The Day I Realized My Baby's Nursery Was Basically a Loud Nightclub

I was sitting on the itchy wool rug in our old apartment, wearing my husband’s college sweatshirt that had a very distinct, crusted-over spit-up stain right on the collarbone. It was raining outside. I was clutching a mug of French roast that had gone cold like, three hours ago. Leo was four months old, lying on his back on the floor, and my husband Dave was frantically tapping his phone screen, determined to prove that having a baby hadn't entirely killed our cool factor.

Dave was trying to search for this specific lo-fi mix by an artist we loved. He has these ridiculously large thumbs and literally fumbled and typed "j baby" into SoundCloud before sighing heavily and correcting it to "dj baby benz." Which, fun fact, is apparently what the indie-pop singer Clairo called herself in her early days before she blew up on the internet. We thought we were so incredibly edgy. We found the mix. We turned on the Bluetooth speaker. We placed it right next to Leo’s tiny, perfect little head.

We were vibing. The bass was thumping, the apartment felt like a trendy coffee shop instead of a messy nursery, and for exactly twelve minutes, I felt like a human being who still understood pop culture.

Delusional.

The doctor appointment that broke my brain

Three days later, we had Leo's four-month checkup. Our doctor, Dr. Miller, who always wears these incredibly intimidating thick tortoiseshell glasses that make me feel like I’m failing a pop quiz, was examining his ears. I don't even remember how we got on the topic, but I think I casually bragged about our eclectic musical tastes. I was expecting a gold star for not playing baby shark on repeat.

Instead, she looked at me over the rim of her glasses and asked where we keep the speaker.

When I told her it was right next to him on the floor, I swear the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. She started explaining that baby ear canals are basically tiny megaphones. Because their heads are so small, the sound pressure gets trapped and amplified, meaning what sounds like a chill, normal volume to my thirty-something ears is actually blasting their developing eardrums into the next dimension.

She threw out some number, I think she said 50 decibels? Which to me means absolutely nothing. Is 50 decibels a jet engine? Is it a whisper? Is it the sound of me crying in the Target parking lot? Apparently, it's roughly the volume of a quiet conversation. Or a light rain shower. And here we were playing bass-heavy indie beats at what felt like club volume directly into my infant's ear.

Oh god. The guilt was instantaneous and suffocating.

I remember just sitting there in the sterile doctor's office, my cold coffee completely forgotten in my bag, realizing I had essentially turned my baby's play space into a raging discotheque. I was SO sure I was doing something good for his brain, exposing him to music and rhythm and culture, but really I was just being an idiot with a Sonos speaker.

What he was actually doing while we blasted music

The ironic part is that during our little living room rave, Leo wasn't even paying attention to the music. He was entirely focused on his Kianao Wooden Rainbow Play Gym. I've to tell you about this thing because it's literally the only reason I got to sit down during his first six months of life.

I originally bought it because I was deep in my millennial sad-beige-mom aesthetic phase and I firmly believed that primary colors would ruin the feng shui of my apartment. I wanted wood. I wanted natural. But surprisingly, the kid actually loved it. There's this little wooden elephant hanging from the A-frame that he would just stare at with intense, unblinking concentration. It’s supposed to help with depth perception and spatial awareness or whatever, but honestly, it just bought me twenty uninterrupted minutes to drink my coffee and pretend I had my life together. I still have it packed away in the attic because I'm way too sentimental to donate it. Every time I see it, I think of him kicking his little legs, totally ignoring the Clairo mix we were so proud of.

Anyway, the point is, he didn't need the loud music to be stimulated. The play gym was doing all the heavy lifting.

Oh, and he was wearing one of those Kianao organic cotton sleeveless bodysuits that day. They're... fine. Look, it's a onesie. It’s super soft, and the organic cotton is genuinely great if your kid gets those weird, dry red eczema patches on their chest like Leo always did. But I definitely threw it in the dryer on high heat once by accident and it shrank to the size of a doll shirt. So, you've to genuinely pay attention to the laundry instructions and air dry it, I guess. But it covers the diaper and doesn't irritate his neck, which is really all you need from baby clothes.

