Review: The brilliant Graco Symbio provides wonderful opportunities to interact with your child

May 11, 2010 Chopsy Baby

The Graco Symbio is a travel system bringing those who fail to understand the hours men spend touching, tinkering and loving their car a better understanding.

This top of the range pram is an object of beauty. It is strong, good looking, practical and above all, it will create a strong bond between parent and child which is possible due to its clever reversible handle.

Just like a car, it is a pram you want to push, touch and tinker with, all made possible with its separate components and stylish design.

With the carrycot, the Symbio is suitable from birth. The pushchair with toddler seat is suitable from six months. As with most prams, the toddler seat makes it suitable for children up to the age of three years or 15 kilograms. We found the harness fitted a three and a half year old comfortably without being tight around the bottom of the body.

So what is it that makes this pram so brilliant?

Firstly what is good about this reversible travel system is that you can purchase the pram – which comes with the base for attaching the car seat – and then buy the car seat and carry cot separately. This makes the Symbio travel system affordable but without weighing you down with parts you may not need.

The interchangeable seats are high up from the ground away from dogs, a cyclist’s front tyre and it gives them a good view of the world.

The toddler seat has three reclining positions, allowing little ones to sit upright, recline back and laze or sleep comfortably in a fully laid back position.

With the large pneumatic wheels closest to you and its spring suspension, this is a smooth, bump free ride and push.

Though it is not possible to hang a supermarket basket from the pram’s handles, the super smooth pram can be navigated easily with one hand and the minimum of strength whilst you carry the basket with the other hand.

Brakes are at hand height, giving you better control of turning them on and off instead of a two-footed stamp dance.

Graco have quite rightly been blowing their own trumpet about the time and research they have put into developing the Symbio. They have worked directly with parents to find solutions allowing them to interact with their child whilst they are in the pram.

Despite a few little niggles, they have come up with a solution they can be proud of. With their fully reversible handle, the Symbio’s pièce de résistance allows your little one the option of facing the world, or facing their parents.

Forget any waffle from the experts, being able to chat away to your baby or toddler will do wonders for their speech development. Research and statistics are not needed to back this up. As you push your child around you can instantly see the immense benefits of having your little one facing you. This is because you can constantly interact with them, hear them clearly and instigate conversation about the world around them whilst improving their vocabulary. It provides a wonderful opportunity to talk to your child which is lost with forward facing prams or being driven in a car.

As a first step, this pram goes miles in the right direction and parents using it with a second child will feel a pang of regret that this wonderful opportunity has been missed with their eldest.

Making the pram rear facing to forward facing takes a second with a click and swing of the handle. The only drawback is that the pram works at its best when the small wheels are furthest away from you on a swivel. When the large wheels are at the front and the smaller wheels at the back, it can be difficult to push the pram, especially if you don’t lock the swivel off. This is because you end up steering the pram with the back wheels, and as well as this being an alien feeling, if you can’t get the hang of it you end up weaving over the pavement. One solution is simply unclicking the seat, turning it around and clicking it back in.

The Symbio is perfect for parents that walk and live locally to their amenities such as within a London Borough which is self contained or an area within a city that doesn’t require transport to get everywhere. The Symbio will push onto a bus with no problems, but if you live on a route that regularly requires having to put the pram down, with an armful of baby and shopping, it’s not a quick process.

The Symbio does fold up and to a light weight. We asked a group of both mums and dads to have a go at folding up the pram. All remarked on how impressed they were with how surprisingly light the pram was, but that folding it up with one hand was difficult. We could only manage to fold it up with two hands and a patient bus driver. Graco claim the Symbio can be put down with one hand and to their credit, a well rehearsed representative at the Earls Court Baby Show achieved what we found impossible.

To get around this problem with any pram or problem bus route, it can help to have a front carrying baby carrier for the early months when your baby can’t hold their head up. This way, if you have to fold up your pram, you can pop the baby safely in the carrier and use both hands to manage shopping and pram.

The shopping basket is compact, but we were surprised at how many things we managed to fit into it. Graco buggies and prams generally tend to be large stable prams and if you go against manufacturer’s recommendations, will carry plenty of shopping on its handles without becoming too unstable. This can be achieved on this model with the humble pram clip, available from most pound shops.

The Graco Symbio is the perfect pram to have from birth. Many new parents quickly find that despite buying a comprehensive travel system, in reality, you will need more than one pram. For the early days and the local days out, the Symbio will see you through from birth to three. For the long distance days out, especially on public transport, a lightweight fully reclining Graco buggy will work in perfect partnership.

Accessories available to buy separately for the Symbio include car seat, carrycot, baby bag and changing mat, a footmuff, raincovers for both the car seat and carry cot, and a parasol for extra protection from the elements.

The Symbio Go carrycot is suitable from birth to ten months and works with the pram’s simple One-Click system.

The Logico S Deluxe car seat suitable from birth also attaches to the Symbio’s frame using the One-Click system.

Graco Symbio pushchair including raincover £349.99