and they wanted a lot of information from us.”

    However, over a month later, OpenAI told Mumsnet that the company was no longer interested in partnering at that time, according to an email exchange reviewed by WIRED. When asked why, the OpenAI staffer characterized Mumsnet’s 6 billion word dataset as too small to warrant a licensing arrangement, Roberts says. They also noted that OpenAI is primarily interested in large datasets that the public cannot already access online, and that it wanted datasets that captured broad human experience.

    This sentiment was echoed by the company when asked for comment from WIRED. “We pursue partnerships for large-scale datasets that reflect human society and do not pursue partnerships solely for publicly available information,” says OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood. “We support publisher and creator choice, offering them ways to express their preferences about how their sites and content work with AI in search results and training generative AI foundation models.”

    Roberts says she was “irritated” by this development. She recalls that OpenAI at first had seemed especially interested in Mumsnet because of the platform’s heavily female-written content. “It’s very high-quality conversational data,” she says. “It’s 90 percent female conversation, which is quite unusual.”

    OpenAI has struck a variety of data-licensing deals with media outlets and platforms in the past year, entering into agreements with Vox Media, the Atlantic, Axel Springer, Time, and WIRED parent company Condé Nast, as well as platforms filled with user-generated content like Reddit. (Automattic, the owner of WordPress.com and Tumblr, was also said to be in licensing talks earlier this year.) As the particulars of those deals haven’t been revealed, it’s not clear what the size of their respective corpuses are.

    When WIRED asked about the size of datasets it will consider for commercial licensing, OpenAI declined to share that information. But spokesperson Kayla Wood emphasizes that the company’s partnerships with publishers are “focused on displaying their content in our products and driving traffic to them.”

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  • Cybex e-Gazelle S Review: Powers Up Hills and Gently Rocks

    Cybex e-Gazelle S Review: Powers Up Hills and Gently Rocks

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    When my son was small, my favorite stroller accessory was little add-on called the Rockit. Shaped like a rocket, it attached onto the handlebar of my stroller and vibrated to rock my baby to sleep while we shopped at the farmer’s market. It was great for those early months, especially since my son (like many babies) hated when the stroller dared come to a stop.

    Now, instead of it being a handlebar add-on, you can find a stroller with that feature built right in. Cybex’s newest stroller, the e-Gazelle S, adds electric powers to Cybex’s existing Gazelle design to give it both a rocking mode and a power assist to help you push the stroller on rough terrain or slow it down on a hill. The e-Gazelle S is well-made and can easily switch from a single to double stroller, and you’d never guess it’s an electric stroller at first glance.

    It’s a splurge—it retails for $1,100. You don’t need this stroller (or need to spend that much on any stroller—our pick for the best baby stroller is half that price), but if there are a lot of hills in your life, this stroller makes them a lot easier. And if I was choosing between this and an Uppababy Vista V2 ($999), I’d choose the e-Gazelle.

    Power On

    Hand holding the handlebar of a stroller showing buttons

    Photograph: Nena Farrell

    The e-Gazelle S has motors built into the stroller frame, powered by a lithium-ion battery you click into the edge of the lower storage basket. To use it, the handlebar has two buttons: the power button and rocking mode button, plus four LED lights that light up to display the battery life (and rocking mode level). Then there’s a little thumb lever underneath these lights and buttons to engage the forward or brake assist. Once it’s turned on, you either need to activate the assist or the rocking mode within about two seconds or it’ll turn off. Cybex says the battery can last anywhere from five to 28 miles, depending on factors like temperature and terrain. I used it on a hot day throughout an amusement park and still had three out of four lights on at the end of the day.

    If you’re worried whether the stroller will run away from you, it can’t. The e-Gazelle power assist works only while the stroller is in motion, so you (or your young, curious child who loves buttons) can’t accidentally send the stroller grooving down the street. While walking, you use your thumb to control the power level of the smart assist, pushing forward to help you go—you guessed it—forward, and backward to engage the electric brake.

