I told my sister Freya that she was being paranoid. This was four years ago, she’d just had her son, and she was standing in her kitchen at two in the morning texting me a photo of a hat with ACTUAL BOBBLES on it asking me if it looked “too much” to put in a hospital bag. I said, and I remember this clearly because she ribs me about it regularly, “he’s not going to Everest, Freya, it’s a baby, not a Victorian chimney sweep.” I thought hats on newborns were something new parents did because they thought it was cute, like tiny sling bags John Lewis invented to upsell tonnes of pointless accessories nobody would ever use. Adorable for Instagram, but utterly pointless for anything else. That was my entire stance on the issue and I held it with all the confidence of someone who hadn’t actually ever been responsible for maintaining a newborn baby’s stable body temperature.
Then I had my daughter in a birthing centre where, no joke, it was colder than my kitchen at home.
A midwife called Bev put a hat on her within ninety seconds of her arrival before I’d properly even had a chance to look at her face, and I remember thinking “oh. Oh no, this isn’t trendy, this isn’t a fashion thing at all, is it?” Bev didn’t ask if I thought it was a good idea. She didn’t wait for my opinion on whether it matched her. She just put it on, swift and practical, like you’d put a lid on a pan of boiling pasta, and it was the first moment in which I realised I’d built up an entire opinion on newborn hats based on absolutely zero knowledge about newborns.
Why I was wrong about newborn hats, and why the reason actually surprised me
Here’s why I was wrong, and also why, when I found out why I was wrong, I felt kind of bad about having gotten got so judge-y about Freya’s_text at 2am_Google search history. Nobody tells you this before you have a baby, and this is the bit that made me feel properly silly for laughing at Freya’s legitimate question in the kitchen:
Newborn babies lose a significant proportion of their heat through their heads. Like, WAY more than adult humans do. It’s got a properly scientific term that involves absolute units of measurement, but it’s not proportional to adult ratios, hence why they need to retain extra heat that way. It’s not because it looks cute. It’s not because you’re a paranoid first time parent. They literally cannot maintain their body temperature without assistance, for the first few hours/days outside the womb because they’ve spent however long in the cosy consistent heat of the womb at 37 degrees, and will not have developed the necessary systems to self-regulate just yet. Like, at all. They are helpless against temperature flux without help, which hats immediately assist with.
The NHS advice and midwife guidance that I’ve looked at since is pretty consistent on this too, hats are recommended in particular for the first few hours and days, and then again outdoors or if the baby was born early or small, because they can’t generate as much body heat or hold on to it as efficiently as necessary. When I looked it up afterwards, annoyed that I was being judged by my newborn, half expecting to find “parental folklore – probably okay” scrawled at the bottom, it had legitency. There was physiological, newborn babies CAN NOT maintain their body temperature without assistance, physics clearly telling me my view on hats, espoused as it was with great confidence months before I had any personal stakes in the matter, was baloney. That actually got me down a bit.
What upset me wasn’t just that I was wrong. Every day I’m wrong about stuff. What upset me was HOW I was wrong. I’d assumed something was purely an aesthetic choice when it was genuinely and actually a requirement. I’d seen hats on baby’s in pictures, seen them on baby announcement cards and babygrams, seen them plastered across the front of parenting magazines whilst I sat scrolling sighing through waiting room magazines. Stupidly, the place my brain filed them under was “how to make babies look cute.” not “how to properly care for babies.” Never once did I question that there might actually be a physical reason, and Freud could analyse me all he likes but I knew Freya wasn’t asking me if that hat looked too much because she cared about how fashionable her baby looked, she asked me because SHE knew, instinctively, it was a functional choice and wanted to do the right thing and I laughed at her.
