How to create the safest baby magazine?

March 10, 2010 1:25 AM

I would like to make a baby magazine that is the safest and least toxic for babies. Any suggestions?

I've posted a similar question before, and a great solution was to create a cloth book, but now I am thinking about creating a magazine as cheaply as possible, but willing to spend more to ensure that it is the least toxic for the baby.

The reason for a magazine format is so that there is a new story regularly and babies and rip out and crinkle the pages (as they enjoy doing), and even if they put it in their mouths, it won't pose a toxicity problem (maybe a choking hazard though)

What I've come across so far:

Cloth books- Pros: Ink and cloth and binding come in different colors and the whole production can be tightly controlled and sourced very specificially
Cons: Very expensive and slow to produce

Magazine with recycled and chlorine free paper, using as much soy based inks as possible
Pros: Cheaper to produce than cloth, but still expensive relative to a normal magazine.
Cons: All the inks used won't be soy based- there will still be petroleum in some of the colors. Paper may still have chemicals inside.

Your thoughts? Thanks!

posted by JiffyQ to media & arts (10 answers total)

For what it's worth, I believe soy is one of the more common allergies among infants. Not sure if miniscule amounts of soy printing ink would be enough to cause much of a problem, but natural != nontoxic, necessarily.
posted by Bardolph at 3:03 AM on March 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

Magazines are generally concerned about keeping production costs low. Advertisers don't care what your magazine is printed on and are unwilling to pay premium unless your magazine absolutely generates return on investment. Offset the cost to the advertisers and you'll find very little in ad revenue.

Customers, reinforce cheap production costs and complain about the percentage of advertisements in a magazine.

While yes, Moms read, and are one of the strongest demographics for purchasing power, print publishing and importance to them begins to wain as they get the hang of things and sites like babycenter.com provide magazine style information with short term addiction.


I'm all for green and non toxic, but find me a green and non-toxic lifestyle magazine and I'll show you a lifestyle magazine that just is targeted towards a niche cause to draw clients to generate revenue - not actually save the world.
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:17 AM on March 10, 2010

Someone in your previous question mentioned Babybug. When my now two-year-old was a baby, his grandmother got him a subscription. Not only did he not stay still to be read to, but he would gum the cardboardlike pages until they would erode. I recycled every issue, because they weren't of much use.

Of course now I wish I had kept them, because at two, he loves to be read to more than almost anything. Moral of the story - you might want to skew a little older, too, because little kids only put books in their mouths for X period of time.
posted by pinky at 4:27 AM on March 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

I'm somewhat in agreement with pinky about age range. I'm not sure if you're using the term 'baby' very loosely, but I've never seen a baby (i.e. an infant) pay any attention to books, whether they be cloth, cardboard or whatever. A toddler is a different story - at two, my oldest son was crazy about books, but by that age he was well past the chewing stage. And compared to most of his friends his interest in books came fairly early.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 5:06 AM on March 10, 2010

My 7 month old loves gnawing on her books. We even have a book made from Tyvek that's especially for little ones to grab and chew without fear of tearing. Possibly too expensive of a material for your purposes tho.
posted by gnutron at 5:23 AM on March 10, 2010

I'm just not sure there's a market for this. I don't know many parents who actually encourage their babies to eat the magazine pages. It happens, sure, but usually the parent takes away the magazine. I mean, I'd rather my baby ingest food, not paper, no matter how non-toxic it is. As for the crinkly aspect that babies love, cloth books have this covered quite well with specific crinkly pages.
posted by cooker girl at 6:09 AM on March 10, 2010 [4 favorites]

My mother (who has a master's in early childhood development) says that pre-reading experience with books (chewing on them as babies, being read to regularly, turning pages) is an important part of later literacy. She'd be in favor of a regularly delivered magazine that the kid could chew on; sure, the kids may not understand the book, but they need to experience it.
posted by Soliloquy at 7:22 AM on March 10, 2010

Thanks for the link to BabyBug. We do Wild Animal Baby magazine for our toddler. He doesn't like it very much yet (age 16 months), but to give you a sense of the market for this.
posted by k8t at 8:27 AM on March 10, 2010

Why not separate this product into two pieces - the parent magazine (regular paper and ink, although with a nod towards non-toxicity) and the baby insert that comes with it (cloth, tyvek or board). When my issue comes in the mail, as a mom I don't have to worry about struggling to read it while baby demands attention, or baby in my lap trying to rip out the pages as I read them. I sit and read the adult part, and hand baby their part to play with. I imagine the baby part being like a leaflet insert inside the magazine. The real magazine can just use regular printing, inks and paper to save on costs, and therefore you can print it quickly allowing you to do current topics. The baby part doesn't need to be based on current affairs, so you can print an entire year's worth (12 different issues or whatever) in one go, negating the problem with slow lead time. You could even theme them around months of the year or however often your magazine ships.

This way you can satisfy your non-toxicity problem with the baby leaflet insert, and increase the chances that mom or dad can actually sit down and read their magazine while baby plays with their magazine. As the baby gets older they will enjoy the idea that when the magazine turns up, its THEIR magazine too.
posted by Joh at 10:37 AM on March 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

As a parent of a former baby, I'd be far more worried about a potential choking hazard than the minuscule possibility that something bad might happen from said baby maybe ingesting some tiny nanoparticle of printing ink.

My baby also had the superpower of producing things from thin air on which she could attempt to choke herself fatally, so YMMV.
posted by howrobotsaremade at 7:53 PM on March 10, 2010