Kiddofreedom

Stroller Hacks for New Moms and Dads

As a new parent, you always have your baby in sight as you  stroll around shopping or running errands. Baby strollers have become an absolute necessity for city parents as well as those who live out in the country.

But lugging a baby and groceries all the time can be a bit of a hassle if you don’t know a few stroller hacks that moms and dads have known for ages.

In this guide, you’ll learn a few little things to do and small actions to take to make every stroll not only safe but also fun for you and your baby.

The suggestions presented below will make you and your baby to start looking forward to the next excursion outdoors. And pushing a baby stroller will stop being what it is for those who haven’t yet discovered these stroller tips. It’ll become a joy, a happy, hassle-free experience that enriches your and your little one’s life in multiple ways.

24 Baby Stroller Tips Every New Parent Must Know

Let’s get down to business right away.

1.Use Ankle Weights to Keep Stroller Upright at All Times

Truth be told: baby strollers tipping over and spilling both baby, drinks, and even groceries happens more often than we imagine. In fact, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, strollers tipping over is among the most frequent causes of stroller accidents. Did you know that fully 16 percent of all baby stroller injuries happen as a result of strollers tipping over?

Fortunately, there’s a hack to stave off stroller tip-overs — using ankle weights.

By the way, what are ankle weights? Ankle weights are a wearable sandbag-like device that people attach to their ankles with a velcro strap to enhance their strength training according to Harvard Health Publishing.

Here’s how to keep stroller from tipping: Use ankle weights to stabilize your baby stroller and prevent it from tipping over and harming your baby in the process. To do this, wrap the stroller’s legs with these weights. It’s super easy and these weights aren’t hard to find.

2. Use a Drink Holder to Prevent Drink Spillages

You can put open cans and bottles full of delicious liquids in the underneath-the-stroller basket and endure the messiest spills all the time.

Or you can use a bottle holder instead to make sure no such accident ever happens again. Fortunately, there are sorts of online marketplaces that sell decent bottle holders on the cheap.

3. Use a Carabiner to Create Extra Room for Groceries

What if your baby stroller doesn’t have much basket room underneath? You can cram only so many things under there. But if you can get a little creative, you can create quite a bit of extra room on the stroller using a carabiner. All you need to do is get a carabiner, clip it onto the handlebar, and hang your bags or whatever else it might be there.

This a great idea lets you focus on your baby and the ride, but if there’s too many bags hanging from the carabiner, the stroller might tip over.

Ordinarily, weights stabilize things. But in this case, you’re placing extra weights at a high point, raising the center of gravity and destabilizing the pushchair. So, use your judgement to decide how much extra weight up there is reasonable.

4. Use an Elastic Leash to Restrain Your Baby’s Sippy Cup

If you’re like most parents, you hate having to run after some fast-flying sippy cup that little hands released because they thought it was fun. Luckily, there’s a way to make sure that this annoying this doesn’t happen anymore.

While researching for this post, I bumped into someone who invented a really effective elastic-style sippy cup leash. You can learn how to easily make a DIY elastic sippy cup leash here.

5. Use a Good Stroller Fan to Keep Your Baby Cool

Sometimes, the day gets really warm or hot, and that means an uncomfortable ride for your little loved one. One simple upgrade you can make to your baby stroller is to add a good stroller fan to it.

Related: Best Stroller Fans for Keeping Baby Cool in the Summer

There’s quite a few good portable stroller fans around and they don’t cost an arm and a leg. You can attach the small fan overhead or to the handlebars. But there are other ways to keep a baby cool in a stroller when summertime rolls around.

6. Slide Better Handle Grips onto the Stroller’s Handlebars

If you own a high-quality baby stroller with really good quality handlebars, skip this stroller hack for moms and dads. Many budget strollers come with cheap handlebar grips that wear out very soon. Others come with rubber grips that sort of hurt the hands, causing nasty blisters to the stroller pusher’s hands. Also, some grips get all dirty and grimy over time, detracting from the overall pushing experience.

Nothing enhances the stroller pushing experience quite like sliding new, foam-style replacement stroller grips onto the handlebars.

Good replacement foam stroller grips and removable and washable. Most importantly, high-quality replacement foam stroller grips deliver a really clean grip. They make you want to stroll around with your baby all the time, bonding with them better. Plus, proper grips make each ride more secure because your hands never ever slip off the handlebars, keeping your baby safe.

7. Use a Bike Lock to Discourage Stroller Thieves

Every city under the sun is home to hordes of really nice folks who like stealing baby strollers. There’s always some miscreant who’s made bike theft a full-time career.

With an angle grinder and dexterous hands that know how to put this mighty to good use, cutting a bike lock and stealing a bike takes minutes!

And it doesn’t matter whether you’ve secured your bike or baby stroller with a Sold Secure Bronze or even a Sold Secure Gold lock. A good stroller thieve gets the job done in a matter of minutes. To be fair, it might take the thief a second or two longer to steal a stroller secured with a really good bike lock (read Sold Secure Gold lock), but does this make any difference?