    The forward assist’s most powerful mode required me to extreme speed walk on a flat surface, and I usually had my thumb somewhere in the middle unless I was on a particularly steep hill. It’s designed with hills in mind, and Cybex says it can help with slopes up to 14 degrees (roughly the pitch of San Francisco’s famed Lombard Street). The brake didn’t feel like it had as much range; I either could feel it stopping the wheels a lot or barely at all. Still, it was helpful on steep inclines. I found myself reaching for the power assist throughout a day at the San Diego Safari Park to get up some of the park’s major uphill sections and to control my speed down the sloping path of the gorilla exhibit. Both these areas are just as tricky with lighter travel strollers, and the e-Gazelle made them noticeably easier.

    This video is about My MovieCourtesy of Cybex

    The rocking mode is a big sell for me, as someone who used a similar feature when my son was small. It’s not as quick to use as turning on the Rockit, though. You’ll need to lock the front wheels, hit the power button, then hold down the rocking mode button. There are three intensities to choose from; you hold down the button to wait for the number of LED lights to brighten to match the level you want (one light for level one, two for two, you get it).

    The stroller will roll back and forth slightly for rocking mode, which is a little strange to see, but my fellow parent friends and I have all sat there rolling a stroller back and forth to keep baby happy. Why not let the stroller do it for you? My kid is too old for rocking mode, but I don’t think I’d go higher than level two. Level three just seemed a little too jerky. I don’t love that you have to turn it off and start over if you want to change rocking levels, but it’s not hard to do.

    You can also hear the stroller working when you have power assist on. It sounds like a high-pitched but soft hum, not unlike the sound of an electric scooter. It wasn’t so loud that it was disruptive, but the sound was noticed by anyone walking with me.

    Multiple Modes

    Two side views of the same stroller comparing what it looks like with and without the top basket

    Photograph: Nena Farrell

    While the e-Gazelle S comes with a toddler seat and shopping basket, it has a ton of arrangements you can do, provided you buy the right accessories. It can handle car seats, bassinets, and toddler seats, either as a single stroller or double stroller. The stroller has more than 20 seat combinations you can try, but you will have to buy car seat adapters ($50), another toddler seat ($240), or a bassinet ($200) from Cybex to use with the stroller.

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  • Tips for Cargo Biking With Your Kids (2024): Gear and Tips to Ride Safely

    Tips for Cargo Biking With Your Kids (2024): Gear and Tips to Ride Safely

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    When I started reviewing electric cargo bikes years ago, they were expensive, niche vehicles for a specific subset of eccentric people. Today, electric bikes are everywhere. But there’s one demographic for whom an electric bike is especially useful—parents.

    Parents, especially moms, travel a lot. I have a full-time remote job and a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old. On any given day, I drop the kids off at school and pedal home to get on the computer. I stop by the store to pick up bananas on the way to drop them off at a playdate or volunteer at an event. Without a motor on my bike, I simply wouldn’t have the muscle power to carry my kids and tote all their stuff. I’d need a car.

    An ebike changed everything for me. It turned my endless boring errands into windswept opportunities to simultaneously work out, take my kids on a joyride, and stop and chat with our neighbors. I love my electric cargo bike, probably a little too much. If you’re thinking about taking the plunge, here are a few tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way.

    Don’t see anything you need here? Check out our guides to the Best Bike Accessories or How to Layer Clothing.

    Updated September 2024: We added new sections on whether an electric bike is right for you and keeping your kids safe. We also updated our gear recommendations and checked links and pricing.

    If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

    Table of Contents

    1. Is an Electric Bike Right For You?
    2. Keep Your Kids Safe
    3. Pick Your Ride
    4. Straps and Accessories
    5. Plan Your Route

    Is An Electric Bike Right For You?

    Urban Arrow ebike

    Photograph: Urban Arrow 

    “Saving the environment!” you thought to yourself. “Getting exercise! Sign me up!” But before you invest in an expensive piece of equipment, I want you to consider: Do you live in a climate where you can expect to spend large amounts of time outside, or is your region frequently plagued with snow, rain, or unsafe heat? Several friends who have bought electric bikes in places like Texas are simply not able to bike children to and from daycare when the temperatures are too high.

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