What do newborns wear in summer to avoid melting completely

My first catastrophic error as a father was a pair of matching linen blend cardigans. It was mid-August, the temperature inside our third-floor London flat was hovering somewhere around the legal limit for a sauna, and I was holding two screaming, red-faced twins who felt physically akin to freshly baked potatoes. I had dressed them in long sleeves, thick socks, and those ludicrous cardigans because someone, somewhere in the nine months prior, had terrifed me with the information that babies lose heat quickly and must be kept warm at all costs.

As I sat there, sweat pooling in the small of my back while Maya wailed at a pitch that I'm fairly sure disturbed local wildlife, I realised the entire premise was flawed. Yes, babies get cold, but in the middle of a British heatwave when the tarmac is melting outside the Co-op, wrapping them up like tiny Arctic explorers is bordering on cruelty.

The problem is that you're bombarded with rules about temperature from the second they hand you this fragile, squishy human. You spend your nights frantically Googling what to put them in, terrified of getting it wrong. I spent the first three weeks of their lives constantly touching their feet, panicking that they were freezing, and subsequently burying them under more fabric until they looked like heavily sweating fabric burritos.

The great pram greenhouse disaster

Before we discuss what you should actually put on their bodies, we've to talk about the pram, because this is where I made my second most egregious error. You see the sun glaring down, you look at your pale, fragile newborn who isn't allowed to wear sunscreen yet, and your protective instinct kicks in. For me, this meant taking a massive muslin cloth and draping it entirely over the hood of the pram to create a nice, shady cave for Isla to sleep in while we walked to the park.

I thought I was being incredibly clever, a real pioneer of modern fatherhood, until I peaked under the fabric ten minutes later. The air that hit my face felt like I had just opened an oven door to check on a roast.

It turns out that throwing any kind of blanket over a pram completely obliterates air circulation. A health visitor with a deeply unimpressed expression later explained to me that doing this creates a greenhouse effect, causing the temperature inside the pram to skyrocket to dangerous levels in a matter of minutes. I felt entirely foolish. Instead of building them a shady torture chamber, the much better approach is to simply use the built-in pram shade, stick to the shadowy side of the street, and attach one of those ridiculous clip-on battery fans that look like they belong on a market stall but will actually save your sanity.

I categorically dismiss the idea of baby sunglasses, by the way, as you'll spend four hours trying to strap them to a head that has the structural integrity of a water balloon, only for them to instantly pull them off and throw them in a puddle.

Synthetics are the enemy of peace

Once I finally stopped trying to boil my children alive in the pram, I had to face the reality of their wardrobe. If you look closely at the labels of the incredibly cute, heavily branded baby outfits gifted to you by well-meaning relatives, you'll find a horrifying amount of polyester. Putting a newborn in polyester during the summer is functionally identical to wrapping them in cling film.

I'm reasonably sure babies don't have functional sweat glands yet, or at least that's what my GP muttered to me while inspecting a rather aggressive bout of heat rash on Maya's neck. Because they can't sweat properly, they rely entirely on the air hitting their skin to cool down. If they're wearing a synthetic blend, that heat just bounces right back into their little bodies, resulting in a screaming infant covered in tiny red bumps that will make you feel like the worst parent in the history of the world.

The only thing that actually worked for us was pure, unadulterated organic cotton. We had this one Short Sleeve Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit from Kianao that practically became a uniform. It was ribbed, which meant I could stretch it over their massive, wobbly heads without causing a dislocation, and it was genuinely breathable. Maya practically lived in the sage green one for two months straight, entirely unbothered by the heat, whereas Isla managed to stain hers with something that looked suspiciously like pureed carrot despite only consuming milk at the time. It's easily the most hardworking item of clothing we owned, surviving endless washes at 40 degrees without turning into a misshapen rag.

If you're looking to build a wardrobe that won't make your child miserable, I highly suggest checking out Kianao's organic baby clothes, purely because they seem to understand that babies need to breathe more than they need to look like miniature investment bankers in stiff collars.

The neck test is the only test that matters

Here's a piece of information that would have saved me roughly forty hours of sleep deprivation: checking a baby's hands or feet to see if they're cold is a complete waste of time. Their circulatory systems are still largely a work in progress, meaning all the blood is busy keeping their vital organs functioning and entirely ignoring their extremities.

I used to touch Isla's icy little fingers in the middle of a warm July afternoon and immediately panic, throwing another blanket over her. She would then wake up furious and drenched in sweat. The only reliable way to check their temperature is to shove two fingers down the back of their neck or flat against their chest. If it feels hot and sticky, they're overdressed. If it feels warm and dry, they're fine. If it feels cold, which is incredibly rare in the middle of summer unless you live in a commercial meat freezer, then you can add a layer.

The nighttime temperature mathematics

Putting a baby to sleep in the summer involves a level of mathematical calculation that I just wasn't prepared for. We had this digital room thermometer—anxiety in the shape of a glowing plastic egg—that would aggressively change colour depending on the room temperature. When the room hit 25 degrees, it glowed a furious, angry red, practically screaming at me that I was failing as a father.

