Gifts for a newborn: three piles and what goes where

This article is a map. Each pile has its own rules, and each type of gift has its own article.

Before you buy a gift, put it in one of the three piles. Most disappointment comes from the giver aiming at one pile and hitting another.

A newborn needs surprisingly few things and uses up a lot of them. That's exactly why it makes sense to buy ahead and in bigger sizes.

In the first weeks, the scarce commodities are time and food, not another object. This pile tends to be the least showy and the one parents remember most.

The third pile is the only one that makes sense even when the child doesn't notice it for years. You'll recognise it by a simple test: is it worth something even if it isn't used at all this year? A footprint, jewellery with a date, a letter in a sealed envelope or a book with the child's name get in nobody's way at home, and in ten years they're the only things from that whole heap that still exist.

Two things spoil even good intentions with keepsakes. The first is unfinished work: a print kit that an exhausted parent has to make at three in the morning stays in its box — more on that in the article on how to make and keep a print. The second is a botched inscription: an engraving with a typo in the name or the wrong date can't be fixed, and that's exactly why jewellery with a name and date has its own article.

A book in which the child is the hero also belongs among keepsakes. With a newborn, it's honest to say how this works: the baby gets nothing out of it and for the first years will only chew on it. It makes sense either as something that waits for the child on the bookshelf, or — and this is usually smarter — as a gift for the older sibling, in which a new character appears, namely the baby: the three-year-old brother gets something of his own at a moment when everything else belongs to the newborn. At Hero of the Book, the illustrations are created from a single uploaded photo, so the hero looks like that particular child, the name is woven correctly into the text, and it's a one-off purchase, no subscription.

And a warning that belongs in this pile: with a book carrying a name, first check how the name is spelt. Isabelle, Isabel, Matthew, Mathew — the name runs through the whole story and the dedication, so you'll read a typo again every single time. Think too about who you're addressing the book to: givers often enter the newborn's name even though it's the older sibling who will actually open the book. And bear in mind that before you pay you'll see a proposed title, a story preview and the dedication — but not the finished illustrations, which are only created from the uploaded photo. If you're writing a dedication in the book, it's worth thinking it through — what to write in a dedication is a chapter of its own.

Duplicate gifts don't come from stinginess or lack of interest — they come from being too shy to ask. Here is the order of steps that sorts it out in one evening.

The hardest part of coordinating gifts is the first message. These are written so they don't tell anyone what to do and can be sent as they are.

Some newborn gifts sell precisely because they look nice in a photo. The UK's NHS recommends keeping the cot empty: no pillows, quilts, bumpers, loose blankets, soft toys or so-called nests or positioners meant to hold the baby in place. The American Academy of Pediatrics gives the same advice in its guide to safe sleep. So a decorative bedding set with a bumper or a big soft toy for the cot isn't a gift for the baby but decoration for the adults.

With toys, look at two things. The "not suitable for children under 36 months" label (a crossed-out child's head in a circle) isn't an age recommendation but a warning about small parts that can be swallowed — and it applies even when the toy sits in the cot "just for decoration" and an older sibling picks it up. The second thing is origin: EU toy safety rules rest on the Toy Safety Directive and the CE marking, but with products from marketplaces outside the EU nobody guarantees the marking matches reality. Specific recalled products can be looked up in Safety Gate, the EU rapid alert system.

The last category isn't dangerous things, just pointless ones: perfumes and cosmetics for newborns, sets of ten pieces of clothing all in one size, giant soft toys over a metre tall and anything that needs batteries and plays a tune. A detailed list, including why people buy these things, is in the article on what to avoid with a young child.