Worth It
WORTH IT Rockit Rocker £30–50
A rocket-shaped motorised pram rocker. Genuinely, the closest thing to a miracle for tired parents.
Verdict: Will keep a sleeping baby asleep for an extra 30 to 60 minutes after you stop walking, which means you can sit in a cafe and finish your coffee. Worth every penny.
WORTH IT The Dreamegg white noise machine £25–35
Simple, effective and surprisingly good. Has a number of different white noises, lullabies and soothing sounds, perfect for babies, even better for adults who are struggling to get back to sleep after being woken many, many times by a baby. Cheap enough to buy a couple: keep one at home and one in your nappy bag for naps on the go.
Verdict: The Hatch Rest sits at the premium end of this category at around £60 and it doesn’t do anything the Dreamegg doesn’t. Save your money and buy the Dreamegg.
WORTH IT Portable blackout blinds (Amazon, any brand) £15–25
The cheap suction-cup ones from Amazon are all you need. Easy to put up, travel-friendly, and they’ll save your baby’s naps in the summer. Especially handy when the sun is still up at 9pm and you’re trying to convince a one-year-old it’s the middle of the night.
Verdict: Don’t pay more than £25. There are plenty of higher-end alternatives on the market that do the exact same job for double the price.
→ Shop portable blackout blinds
WORTH IT (BUY OR RENT) The Snoo Smart Sleeper £1,395 to buy / ~£70 a month to rent
The smart bassinet that rocks, shushes and detects your baby’s cries. When it works, it’s brilliant: longer stretches of sleep, calmer nights, the kind of difference parents talk about for years afterwards. There are two catches though. Babies outgrow it at 4 to 6 months, and not every baby takes to being strapped down.
Verdict: It comes down to one question: how many babies are you planning? If this is your last (or only) baby, rent it. At ~£70 a month you only pay for the months it works for yours, and you’re not stuck with a £1,395 box if they hate it. But if you know more children are coming or you know someone who'll buy it off you after, buy it outright. Spread across two or three babies it’s cheaper than renting each time, it holds its value brilliantly secondhand, and you’re not scrambling to hire one again at six weeks postpartum. Either way, try before you commit to buying.
→ Buy the Snoo at Happiest Baby
WORTH IT The VTech VM3254 video monitor £45
The one product on this list almost everyone ends up buying and you don’t need to overthink it. The VTech VM3254 does the job at a fraction of the price of the fancy ones: a clear picture, a dedicated parent screen so there’s no app to wrestle with, a built-in room thermometer - and crucially no Wi-Fi or subscription to fall over at 2am.
Verdict: You can spend ten times this on a smart monitor that tracks your baby’s breathing and oxygen through an app, and if that’s the reassurance you need, fair enough. But for most families this does everything you need it to. Whatever you buy, check the security credentials: a camera in your baby’s room is worth getting right.
WORTH IT The SnüzPod next-to-me crib £200 (cheaper alternatives from £75)
A crib that straps to the side of your bed so you can reach your baby without getting up. A genuine gift in the bleary early weeks, especially if you’re recovering from a c-section and can’t be hauling yourself upright every two hours. The SnüzPod is the one we’d point you to: compact enough for smaller rooms, lovely-looking, with a lift-off bassinet so you can move the baby around the house and a reflux incline for the windy nights.
Verdict: Worth every penny for the first six months. Get one that tilts (reflux is real) and check it actually attaches to your bed frame before you buy – ottoman beds and divans can be fiddly.
Overrated
OVERRATED Sleep consultants £200–1,000+
A real mixed bag. Some of our friends swear by theirs and credit them with saving their marriage. Others paid the better part of a grand for a very long PDF that was hard to remember at 3am when the baby wouldn’t go to sleep. Quality varies wildly. So does the methodology.
Verdict: If you go for one, get a personal recommendation from someone whose values match yours. Avoid anyone who talks about sleep training like it’s a moral position. Ask exactly what you get for your money before you pay. And if your gut says it’s not for you, trust it.
OVERRATED Magnesium sleep spray for babies £18–30
The TikTok darling. A topical spray you’re meant to spritz on your baby’s feet at bedtime. The marketing is excellent. The clinical evidence for using it on babies is, to put it kindly, vibes-based.
Verdict: Save your £25. If your baby has a genuine sleep issue, talk to your GP or health visitor. If they don’t, a spray bottle from Holland & Barrett isn’t going to crack it either way.