You find yourself staring at confusing charts about TOG ratings (a measurement of thermal resistance that I still don't fully understand, though it sounds intensely scientific) trying to figure out if a 0.5 TOG sleep sack requires a short-sleeve bodysuit underneath or just a nappy.

The reality is deeply messy and requires absolute guesswork. During the peak heatwave, when the bedroom felt like a tropical terrarium, we abandoned sleep sacks entirely. They slept in just their nappies, splayed out like tiny starfish. When it dropped back to a normal British summer temperature (mildly damp and hovering around 21 degrees), we put them in a thin short-sleeve bodysuit and a 0.5 TOG sack.

We did own the Infinite Rainbow Bamboo Baby Blanket, which was gifted to us. It's a perfectly fine, deeply soft piece of fabric, and the little white rainbows on the khaki background are visually inoffensive to stare at at 4 am. But let's be totally honest: during a proper heatwave, it spent more time draped over the nursing chair than on the actual babies because putting a blanket over any living creature in that heat felt sadistic. It's lovely for a mildly breezy September afternoon, but in August, it was relegated to being a very soft mop for spilled milk.

A brief detour into the boot of the car

If you think your house is hot, wait until you've to put a newborn into a car seat. Infant car seats are essentially heavily insulated foam pods designed to survive an impact, which means they're utterly brilliant at trapping heat.

I once took Maya out of her car seat after a twenty-minute drive to the supermarket and her entire back was soaked in sweat. She looked like she had just finished a spin class. The trick we eventually learned was to pre-cool the car by running the air conditioning for five minutes before we even put them in, and dressing them in the absolute bare minimum—usually just a single light bodysuit.

We genuinely ended up using another blanket we had, the Fox Bamboo Baby Blanket, to fix a completely different car problem. Because you can't use those stick-on window shades on every single window, the sun was constantly blazing directly onto Isla's face. I ended up rolling the window down, trapping a corner of the bamboo blanket in the glass, and rolling it back up to create a makeshift curtain. It worked brilliantly to block the UV rays, though I'm fairly certain that wasn't the intended use when the designers spent months developing the hypoallergenic bamboo weave.

Embracing the state of undress

The hardest lesson I had to learn about summer parenting was only letting go of my own aesthetic expectations. I had visions of taking the girls to the park in matching floral rompers and cute little sun hats. The reality was two babies sitting in the shade wearing nothing but their nappies, looking slightly disgruntled while I aggressively fanned them with a piece of junk mail.

Stop Googling "baby too hot" at 3 am, pack away the thick knitted blankets your aunt spent six months making, and just let them exist in a single, breathable layer. If you want to make your life infinitely easier, grab a few reliable, lightweight pieces and accept that summer with a newborn is largely about survival.

Ready to ditch the polyester and dress your child in something that won't make them miserable? Check out Kianao's organic cotton collection and save yourself the stress of heat rash.

The messy reality of summer dressing (FAQ)

What's a TOG rating anyway, and do I need to care?

I spent weeks staring at TOG charts on the internet, which is a fantastic way to slowly lose your mind. Basically, it's just a measure of how thick a sleeping bag is.

• 0.2 TOG is basically a single sheet of tissue paper for when your house feels like an oven.
• 0.5 TOG is a very light t-shirt material for a standard warm night.
• 1.0 TOG is for when the British summer inevitably breaks and it starts raining for three weeks straight.

Can I put sunscreen on my newborn?

My GP looked at me like I was a complete idiot when I asked this at our six-week check. The short answer is no.

• Babies under six months have skin that's far too thin and sensitive to absorb the chemicals in sunscreen.
• If you put it on them, you're practically asking for a horrific rash.
• You just have to treat them like vampires and keep them entirely in the shade. It’s annoying, but it works.

Why are my baby's hands freezing when it's thirty degrees out?

Because their bodies are terrible at distributing blood. When we first brought the twins home, their hands were icy little claws despite the flat being sweltering. It just takes a few months for their circulation to figure out how to reach the ends of their arms and legs. Ignore the hands; check the back of the neck.

Do they really need to wear a hat if we're in the shade?

This is a source of constant debate in our house. My stance is that if you're completely in the shade, the hat is just trapping heat on the one part of their body (their head) where they honestly release it. We only ever wrestled a wide-brimmed sun hat onto them if we physically had to walk through direct sunlight to get from the car to a building. Otherwise, let their bald little heads breathe.

How do you dress them for an air-conditioned supermarket?

This is the ultimate trap. You dress them for the blistering heat outside, then you walk into a Tesco that's being refrigerated to preserve the dairy aisle, and suddenly they're freezing. I used to just keep a spare long-sleeve organic cotton onesie shoved in my back pocket. I wouldn't even take their short-sleeve outfit off; I'd just aggressively stretch the spare onesie over whatever they were currently wearing until we got back to the car. It wasn't elegant, but it stopped the crying.