Let’s take a moment to talk about me circa-Oatly latte, because I want to be fair to past me for a second here. I don’t think I’m alone in this particular brain-fail. I genuinely believe people incorrectly shelve newborn hats as “things new parents do for fun” because there’s SO MUCH STUFF THAT NEW parents do buy for FUN when they bring their babies home. The babiesgrows that they’ll wear once on the way home in that first outfit before they’re swapped for hospital gear. The cute hats and mittens sold together that will never match anything the baby actually wears. Blankets with idiosyncratic stitches your neighbour think are “cutesy” but actually achieve nothing except make babies feel like bumper cars. We get so cynical about all of it that parents buy unnecessarily cute clothes and baby necessities, that hats gets lost in the noises. Except it’s the one item OF ALL THAT STUFF THAT’S ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING USEFUL, and I accidentally threw it in a bucket with “totally bullshit adult decisions.”
The caveat, where it actually starts getting complicated, because y’know, it’s not babies-all-the-time
The reason I had to qualify that above paragraph with “for the first few hours/days” and “outdoors” is because now we have to get into where I irritated myself all over again by learning things I’d previously been quite adamant about. Once we got home and my daughter’s temperature had settled, and we were in our own regularly heated house, I had to completely reverse my thinking on hats because although they were necessary before, they suddenly became something to take off and monitor because – guess what – infants have been linked with increased risks during sleep if they’re covered too much and overheated.
I got this side of it from another health visitor called Priya who was round when my daughter was about a week old and caught me napping, because I’d still been in my “blankets AND hats are vital” phase and left a hat on her during a nap. Priya just kind of said “you can take that off now love, she’s clearly not cold. And this room is actually bloody lovely and warm,” and stared at the radiator as if it personally insulted her. I felt a flash of defensiveness I’ve grown accustomed to over the last few years, the same feeling I get when someone explains that vegan cooking isn’t actually about ethics and then spent the next five minutes being wrong on two separate issues.
So the frustratingly honest truth is that, like a lot of “what should I do with my newborn” questions, it actually depends. On the temperature of the room. On whether they’re indoors or out. Not on your gut instinct as to whether Baby is vue. As soon as you leave the hospital, and your baby has settled and registered their temperature as being “normal” to their little bodies, a hat isn’t actually serving the same function it was immediately post birth. The biggest anchor for that is sleep. Once your baby is home and in safe temperatures, hats during sleep indoors are actually contrary to guidance.
We have to caveat that with the big “BABY WHY” that all parents will one day think at their baby, which is that hat IS helping to keep them cool. It’s not that they don’t need regulating, but hats keep babies too cool UNLESS you’re indoors and they’re sleeping. Then it becomes a factor in pushing them over the edge into being too warm. The Lullaby trust are great on this actually and make the guidance super clear – baby hats are not recommended for indoors sleep because adding a hat to blankets and sheets in a temperature regulated house is far more likely to push them over into too hot than too cold, and too hot comes with a whole host of risks with regards safe sleep that hats were originally protecting you from.
So, no, hats are not needed all the bloody time. Indoor hats are specifically not recommended for sleep because they then become another layer. They’re magical for the first few hours after birth where they’re combating your baby losing heat quickly after the womb. Outdoors they’re clearly still necessary. If you’re in a warm home and your baby has settled, hats are perfectly fine provided you’re not putting them on for sleep times. It’s science. It’s actually annoyingly reasonable once you get past the “WAIT BUT DO THEY NEED ONE ALL THE TIME? ?” portion of your newborn journey.
What I sort of appreciate about this particular infant conundrum is it’s not frivolous new parents being overly specific because they can. Actually, it’s the complete opposite. Pediatricians and infant care experts are specific about hats being taken off indoors because it can swing too easily from preventing one issue to causing another. You can undercool a baby by not having them wear a hat, but you can also overheat them by keeping one on too long once they’re home. That doesn’t apply to everything else you’ll buy, which I think is the bit I really connected with. A babygrow isn’t suddenly going to overheat your baby if they wear it to bed. Hats are special because they both prevent and cause something actionable. Completely ruining my “had it all figured out” adult ego.