Here’s the good news!

If a thief chances upon two similar baby strollers, they’re more likely to steal the unsecured stroller than the bike lock-secured one. So, get a good bike lock and keep your expensive baby stroller secured at all times. It helps, to some extent. 

8. Doing a SUV Road Trip With Your Stroller? Secure it With a Bungee Cord

If you’re riding in a SUV with your kid and their stroller, you store the pushchair in the back, right? But some stroller types can really take up space, leaving your starved of room to store other necessities.

But if you have some bungee cord around, you can create a little more room in the SUV’s back. Fold the stroller and use the bungee cord to secure it to the vehicle’s backseat’s headrest. This will keep it secure and sitting upright throughout the trip.

9. Don’t Have a Stroller Fan? Use a Cooling Pad Instead

When the summer shows up and the stroller environment gets all warm and clammy, it’s time to turn on the stroller fan. But if you’ve yet to equip the stroller with this mini cooling system, you can always use a cooling pad.

A good cooling pad works for most of the major stroller brands. Just position the cooling pad under the seat and place the baby on it and off you go. There’s all kinds of good enough cooling pads on Amazon and other online stores.

You can use ice packs instead. However, ice packs melt after some time, which means they’re not a reliable way to cool your baby’s bum for really long summer rides.

10. Live in a Small Apartment? Hang the Store by the Door

In a small apartment, there’s one thing we all need more of — extra room. We need extra room for baby toys and other baby gear such as kids’ roller skates, kids’ rollerblades, kick scooters, and helmets.

Obviously, you can’t physically make your small apartment larger. But with some creativity, you definitely can create extra space. One way to do this is to attach a solid door hook that’s strong enough to support even the heaviest baby stroller.

Hang your stroller on this hook and voila! More space to store other baby items.

11. Use a Head Strap/Head Support Band to Keep Baby Head from Flopping

Good parents keep propping little floppy heads all the time after the baby falls asleep during a stroll. That’s not too much work for someone you love, but what if you could find a device that can render all that extra work unnecessary? A head strap helps you hold a kid’s head in one position so that the it stops from moving side to side.

12. Use PVC Pipe to Make a Stroller Handle Extender and Support One-handed Pushing

Ever find yourself wishing that your stroller’s handles were a little longer? You can give the stroller away and buy one with a higher handle height. Or you can use some PVC pipe, some elbow joints and a few other hardware supplies to lengthen the stroller’s handle.

The same goes for when you want to make an umbrella-style travel system that pushes with two hands a one-handed affair. I haven’t done this yet…because I my stroller’s handle height is where I want it, plus my stroller steers with one hand.

But I found a really educative video on how to use good old PVC pipe to extend your stroller’s handle and even make it possible to push with one hand one hand rather than two.

13. Use Snacks to Keep Baby Entertained in the Stroller

Babies sometimes get bored during strolls. And you need to find little creative ways to keep them busy while enjoying the ride more. So get a stroller snack tray, click it right in, and keep your baby happy throughout the ride. Be sure to order a snack tray that’s compatible with your stroller model. And of course, keep that tray full.

14. Stay Connect With the World With a Cell Phone Carrier/Holder

If you’re anything like me, strolling down forest trails and gravel roads is no excuse to stay disconnected with everyone else. A good mobile phone carrier on a stroller helps you to enjoy memorable adventures in the great outdoors with your baby while staying connected with your home, work, and everyone else who needs you.

15. Equip Stroller with Safety Lights for Evening Rides

Even if you never plan on doing nighttime strolls with your baby, adding safety lights to your stroller is never a bad idea. Adding colorful safety lights to your stroller increases your visibility so that drivers can spot you more easily.

Besides that, equipping your stroller with these lights sorts of spices things up for you and your little one, making you look like the coolest mom on the planet.

You can also use reflective tapes for the same safety benefits.

16. Hydrate Your Baby Without Stopping to Do So (Use a Bottle Sling)

Babies, like everyone else, need to stay sufficiently hydrated. And if you can attach a bottle sling to the stroller’s rain cover, you won’t need to stop to feed the baby. This little device positions the bottle within the child’s comfortable reach so that both of you can enjoy the ride more while doing less.

17. Increase Baby Comfort With a Stroller Board

A solid stroller board (buggy board) helps create additional room on your stroller. It’s a great way to keep an older child close while a younger sibling sits in the stroller seat. The older child (3-4 years) can walk some of the time and get on the wheeled board the rest of the time. With this board, you do less pushing, and nasty strangers judge you less because your older kiddo won’t be riding in the stroller the entire time.

18. Keep Muddy Stains Out of Your Carpet With Stroller Wheel Covers

The last thing you want is to stain your plush carpet with wet mud. Wheeling a damp, muddy stroller across the room to the balcony is pretty easy. What isn’t easy is mud stain removal from a thick pile carpet.

