Greg Allen is a father who writes Daddy Types. His site collects useful gear, advice, news and resources for all dads, but especially new ones. Eventually, he hopes Daddy Types’ influence will extend beyond dads, to improve the lot of mothers–and kids–too.

As I was reading over some of my older posts, I kept thinking that some of the best comments weren’t mine, but a reader’s. (shocker, I know). I thought I’d just pull some juicy quotes from various threads, and let people link through if they want to. Sort of a “lessons learned” kind of thing. Here goes:

• “Friends don’t let friends buy Precious Moments.” When I saw that someone (I’ll never know who) clicked through from Daddy Types and bought a rickety, plastic Precious Moments bed from Amazon, I took some heat for making fun of it. One reader complained, “I guess I just don’t understand why you have to be so judgmental about what other people are buying. Can’t you just accept that everyone has different styles?” A debate about status symbols and elitism prompted another reader to chime in: “I have encountered this sort of thing a lot with my in-laws. If I happen to like what they don’t I am a snob, but if the like what they like, it’s just their taste.”
• Parent-founded companies vs the Baby Industrial Complex: Some of the best innovation in kid-related design is coming from fed up parents. “You know the drill. ‘I wanted [check all that apply] clothes/ furniture/ toys/ advice book/ blanket/ something to help me do _____, but everything I found was bland/ crap/ homogeneous/ cutesy/ over-sentimentalized/ outdated stereotype-reinforcing/ shoddy/ mass-produced/ environmentally destructive/ aesthetically offensive, so I decided to do it myself.’”
• Pick your battles I’m much more of a design snob than my wife; we decide a lot of stuff for the kid together, but I’m lucky that she’s usually fine going with my suggestions. That’s not always the case, though. And if you sometimes have some big disagreements on design for the kid, it seems wise to me to pick your battles carefully, and just go along with some things sometimes. Like the nursery, or like if your wife insists on putting a headband on your bald kid, you might suggest one with a camouflage bow…
• Choosing function vs fashion With dads getting ever more involved in baby-raising and baby-related design decisions, men are going to run into awkward situations where a baby gear company’s making a clear fashion play to the mother. Like the Kate Spade edition stroller from Maclaren, which fails one Daddy Types test: a baby product doesn’t necessarily have to be designed for dads; it just shouldn’t be designed to alienate them.

You guys have it so easy When I was an expecting parent, we didn’t go to sweet online shops like Design Public, which carried a variety of well-designed baby stuff. Because there wasn’t any. No shops, no lines. Just David Netto. And if white lacquer wasn’t your thing, well, too bad. Why, to get nursery furniture we liked, we had to make our own changing tables out of steel tool carts.

And we had to get up to change the channel, too.

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