Opinions on Round Baby Cribs....

What is your opinion on round baby cribs ? I would think it is much less tradional than the angular rectangles of most households but is there any developmental benefits? I’d think the abscence of straight lines could alter some cognitive mapping schemes but in all I don’t think developmentally there would be any measurable effect different from the norm…
Perhaps they are the new IN thing but I have not heard much about them… Anyone else care to chime in with an opinion?

From th elink:

Not all of us have large nursery rooms. Secondly if you don’t put a rectangular crib next to the wall, you also have access from all sides. :rolleyes:

Retangular cribs come in even more colors and themes. I would like a cite that retangular cribs are invisible from one particular side or angle. :rolleyes: :dubious:

Ah at last the real reason for buying a round crib. It is not about the baby, it is all about the mom having the latest and most chic baby accessory. This is in the same catagory as Guess baby rompers. The kid would be better served by having a more involved set of parents.

Actually, according to the website, it about the mom having the most shiek [sic] baby accessory. Sheesh…if they were going to use the wrong homophone, they could have at least spelled it correctly. :rolleyes:

I want to know how you get four sided visibility from a round object.

I’ve never heard any developmental claims, and I’d be highly dubious of them if I did. I think they’re incredibly adorable from a “fantasy princess bedroom” perspective. I think they’re a pain in the ass to change the sheets on (no corners to help hold the sheet while you scootch around the other side) and that the largest ones make it hard to grab the baby if she’s tiny and in the very middle of the crib, or if she decides to run a race around the perimeter to stay out of your reach.

But it should be noted that I formed those opinions in about 32 seconds in the store, when putting my baby in the floor model for a cute photo op, and I don’t own a round crib myself.

I also love canopy beds, non-functional mosquito netting and fairy decals on the walls. I’m a princess dork.

The picture shows that crib with a bunch of sticky-up pointy things. I thought those were illegal now, on account of that whole choking thing (you get a string caught around it and around baby’s neck–> dead baby). Where does this crib come from?

Anyway, I think it’s kind of pointless and a hassle to change the sheets.

OK, that would be entertaining to watch-a baby doing laps on its own jogging track.

Why would curved lines in one area of a baby’s environment = the absence of straight lines? Why would this alter cognitive mapping schemes?

Yeah, just go find sheets for that thing. Let me guess - the company that sells the beds also sells the bedding, and its significantly more expensive than the regular stuff, and much harder to find.

There’s a reason things come in standarized shapes and sizes. When my parents call and ask if we need them to buy anything for the baby, and I say sheets, I want it to be sheets they can buy anywhere.

Themeatically they match your love nest round king sized bed with the adjacent heart shaped whirlpool tub…

Wonder if they have satin sheets and hearts shaped like pillows for them.

(Name your daughter Mirage and stick her in a heart shaped crib and there is no fighting Destiny…ok, well, since Destiny is her older sister, they probably will fight).

I actually looked at one before my daughter was born. They’re really cool, although entirely impractical unless you have a very large room. In our small apartment, it just wouldn’t work. And they are much more expensive to boot.

It wouldn’t… I’m not involved in academia anymore, but before I left some people at my school were studying nursery designs and the impact on infant cognition. One of the studies had as a factor a round room… I was just kinda of brain storming in a ubiquidous sort of way :slight_smile:

So, if you get a round crib, the baby (assuming it’s a girl) is going to grow up destined to enter a harem?

Yeah, I’d also be concerned to be sure the crib design ensures that no scooching baby too young to roll itself over gets its head stuck into the slats at an angle that smooshes its face into the mattress. Spitz and Fisher (our “Bible”) has lots of sad black and white pictures of asphyxiated infants in cribs before the design was perfectly understood. If I had gone to all the trouble to reproduce (as I haven’t), I wouldn’t buy one of these until I knew two decades of use had gone by without an asphyxial death. It isn’t just strings that can catch a kid’s face.

I just had to hit the link for the twin round cribs - MY GOD! All that bunting and frou-frou - can you imagine how much crap (literally) the babies could smoosh into those nooks and crannies (just like a Thomas’s English muffin) once they get to the “gee, what do we have here” phase?

I did end up buying two cribs, one from Once Upon a Child and the other from a thrift store. I knew we weren’t going to have any more kids who’d need them later, so spending $80/ea on them (plus $40-60 ea for mattresses) made a lot of sense to me. And sheets - lots of sheets! Mine were out of their cribs entirely by age 2.

Re: cognitive mapping, you might want to look into slinging your child for daytime naps, if that’s an option for you. I’ve seen some arguments that that’s very beneficial, although some kids just don’t go for it.

Hell, I thought it said ‘Shrek’. Couldn’t imagine what a green ogre has to do with cribs.

I don’t know about the development issues, but I personally think they’re butt-ugly. No real reason, I just do.

E.

Inside, outside, top and bottom. Assuming you opt for the glass-bottom crib, of course.

If you mounted the crib on its side, the kid could get some very developmentally useful exercise and you’d have a source of free power.

Slinging, as in stuffing the kid into those baby slings that I’ve seen some parents wandering around with, slings that’re basically a large length of fabric with a buckle (if that)? Or a more formal hammock?

There have been some cognitive studies comparing the visual responses of people who grew up in “carpentered” environments (i.e. virtually everyone in Europe and North America) with people who grew up in “non-carpentered” environments (African villagers, for example.) People who grow up around lots of right angles are better at judging if two lines meet at a right angle. Interestingly this “right-angle detection” appears to occur very early in the visual pipeline, far before the data reaches the conscious part of the brain. It appears that certain neurons in the visual cortex can be reprogrammed by repeated stimuli at an early age.

(Don’t ask me for a cite. I read the paper in grad school twelve years ago. And I don’t feel like digging around to find it again.)

Of course a curved baby crib in an otherwise square room isn’t going to affect visual development much at all.