Strollers, Other Baby Products Will Be More Expensive with Tariffs

Sam Rutledge and his wife are expecting a baby in mid-July, so they thought they had a few more months to research and buy the gear they’d need.

An estimated 90% of the core baby care products and the parts that go into making baby paraphernalia—from bottles and diaper pails to strollers and car seats—are made in Asia.

But President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement in early April turned the couple’s slow walk into a sprint. In the past few weeks, they’ve bought two strollers, a car seat, a nursery glider, a crib, and a highchair.

All of them are made overseas, Dee-Ann Durbin reported for the Associated Press (AP).

“These are all pretty expensive under normal conditions, but when it became clear tariffs were coming, we decided to buy them in case they became prohibitively expensive,” said Rutledge, who is a high school physics teacher.

Raising a child in America has never been cheap.

In the first year alone, it costs an average of $20,384, according to BabyCenter, a parenting website. But tariffs—ranging from 10% for imports from most countries to 145% for imports from China—will make it significantly more expensive for new parents.

An estimated 90% of the core baby care products and the parts that go into making baby paraphernalia—from bottles and diaper pails to strollers and car seats—are made in Asia, according to the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association (JPMA), a U.S. trade group.

The vast majority come from China. “Overseas manufacturing has been the norm in our industry for decades,” said Lisa Trofe, the association’s executive director.

It wasn’t always this way. When Munchkin Inc. CEO Steven Dunn founded his company in 1991, it made baby bottles in California with tooling from New Jersey. But over the years, the manufacturers he used shut down, and the cost of doing business in the U.S. skyrocketed.

Now, about 60% of Munchkin’s 500 products—from a $5 sippy cup to a $254 Night Owl Stroller with headlights—are made in China.

In response to the tariffs, Dunn halted orders from China and instituted a hiring freeze at Munchkin’s California headquarters, where 320 people are employed. He expects Munchkin will run out of some products within three months.