Why most baby walkers are so bulky, and the 13.5 cm solution

It happens one thing at a time

The bouncer went in the corner. Then the play mat came out and never quite went back. Then the pram started living in the hallway because folding it every day stopped being worth it, and somewhere along the way the room you sit in every evening turned into a room with a sofa in it.

Nobody decides to fill a flat with baby gear. It arrives one useful item at a time, and every one of them is genuinely useful, which is exactly why none of them leave.

The walker is the worst of them

It is the widest thing you own and the most awkward shape. A wide base is what makes a walker work, so the good ones are wide on purpose, and there is no version of the problem where a walker is small on the floor.

Which leaves you two options, and most people end up with the second one. Either it goes away every day, or it stops going away at all.

And it stops going away because most walkers do not really fold. They come apart, which is different. Something unclips, something else has to be lifted out first, and there is a knack to it that you have to remember every time. After a fortnight of that, it lives by the radiator.

Folding flat is a different thing from folding

The measurement that matters is the depth once it is down, because depth is what decides where it can go. Anything over about twenty centimetres needs floor space of its own. Anything under it goes behind a door, down the side of a wardrobe, or flat under a bed, and stops being a thing you have to find a home for.

At that depth it slides behind the sofa or into the gap beside the wardrobe. It also goes in a car boot without a negotiation, which matters if the grandparents get a day a week and you would rather not buy a second one for their house.

A walker that folds in one movement is a walker that actually gets folded. Everything else about the design is irrelevant if it never leaves the middle of the room.

LullaWalker folds without coming apart

It is worth being plain about what it is, because you have bought things that promised to fold before.

It is heavier than the flimsy ones, because the frame is steel. That is the honest version, and it is the trade. You get a frame that holds its shape and a fold that does not need a knack, and the price of both is that it has some weight to it.

Nothing detaches. It goes down in one movement to roughly 13.5 cm and stands up on its own edge. The seat comes out separately for the wash, but that is a choice rather than a step you have to do first.

And it is worth saying that none of the folding costs you anything on the floor. The base is still set wide of the seat and the frame is still steel, so it is not a smaller walker, it is a walker that gets smaller when you are finished with it for the day.

What the floor space is worth

If you rent a flat, you already know roughly what a square metre of your living room costs you every month. It is more than most people would guess, and a walker parked permanently in the middle of it is using some of that every single day.

Folding is not a nice extra on a walker. In a smaller home it is most of the reason to choose one over another.

You get the room back in the evening

That is the whole of it. The walker does its job in the afternoon, and then the floor is a floor again by the time anyone sits down.

It takes about as long as folding a pushchair, which is to say not long enough to talk yourself out of.