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Weighted blankets have become popular with adults suffering from insomnia or anxiety, who say the product’s comforting pressure makes sleep come more easily. personalised baby comforter
But some companies, including Nested Bean and Dreamland Baby, are now marketing weighted sleep products — including wearable blankets and swaddles — for babies, even newborns. That’s raising alarm among pediatricians and many product safety experts, including those at Consumer Reports, who say that these products are being sold with no safety standards in place and little to no evidence that they’re safe.
In June 2023, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said in a letter to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) that these weighted products should never be used for babies.
“There’s no regulation of these,” says Rachel Moon, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and the chair of the AAP’s task force on sudden infant death syndrome. “People assume that if something is on the market, somebody has deemed it safe,” she says, but that’s not the case in the United States.
The CPSC, a federal agency responsible for ensuring that consumers are protected from dangerous products, recently updated its safe sleep guidance for infants (cpsc.gov/safesleep), to advise caregivers not to use weighted blankets or weighted swaddles, citing guidance from both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. The agency told CR last year that it was aware of at least one report of a fatality involving a weighted infant product.
The weighted products sold by Nested Bean feature plastic beads sewn into the fabric to place “gentle pressure” specifically on the baby’s chest, weight that the company says “feels as light as your palm on your baby’s chest.” Dreamland Baby’s weighted products distribute the weight evenly over the baby’s entire body.
Nested Bean says it has sold 2.5 million of the product, and Dreamland Baby says it has sold over 500,000.
Both Nested Bean and Dreamland Baby offer swaddles they say are safe for newborns, and both use weights that are no more than 10 percent as heavy as the weight of the baby for whom they are intended. This is the same blanket-to-user weight ratio that’s typically used for weighted blankets for adults. The Dreamland Baby website points to a clinical trial as evidence that its products are safe.
That study looked at infants who wore the swaddles for 30-minute-long sessions and were under constant supervision. And the AAP, in a warning letter written in June, noted that “there is no evidence in the peer-reviewed scientific literature evaluating the safety of weighted sleep products on typical, healthy infants, and there is also nothing published regarding their use in an unmonitored setting.”
Nested Bean told Consumer Reports that the company values AAP’s input but that its own research and its “experience of more than a decade on the market show that Nested Bean’s minimally weighted infant sleepwear products are safe and effective.”
Samantha Breen, a press representative for Dreamland Baby, told CR that “the AAP’s position against wearable weighted products is not supported by scientific evidence, including product testing” and that the company urged the AAP to reconsider its stance. She said they have sold more than 500,000 sleep sacks since coming onto the market in 2019, with no reported adverse events, evidence “that our product is safe.”
Medical experts say that even the “gentle pressure” described by the manufacturers of weighted sleep products can be dangerous for infants for multiple reasons.
First, a baby’s body is inherently different from an adult’s, and putting any weight on a baby’s chest is problematic.
“When babies are first born, their rib cage is not rigid,” Moon says, “and so it doesn’t take a lot of pressure to press on it and create obstruction there. It makes it harder for them to breathe, it makes it harder for their heart to beat properly if there’s pressure on there.”
Second, these products can make it harder to get out of unsafe sleeping positions. Pediatricians recommend that babies be put to bed on their back, which is the safest position to avoid sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). If very young babies are wearing weighted products and happen to roll over onto their stomachs, it will be harder for them to roll back over into a safer position. And if the weighted parts of the blanket or swaddle shift out of position on the baby’s body and cover the baby’s mouth or nose, that poses a risk of suffocation.
Finally, as much as parents may not want to hear it, “you don’t want your baby to sleep for 12 hours at night,” Moon says, and not just because young babies need to wake frequently to feed.
“In terms of babies who die of SIDS, what we think is happening is that they can’t wake up; there’s a problem with their arousal,” she says. If they get into a situation where they aren’t getting enough oxygen or have too much carbon dioxide in their system, a too-deep sleep can inhibit their ability to startle, wake and restabilize their systems. “When babies wake up in the middle of the night, that is actually protective.”
Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization that works side by side with consumers to create a fairer, safer and healthier world. CR does not endorse products or services, and does not accept advertising. Read more at ConsumerReports.org.
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