An online search for must-have baby gear or baby gadgets will return millions of results, each page offering multiple items promising to be necessary and lifesaving. Expectant parents (or those buying gifts for them) can easily be overwhelmed. To get some hands-on reviews, we reached out to recent parents and child care providers for some recommendations on which items were truly beneficial in the care of infants.

The top recommendation from those surveyed: sleep aids. New parents recommended multiple gadgets to help infants sleep and topping the list was a sleep sound machine or white-noise player. Although they have been around for a while, machines that provide soft background noise to mask other environmental sounds have gained traction with infants – and adults – in recent years.