Why the world is suddenly too damn loud

After that doctor's appointment, I became completely unhinged about volume. You end up downloading one of those free decibel meter apps that are probably stealing your data just so you can walk around your living room testing the volume of the dishwasher and the dog barking and realizing that literally everything in your house is a hazard to your child's eardrums which is just exhausting.

And don't even get me started on baby toys. Why does every plastic toy from my mother-in-law need to have a speaker that plays a distorted, chaotic version of "Old MacDonald" at 90 decibels? Who engineered this? Do they hate parents?

Never put adult headphones on a baby, obviously.

We started pivoting hard to silent toys. Things that didn't require batteries or volume control. Because he was right on the cusp of that horrible, drooly, miserable early teething phase, I had handed him the Kianao Panda Teether. That thing saved my absolute sanity. He was a feral chewer. Just gnawing on his own fists, my fingers, the edge of his blanket. The teether is food-grade silicone and has this little bamboo detail that he would just attack aggressively while Dave and I sat in total, paranoid silence, terrified to turn the TV on.

If you're also desperately trying to purge your house of loud, battery-operated plastic things that are slowly destroying your hearing and your peace, check out Kianao's sensory play collection for things that are genuinely quiet.

Fast forward to the big kid years

The funny thing about obsessing over your first baby's hearing is that by the time they get older, they end up controlling the noise anyway. Maya is 7 now, and Leo is 4. Our house is never, ever quiet. Maya has an iPad and is currently obsessed with TikTok dances, which means she's constantly playing—wait for it—Clairo songs.

Full circle.

She walks around the kitchen blasting the exact same songs Dave and I were trying to play for Leo all those years ago. Except now, I'm the one yelling "TURN IT DOWN, IT'S TOO LOUD!" while Dave just laughs into his coffee.

I still worry about their hearing. I still make them wear those giant, noise-canceling earmuffs when we go to outdoor concerts or fireworks, even though Maya complains that they ruin her outfit. I guess the anxiety never really goes away, it just changes shape. You go from worrying about your Bluetooth speaker placement to worrying about their iPad volume limits. It's just a constant state of low-level panic.

Parenting.

Before we get into the messy, frantic questions you're probably Googling at 2 AM while staring at your sleeping baby, make sure you look at Kianao's sustainable baby gear to fill your nursery with things that won't accidentally deafen your child.

The messy questions about baby ears and music

Can I play normal music for my kid or am I stuck with lullabies?

Oh god, no, you don't have to listen to lullabies forever. I'd have lost my mind. Dr. Miller told me it's totally fine to play whatever music you like—indie, pop, 90s hip hop, whatever. The genre doesn't matter at all to their brain. It's purely about the volume and the distance. Just keep the speaker across the room, not in the crib, and keep it at a level where you could comfortably talk over it without raising your voice. If you've to shout to your partner, it's too loud for the baby.

What the hell is a decibel anyway?

I still barely understand this, to be completely honest. From what I gather, it's just how they measure sound intensity. But it's not a straight line—it's logarithmic or something? Which means 60 decibels isn't just a little louder than 50 decibels, it's like, a lot louder. Basically, 50 decibels is a quiet suburb or a humming refrigerator. That's your target. Anything over 60 or 70 for long periods is a big nope for tiny ears.

Did I ruin my baby's hearing by going to a loud cafe?

I panicked about this too! We took Leo to a busy brunch spot when he was like two months old and someone dropped a tray of dishes and I practically threw myself over the stroller like a bodyguard. Short bursts of loud noise, while startling and annoying, usually aren't going to cause permanent damage. It's the prolonged, continuous exposure to loud noise (like a sound machine blasting right next to their head all night) that pediatricians really worry about. You didn't ruin your baby.

Is a sound machine honestly safe?

Yeah, but you've to be smart about it. We were definitely using our white noise machine completely wrong at first. You're supposed to put it at least seven feet away from the crib. Seven feet! We had ours sitting on the railing of the bassinet. Crap. Move it across the room, turn the volume down to that magical 50 decibel mark, and just use it to muffle the sound of you stepping on a squeaky floorboard, not to drown out a jet engine.