High chairs: choosing baby's first seat at the table

The decision comes down to three questions

High chairs look like a category with a hundred variables. It is really three, and once you answer them the shortlist writes itself.

1. How much floor do you have? A convertible chair like the Graco Blossom takes real floor space and keeps it for years. A hook-on chair that clamps to the table takes none at all. If you are in an apartment, this is the question that matters most, and our small-space picks are built around it.

2. How much do you hate cleaning? Food gets everywhere, into every seam of every fabric pad. A one-piece plastic chair you can hose off outside is a completely different daily experience from a padded convertible with a five-point harness threaded through upholstery. This is why the IKEA Antilop keeps beating chairs that cost ten times as much.

3. How long do you want it to last? A cheap plastic chair is outgrown in toddlerhood. A Stokke Tripp Trapp adjusts for years and is still a usable chair when the child is a teenager. Neither answer is wrong; they are different purchases.

The types, briefly

• Full-size convertible. Recline for a young baby, then booster, then toddler chair. Most versatile, biggest footprint. See convertible picks.
• Simple molded plastic. One piece, no recline, trivial to clean, very cheap. The value benchmark for the whole category.
• Wooden adjustable. Pulls up to the table, adjusts as the child grows, lasts for years. Most expensive up front, cheapest over time.
• Hook-on table chair. Clamps to the table edge, zero floor footprint, folds into a bag. Needs a suitable table. See hook-on picks.
• Booster. Straps to a dining chair. The natural step after a high chair, and a decent first seat in a tight kitchen. See high chair vs booster seat.

When do you actually need one?

Around the time your baby starts solids, which the American Academy of Pediatrics puts at about six months — and it is about readiness rather than a date on a calendar. The AAP's own list of physical signs includes being able to sit with some support in a high chair or feeding seat, holding the head steady, and opening the mouth at the sight of food.

In other words the chair is not what makes a baby ready; sitting steadily with good head control is. We go through the signs in when can baby sit in a high chair?

The feature nobody mentions: a footrest

A baby whose feet dangle has nothing to brace against, and bracing helps with both stability and swallowing. Adjustable footrests are standard on wooden chairs, common on mid-price convertibles, and absent from the cheapest plastic chairs. If you are choosing between two otherwise similar chairs, the one with an adjustable footplate is the better chair. It is the main reason the Tripp Trapp and the Mockingbird score as well as they do in our main ranking.

Safety, in four lines

The AAP's high chair safety guidance is short and worth reading in full, but the essentials: use the harness every single time, including for a two-minute snack; never rely on the tray to hold a child in; keep the chair away from walls and counters a child can push off; and never leave a baby unattended in a chair. Our high chair safety checklist turns it into something you can run through once and stop thinking about.

Also worth doing once: check whether your chair has ever been recalled. Feeding and seating products are recalled reasonably often, and notices are posted at CPSC.gov. We remove recalled products from our recommendations as soon as we know.