The best gifts for new dads

When your first child is born, your first instinct is to spend whatever you can on the nicest ride for your baby. I get the urge, but take it from me that it’s a fool’s errand since they’ll often grow out of their first pram long before it gets its first dent or scratch. There’s a reason you’re likely to spot so many brand-name baby carriages on Facebook Marketplace in good condition. When it comes time to move to a stroller, however, you, uh, well, you can do that on the cheap as well.

Picture the scene: Our eldest was four and could walk easily, our youngest was two, and was about six months away from being able to walk with us. It was during the COVID lockdowns, so we couldn’t go secondhand shopping, and the fancy stroller we’d picked up on sale collapsed. I went on Amazon and found the dirt-cheapiest stroller I could find: Hauck’s Lightweight Sport. At the time it was £60 (around $80), and I figured it’d probably last long enough to cover the gap, and we did not treat it with too much care and attention.

Who would have thought that the flimsy, almost embarrassingly-cheap stroller would wind up outlasting a model that cost fourteen times as much at retail? Our son took a little longer than we expected to get his walking stamina, and so we wound up using it for the next two years. Then we handed it over to our in-laws when they were expecting their first child, saying they could use it when she’d grown out of her baby carriage. But they started using it as soon as she was old enough (and loved the freedom it afforded her). More importantly, it took a lot of punishment since the in-laws are outdoorsy types who take it off-road and on plenty of plane trips.

It’s certainly taken a battering, but when the wheels fall off, it only takes a second to jam them back into place. But if you’re just looking for something that does the job, won’t cost the Earth and will last a surprisingly long time, I can only speak to my experience that this is the one. — Daniel Cooper, Senior Reporter