The End of Humiliating Baby Shower Games (And What to Do Instead)

Five years ago, I stood in a drafty village hall in Surrey, holding a plastic cup of warm sparkling wine, watching my sister-in-law unwrap a massive ball of clingfilm while wearing a blindfold. Someone shoved a disposable nappy under my nose. Inside was a smeared, brown, lumpy substance. "Guess the chocolate bar!" a woman named Carol shouted at me. I think it was a crushed Twirl, but the sheer visceral horror of the moment permanently rewired my brain. I politely declined, retreated to a corner by the emergency exit, and wondered how celebrating a new life had morphed into an episode of a low-budget torture program.

The biggest myth in the history of human reproduction isn't the so-called glowing second trimester—it’s the baffling idea that pregnant women inherently desire to be publicly humiliated. with traditional baby shower games, the bar is completely on the floor. I'm fairly sure cortisol crosses the placenta, though I slept through most of A-level biology, but it seems entirely logical that making a heavily pregnant woman guess her own expanding girth with a piece of string isn't doing anyone's stress levels any favours. My health visitor vaguely muttered something once about keeping maternal anxiety low in the third trimester, which I immediately interpreted as a medical mandate to ban any activity involving measuring tapes or forced dancing.

The great myth of maternal humiliation

I don't know who invented the traditional baby shower, but I suspect it was someone who deeply resented their friends having a nice Saturday afternoon. It turns the whole afternoon into a bizarre baby show where the mother-to-be is the main exhibit, prodded and poked while desperately trying to maintain a polite smile over a plate of tiny sandwiches.

You invite your smartest, most interesting friends over, and instead of having a nice chat about the impending doom of their free time, you force them to drink apple juice out of a plastic baby bottle. It makes absolutely no sense. If you were hosting a dinner party, you wouldn't make your guests race to put a tiny sock on a doll while blindfolded, so why do we do it when someone is gestating?

And let's not even talk about the blind baby food tasting game, which is just an elaborate way to make grown adults gag on pureed peas.

Activities that don't require apologizing later

When my wife was pregnant with our twin girls, we essentially banned anything that required a timer. Instead, if you want a baby shower game that doesn't make people look at their watches, you've to pivot from 'frantic competition' to 'mildly sentimental tasks you can do while holding a sausage roll.'

One genuinely brilliant thing my sister organised was a late-night nappy station. She bought a massive box of eco-friendly nappies and left a pile of permanent markers on a table. The instruction was simply to write a message on the outside of the nappy for us to read at 3 am. Let me tell you, when you're standing in a dark nursery, covered in an inexplicable amount of bodily fluids, questioning every life choice that led to this moment, pulling out a nappy that says "At least you're not at work, mate" in your best friend's terrible handwriting is a lifeline. It's the only thing that stopped me from weeping onto a changing mat.

Another entirely acceptable activity is the time capsule. Give everyone a bit of nice card and ask them to write down what they think the baby will be like, what the world will look like in eighteen years, or just a piece of advice that isn't completely useless. You seal it all in a box and hand it over. It requires zero athleticism, nobody is blindfolded, and guests can do it quietly in the corner while judging the playlist.

Browse our collection of baby shower gifts that won't end up in a landfill within a week.

A brief note on prizes that avoid the bin

If you absolutely insist on having winners and losers at this gathering, you need to rethink the prize situation. I've a drawer in my kitchen filled with cheap plastic trinkets, scented tealights that smell like toilet cleaner, and miniature bottles of hand sanitiser from various events. It’s an ecological nightmare.

If you're going to hand out a prize, make it something the person will actually take home and use, or something they can immediately gift back to the parents. The one thing I absolutely loved from our own shower—and the thing I now aggressively buy for everyone else—is the Organic Cotton Baby Blanket Calming Gray Whale Pattern. It's properly lovely. The double-layer organic cotton is so ridiculously soft that I've genuinely considered using it as a scarf, and the grey whale print somehow manages to look chic rather than looking like an explosion in a cartoon factory. It's without a doubt my favourite thing we own, mostly because it has survived two toddlers dragging it through various puddles in the park and it still washes up perfectly.

Alternatively, if you want to be brutally, aggressively practical with your prizes, you could hand out a Walrus Silicone Plate. It's got this suction base that's supposed to stop a toddler from launching their dinner at your face. It’s just okay as a shower gift, if I’m entirely honest—handing someone weaning equipment before the baby is even born is a bit like giving someone a snow shovel in July. It reminds them of the chaotic, pasta-throwing phase that’s hurtling toward them, but it's undeniably useful once they actually get there.

Or, if the guests want to pool their money for a prize that doubles as the main event gift, the Wooden Baby Gym | Wild Western Set is brilliant. It has a wooden buffalo and a little crocheted horse. It avoids the cardinal sin of baby gear, which is flashing lights and aggressive synthetic noises that make you want to relocate to a silent monastery.

The acceptable face of competition

If you've a crowd that gets twitchy if they aren't competing for something, there are ways to manage this safely. Gift bingo is entirely tolerable. When the parent-to-be sits down to open the mountain of tiny socks and muslins, hand out blank bingo cards. Guests write down what they think is in the bags, and cross them off as they go. It gives people something to do with their hands during the inevitable forty-five minutes of saying "oh, how cute" at fifty different variations of a white bodysuit.

The clothespin game is also fine, mostly because it requires no setup. You clip a wooden peg to everyone's shirt when they arrive. If someone catches you saying the word "baby", they take your peg. The person with the most pegs at the end wins. It’s entirely passive, quietly vindictive, and deeply satisfying for the competitive guests who want to lurk by the buffet table listening for slip-ups.

Ultimately, the secret to surviving a modern baby shower is to lower the volume on everything. You don't need a frantic itinerary. You just need some good food, a comfortable chair for the pregnant person, and a mutual agreement that nobody will be forced to eat anything out of a nappy.

Ready to upgrade your gifting strategy? Check out our full range of sustainable essentials before your next shower.

Questions I get asked about this nonsense

How many activities should we actually plan?
Two. Three if you're feeling incredibly ambitious and your guests haven't started looking longingly at the door. Honestly, anything more than that feels like a corporate team-building retreat. People just want to eat cake and talk to each other. Give them one passive activity (like the nappy messages) and maybe one actual game, and then let them be.

Do we've to open gifts in front of everyone?
Absolutely not. My wife flatly refused to do this because the idea of performing fifty consecutive faces of genuine surprise sounded exhausting. We just stacked them on a table, thanked everyone profusely, and opened them later on the sofa while watching television. Some older relatives might grumble about this, but you can just blame it on pregnancy fatigue. It's a bulletproof excuse.

Are male guests supposed to play along too?
If you've invited us, yes, we're trapped there just like everyone else. Co-ed showers are much more common now, which is great because it acknowledges that fathers exist and will also be dealing with the impending sleep deprivation. Just don't make us drink out of the tiny plastic bottles either. It's demeaning for everyone involved.

What's the best alternative to a traditional guest book?
Ask everyone to bring their favourite childhood book instead of a greeting card, and write their message on the inside cover. Cards get thrown away during the first panicked tidy-up of the house, but we still read the copy of 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea' that my mate left us. Plus, it jumpstarts the nursery library without you having to figure out what children seriously like reading.

Is it okay to serve alcohol at a baby shower?
I'm firmly of the belief that if you're asking people to give up their Saturday afternoon to look at breast pumps, you should offer them a glass of wine. Obviously, have excellent non-alcoholic options for the pregnant person and anyone driving, but forcing the entire room into solidarity sobriety usually just makes everyone leave an hour earlier.