To prevent mud from getting into your house, cover those muddy stroller wheels with wheel covers. Don’t have wheel covers? No worries, use your shower caps instead, if they fit.

19. Have a Rain Cover or Umbrella on Hand Always

It’s going to rain at some point, and you can’t predict the weather every time. So, be sure to have an umbrella or rain cover ready for when you notice the first raindrop. If your stroller came with a nearly useless rain cover, take it and install a proper rain canopy. And if you live in a state that crawls with skeets some of the time, arm yourself with a stroller bug net.

20. Mark Stroller for Easy Identification

Disneyland is an awesome place for kids and parents. But when you’re exiting a ride or attraction, you suddenly learn you can’t find the damn stroller for the life of you. Your mind isn’t as nimble as it was getting in, plus the cast members moved things around and made it extremely to find one’s stroller.

Or an innocent parent ends up transporting their child on someone else’s stroller and leaving theirs behind. And that unlucky person is you! To prevent these rare but still possible scenarios, find a way to mark your stroller.

But how do mark a stroller for Disneyland? Here’s a few ideas to help you mark your stroller for easy identification at Disney:

  • You can use some fancy hot-pink duct tape to wrap the stroller’s handles.
  • You can also tie an extremely bright scarf on the handle. Tying a hot pink scarf on stroller handle works for me every time.
  • Type your family name on a colored paper, laminate it, punch holes in it, and hang it on the stroller. Also, find a way to attach these pieces to the handles.
  • And if the season allows it, wrap brightly colored battery-powered Christmas lights around the handles

21. Increase Stroller Wheel Grip With Zip Ties

Some strollers come with rubber wheels that grip the surface like no one’s business. But even the best rubber stroller wheels eventually wear out, and when they do, grip vanishes. Stroller wheels with zero grip are an stroller accident waiting to happen.

One way to make stroller wheels a little grippier is to use zip ties. Simply wrap zip ties around stroller wheels and trim the edges to increase the wheels’ traction. This way, you can ride your stroller on slick surfaces without a worry.

22. Use Color-coded Stickers to Make Things Easier for Everyone

If your hubby is anything like mine, he knows everything. And I mean everything. Including folding baby strollers do doesn’t know how to fold up! That’s where using stickers to label the instructions to follow come into play. He doesn’t need help, but help him anyway.

23. Use Old Shoe Organizers to Make DIY Cup Holders

Have old shoe organizers lying around? Don’t throw them when decluttering your home. Instead, get a pair of scissors and cut two pockets off of the shoe organizer. Then, attach some velcro strap to the each cup and attach each improvised stroller cup holder onto the top (on the inside) of the storage basket.

24. Use Tennis Grips to Repair Torn Stroller Handles

Even the finest stroller handles eventually get torn through constant friction between the hands and handle grips. If and when this happens to your stroller, you can do one of two things. You can either buy a new replacement handle grip. Or you can use some tennis grips to repair the worn spot and give the handles a new, grippy feel. See how one mom did it in this video.

Bonus Tip: Learn how to Ship a Stroller. If you ever need to sell a used stroller or give it away, here’s how to ship it.

Final Thoughts on Mom Hacks for Strollers

There’s many ways to upgrade and improve your baby stroller to make it work like the truly useful workhorse it should be for you and your little one.

While some of the tips presented here may have you spend a little money, others don’t require to spend a dime. Most importantly, you don’t need any kind of expertise or advanced tools to make it happen.

Did we leave out any stroller hack you feel we should have included? Tell us about in the comments box below.

Author: Esther Moni

I'm Esther Moni, a proud stay-at-home mom and a psychology graduate of the United States International University (USIU) . I hate it when anyone calls me a housewife, because what does housewife even mean? Being a mother of two babies and a pup, Bailey, as well as being Ricky's wife tires me to no end, but I still manage a smile at the end of it all. And when my boys aren't done doing mischief, I juggle writing a post on parenting or baby gear performance for this blog and running my little counselling office based out in Nairobi. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/esther.moni/">Visit my Facebook profile here</a>, and this is my <a href="https://ke.linkedin.com/in/esther-moni-3841b573/">LinkedIn profile</a>, and here's my <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKcVb3NNDrURDH8C0KiAE1g/">nascent youtube channel.

Esther Moni

I'm Esther Moni, a proud stay-at-home mom and a psychology graduate of the United States International University (USIU) . I hate it when anyone calls me a housewife, because what does housewife even mean? Being a mother of two babies and a pup, Bailey, as well as being a wife tires me to no end, but I still manage a smile at the end of it all. And when my boys aren't done doing mischief, I juggle writing a post on parenting or baby gear performance for this blog and running my little counselling office based out in Nairobi. Visit my Facebook profile here, and this is my LinkedIn profile, and here's my nascent youtube channel.

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