A comprehensive guide to buying baby gates

Deciding how to better baby proof your home before the arrival of a new baby can be quite difficult especially for first time parents. I remember that at the beginning I had to carry my daughter with me in every single room – even when I had to use the toilet or take a shower. 

It was truly draining but I preferred that instead of leaving my baby cry in her cot or leaving her unsafe in the living room. But things got especially hard when she started to move around crawling and toddling around. Her safety was the most important thing to me. 

Soon we discovered baby playpens – which were great for the first 6 months and baby gates – we used one to delimitate the space our daughter was safe to play in. Delimitating the space was great as it allowed me to go and care for myself and just let my daughter play in peace with safe toys. 

I am sure that lots of parents already used baby gates in their home and they will continue to use them for long time coming. Figuring out what is the best baby gate for your home can be confusing.

Thankfully though there are lots of baby gate types to help no matter in which type of home you live in already. We had an open plan kitchen/living room so for us a free standing baby gate was the best but home might need a totally different type of baby gates.

So how should you choose?

There are basically three types of baby gates 

Free-standing gates – for when you want to keep your baby in a small, defined space. These can be as big as you need them to be. They can be used to delimitate a space into your living room like I told you we did or  even in the garden. 

Pressure-mounted gates – are great to be mounted in doorways as they rely on pressure to stay in place. These are great if you want to garden your child in a separate room or if you want him to stay away from the kitchen or bathroom. They can also be mounted at the top of the stairs but they are not as safe as the Hardware-mounted gates because it can slip and fall under a baby’s weight if not installed correctly.  

Hardware-mounted gates attach to door frames and surrounding walls with screws. As I said above the are safest option at the top of staircases. These are great because they can support you baby weight without slipping. They do have disadvantages as well though: they can’t be taken down in a hurry and when you do they leave goes in walls. Plus it takes longer to install them.

So which kind of baby gate do you use or used when you kids were little? There are lots of guides online to help you through it and reading the reviews can of course help you.