This past week, I was visiting Canada’s Wonderland with my older kids and noticed something that I wouldn’t have noticed before.
Parents were pushing around their baby strollers with a blanket covering baby from the sun. The blankets were thin to provide shade for a sleeping baby.
But doing so can be very dangerous! Thin blankets, including muslin cotton, can create a furnace-like heat for the baby because of poor circulation.
“It gets extremely hot down in the pram, something like a thermos,” Svante Norgren, a pediatrician at a Stockholm children’s hospital, told a Swedish newspaper.
“There is also bad circulation of the air and it is hard to see the baby with a cover over the pram.”
To test this claim, a Swedish newspaper did their own experiment. After leaving a stroller outside, uncovered, for 90 minutes, the stroller reached a temperature of 22 degrees.
But a stroller with a thin covering reached a temperature of 34 degrees in just 30 minutes, and after an hour, that temperature rose to 37.
“The results of this study do not surprise me, and illustrate the dangers of excessively covering during hot weather,” Dr. Hamed Khan, of London’s St. George’s hospital, told The Huffington Post UK.
Babies and children are very sensitive to heat, and their bodies can actually heat up three to five times faster than adults. In addition, children don’t sweat as much as adults do, which means they also can’t cool down as quickly either.
Children under the age of one should be kept out of direct sunlight to prevent skin damage and dehydration, advises the Government of Canada. A safer way to do this is to attach a parasol to your baby’s stroller, rather than use a covering.
