For $20, I Got a High Chair and a Mindset Shift

Plus things to cook, read, and buy

Our Ikea high chair, decorated for birthday breakfast. | Photo by Hillary Dixler Canavan

While I did plenty of planning ahead when it came to baby gear, I didn't buy a high chair in advance. I wanted to save the floor space in our small apartment till the last moment I had to give it up, but also I had sticker shock when it came to the price of the high chairs the parenting articles, influencers, and friends were recommending. I asked my pediatrician what he was doing with his daughter, who was only three months older than mine, and he said he got one from Ikea. So my husband and I decided we'd do that too. I am so glad in retrospect that we did. We got far more than just the satisfaction of a bargain out of it. We got a good high chair and a fantastic parenting lesson.

Let's start with the high chair part. The Ikea Antilop does what a high chair should: It provides a safe place for your baby to eat, while also relegating the inevitable mess from your table to the high chair's tray. It's also fantastically easy to clean, which, given that you'll eventually be using the high chair some five times a day between meals and snacks is perhaps the single most important thing about a high chair after safety. Nooks and crannies are hell when it comes to high chairs. Trapped food quickly becomes trapped nastiness. Along with not having many of those thanks to only being made of three pieces (legs, chair, table), the Antilop is easy to clean on a day-to-day basis with wipe downs. And for when a deep clean was necessary, I just hauled it into the shower for a proper scrubbing. I wouldn't have been able to do that with a fancy wooden one. Since it's so easy to disassemble and reassemble, it's also surprisingly portable.

One of the main promises of the upmarket high chairs is that their ergonomic design will support your feeding goals, and, implicitly, a happier, healthier child. The other key selling points of the highest-end high chairs are that they become toddler and little kid dining chairs, properly scaled so that they can easily reach a dining table. I knew if we stuck with the Antilop, I'd be using it for a shorter time period.

Worried about the ergonomics I didn't even realize mattered before I started researching high chairs, I bought some accessories from Etsy sellers like a back support pillow and a wooden footrest to make the Antilop more like the fancy chairs. We abandoned the footrest pretty quickly since my daughter didn't seem to care about it, and the pillow also became unnecessary as she got bigger. Since the Antilop is not adaptable, we switched to a booster seat on a dining chair when she got too big for the high chair. Even with the accessories I purchased plus the booster, the grand total was still far below the cost of a fancy chair. I am not a pediatrician nor a feeding therapist and this isn't medical advice but rather my two cents: If your child isn't having feeding issues, you might not need what the fancy high chairs are selling. 

Sticking to the more economical option despite hearing from nearly every article, influencer, and several parents in my orbit that the more expensive option is a "must-have" proved to be good practice for me. Despite my media literacy and deep familiarity with how to reach an intended audience, I found myself just as susceptible as any other new parent when it comes to messaging and marketing targeting my fears about somehow failing to do the very best for my child. (The very best, inevitably meaning buying something…something expensive.) Because of course it isn't just high chairs. It's the baby food makers that do the same thing as the food processor you already have, the Montessori play kits that aren't as exciting as a half-drunk water bottle, the orthopedist-endorsed toddler shoes that will only fit for a few months. I could go on forever with these kinds of products. 

Even after those first bleary-eyed months of parenthood, I'm still bombarded by messaging about expensive, your-precious-child-needs-this stuff. But these days, whenever I find myself tempted by the next must-have, I stop and think about our beloved Ikea high chair. It served us so well, we enjoyed great meals with it pulled up at our table, and it did its job. It was good enough. When it comes to parenting, I find that embracing this lesson is both transformational and an ongoing practice. I still struggle with believing it every moment, but I hold to this truth as a core value and recite it to myself like a mantra: Good enough is actually great.

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• Cook: Over in Table Chat, I've been dropping what I've been cooking for my family and asking for readers to share their own cooking itineraries for the week. Last week, I made kale sauce bucatini (from the MVP recipes list), always a winner.

• Read: On the family theme — nuclear family, found family — I finished Sally Rooney's latest novel, Intermezzo, this week. I love her writing, and Intermezzo digs more deeply into family dynamics than any of her previous books. To be honest, I’m still kind of emotionally hungover from this one.

• Buy: I shouted these out in Table Chat, too. I use these air fryer parchment paper liners to help make it even easier to clean up. Lately, I've been using them when I’m air frying tins of Trader Joe's Greek chickpeas with Parsley and Cumin and eating them on top of crusty bread or salad for an easy lunch.

• Cook: I made a vegan version of this delightfully simple NYT Cooking recipe for chickpeas with baby spinach by Martha Rose Shulman using water instead of chicken broth — it was great with warmed pita at a potluck.

• Read: Cookbook author Julia Turshen is launching a new series in her newsletter, Keep Calm & Cook On, where she's asking folks to keep logs of their lunches. I love food diaries like this, like the Grub Street Diet and Bon Appétit's The Receipt. And I've been thinking about asking some families to do a version of this for The New Family Table. Would you want to read about how a real family eats during a week? Maybe a week of dinners? Let me know in the comments!

• Buy: I took my daughter to a classmate's birthday party over the weekend that offered the kids books to take home instead of goodie bags. It was so generous, and I'm thinking about doing the same when it's my daughter's turn in the summer. It got me thinking about which books I'd want to include. Definitely Ramen for Everyone by Patricia Tanumihardja — not only does the book explore ramen ingredients and generational recipe keeping, it also addresses perfectionism and frustration. (H/t and TY to Snack Chat's Katie Okamoto for giving this book to Claire for her birthday. We obviously love it!)