Why your baby's walker may not fit them for long

They are a different size every time you look

You noticed it first with clothes. Something fitted in March, and by May you were folding it into the bag for someone else. Then it happened with the pram, and the car seat, and the high chair, and by then you had stopped being surprised by it.

Babies grow fastest in the first year and they do most of it in the legs. Between five months and eighteen months the distance from the seat to the floor changes completely, and that distance is the only measurement a walker actually cares about.

A walker is only comfortable at one height

Set it too low and their knees come up, they cannot get a proper push off the floor, and they lose interest in about four minutes because the thing will not go anywhere.

Set it too high and only their toes reach. They can just about touch, which means they spend the whole time stretching for the floor instead of standing on it, and that is not comfortable for anybody.

There is a fairly narrow band in the middle where it actually works, where the feet are flat and the legs have something to push against. A walker with one fixed height gives you that band once.

Which is why the number of settings is the real specification

Not the colour, not the toys on the tray, not the weight. How many times you can move the seat before you run out of walker.

Two settings gives you two bands, and each one lasts a couple of months. Ten gives you ten, and they overlap, so there is always one that puts their feet flat wherever they happen to be that month. The walker keeps up instead of being outgrown.

The question is not whether it fits them now. Every walker in the shop fits them now. It is whether it still fits them in six months, when they are the ones who will actually be using it properly.

LullaWalker adjusts ten times

It is worth being plain about what it is, because you have bought baby gear before and some of it was used for a fortnight.

It is not the cheapest walker on the page. That is the honest version. What you are paying the difference for is the part that decides whether it is still in the living room next spring or already in the loft.

Ten height settings, covering roughly five to eighteen months. A wide circular base on a reinforced steel frame that holds up to twenty kilos, so the frame is not the thing that runs out first either. Four wheels that turn in any direction. A seat that comes out and goes in the wash, which you will care about more than you currently think you will.

One walker instead of two

A fixed height walker that stops fitting at nine months is not cheaper. It is half a walker, and the other half is the second one you buy in the spring.

Spread across the thirteen months it is designed to cover, the whole thing works out at a few pounds a month. That is the arithmetic that matters, rather than the number on the page.

You buy it once

That is the whole payoff and it is a small one, which is why it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up.

You are not doing this again in four months. No second walker, no working out what to do with the first one, no wondering whether to bother at that stage. You move the seat down a notch and carry on.