Baby Play, Home & Wellness Guides
This guide matches the right mat type to each surface so you can protect your baby, preserve your flooring and avoid an expensive buying mistake.
Babies spend a lot of time close to their play surface. They crawl across it, touch it with their hands, drop toys on it and, inevitably, put those hands and toys straight into their mouths.
The good news is that learning how to clean baby play mat surfaces properly doesn't require turning your living room into a hospital ward.
Rugs soften the feeling of timber, tile and concrete floors. They also reduce echoes and create a warmer place for parents and children to sit together.
Carpeted surfaces may help reduce the severity of some minor household falls compared with bare hard flooring. However, a standard rug usually does not offer the same depth of resilient cushioning as a purpose-made foam mat.
The benefits of floor play for babies include opportunities to build strength, coordination, balance and body awareness while practising movements such as reaching, rolling, sitting and crawling. A safe, supervised floor space also allows babies to explore freely and learn through repeated movement.
There are ordinary aunts and uncles, and then there are Cool Aunts and Uncles.
You know the type. They arrive with good stories, questionable amounts of sugar once the kids are older, and gifts that make everyone else quietly reconsider what they brought.
But there is one trap even experienced gift-givers fall into: spending serious money on something that has a spectacularly short baby-life.