OVERRATED — Standalone room thermometers £20
The glowing-egg type that shows your baby's room temperature at a glance. Cute, and the colours match the tog labels on most sleeping bags. But most baby monitors already display room temperature, including the VTech above. If you've bought one, you're paying twice for the same number.
Verdict: Skip it if your monitor reports temperature. If you want a reading and aren't buying a monitor, a £4 digital thermometer does the identical job without the nightlight markup.
Surprisingly Brilliant
SURPRISINGLY BRILLIANT Mori Clever Sleeping Bag £40–60
Soft, well-made and they last forever, going from around three months right up to two years in a single bag. Organic cotton and bamboo, so extremely breathable. Yes you can get cheaper sleeping bags that do the same thing, although for the one bit of kit your baby sleeps in every night, the extra tenner is worth it.
Verdict: Buy two or three so one can always be in the wash, and another is ready to go if your baby has an overnight accident. Pricey, but you get what you pay for.
→ Shop the Mori Clever Sleeping Bag
SURPRISINGLY BRILLIANT (IF YOUR BABY IS INTO IT) Love to Dream Swaddle Up £35–45
The arms-up swaddle that has reached cult status in the UK. The design lets babies self-soothe by sucking their hands, which means longer stretches of sleep. For a lot of babies it works.
Verdict: When it works, it works. When it doesn’t, your baby will scream like you’ve attempted to put them in a straight jacket. A friend of ours bought one and watched her baby finally settle into it. Buy one and see how your baby reacts before you commit to a drawer of them.
→ Shop the Love to Dream Swaddle Up
SURPRISINGLY BRILLIANT Peachies nappy subscription from ~£0.30 per nappy
Hear us out. Yes, a nappy subscription costs more than the supermarket own-brand. But it means you never have that 11pm “do we have enough nappies?” panic again and newborns change sizes often. They turn up, you stop thinking about it, and quietly that’s one of the best things you can do for everyone’s sleep. The nappies themselves are genuinely good too: soft, absorbent, and no more middle-of-the-night blowouts - so they say.
Verdict: Start with a tester pack to find the right size before you commit (babies grow into and out of sizes faster than you’d believe). The refer-a-friend discount is pretty generous, so get on the NCT group chat and swap codes before you subscribe.
→ Subscribe direct at Peachies
SURPRISINGLY BRILLIANT A door silencer (any £5 one on Amazon) £5–10
A small foam cushion that wraps around the door latch and stops the door making that catastrophic CLICK when you close it. The cheapest sleep product on this list and arguably the most life-changing.
Verdict: You won’t understand why this matters until you’ve nap-trained a baby and then woken them up closing the door. After that, you’ll buy three. Add this to your registry instead of another mobile.
SURPRISINGLY BRILLIANT Ewan the Dream Sheep £35–45
A cuddly sheep that plays pink noise and glows a soft warm pink. A cult buy for a reason: the sound is womb-like rather than the sometimes harsher white noise of a machine, and a lot of babies settle to it fast. There’s a cheaper Snuggly version and a deluxe one with a longer timer if you want to dodge the every-20-minutes restart.
Verdict: Not every baby bonds with it, but when they do it’s the difference between a 40-minute settle and a 5-minute one. We think they're worth a punt and it makes a cute baby shower gift. Just don’t lose it – a missing Ewan at bedtime is its own kind of crisis.
The Honest Bit
Hate to say it, none of these products are going to save you from the dreaded 4 month sleep regression. But they do genuinely help keep your tiny baby more comfortable and asleep for longer than without.
Your baby’s nervous system is wiring itself in real time on its own schedule, mostly indifferent to whether you spent £30 or £3,000. What the good products do is make the bit between now and then more bearable. They buy you an extra hour of a hot drink at a cafe, they get you through the 4am hour with slightly less crying (yours and theirs), they save you from forty minutes of shushing in a pitch-black room. Worth a lot. Just not £1,400 outright.
"These baby products will buy you back small pockets of your life until your baby figures it out."
Shop the Sleep Edit
Want the gear that actually works? We’ve put our top sleep picks in one place, ready to shop. No marketing fluff, just the products we’d recommend to a friend when they've not slept in two years.
Browse the edit and follow us @HeyJunii for more honest reviews.
