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Before a baby shower for the birth of my son last year, friends insisted I had to register for gifts, and enlisted my mother to escort me to Buy Buy Baby — two floors of everything you need for baby and a whole lot more you probably didn’t know needed to exist. My mother, a child of the Depression, held her tongue while I pored over the store’s list of must-buy products that she had somehow managed to do without while raising three children. We had spent 20 minutes trying to discern the difference between models of Diaper Genies when I came upon the Boppy Tummy Time pillow — which you apparently need in addition to the Boppy breast-feeding pillow, even though both are half-moon-shaped pieces of foam virtually indistinguishable from each other — and my mother began to giggle. We left without registering.
As Pamela Paul chronicles in her occasionally frightening account, “Parenting, Inc.,” my generation of parents has fallen into the grips of Big Baby. Pushed by a host of factors — the guilt and exhaustion of working parents, the dispersion of family networks that once passed knowledge from generation to generation, the pressure of admissions from preschool to college, and a culture that worships all things celebrity (including its offspring) — we are intimidated or bamboozled into buying all sorts of goods and services that we not only don’t need, but that may harm our children. Slaves to legions of professional advisers and predatory entrepreneurs, we are rendered unable to recall the advice Dr. Spock issued our parents: Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.
Paul has tapped a real concern. An entire industry preys on parental anxiety, and succumbing to it, we risk raising children who don’t know what to do with “free” time and who will measure their value by what they can buy. Most parents will recognize a bit of themselves in Paul’s introductory complaint: “No matter what I do, someone else seems to be doing enviably more or improbably less, and either way, their child and family seem all the better for it.”
It’s not just the $800 strollers and fetal-education gizmos of her subtitle. It’s inventions like the Splash Shield to keep bath water in the tub or the TP Saver to foil curious hands before they undo the entire roll of toilet paper. There are baby “faires” to rival auto shows in convention centers around America and children’s country clubs in Manhattan, styled by the people who design the upscale Equinox Fitness Clubs, where children’s blouses sell for $380 and tots learn that it’s best to be exclusive when choosing playmates. (Just when I thought Paul might be reaching a bit, the PoshTots catalog arrived, offering a two-story Tumble Outpost for $122,730 — that is not a misprint — featuring a wraparound ramp, a tube slide and, presumably, at that price, a six-burner Viking range and water views.) Clearly, there’s a baby born to a rich sucker every minute.
Paul, the author of books on the pornography industry and “starter marriages,” includes horrifying quotations from marketers. “Everything we do is academic, even for toddlers and babies,” boasts one producer of computer software for children under 2. “There’s nothing in there that’s just purely for fun.” My competitive anxiety surged when I read Paul’s descriptions of the educational videos and software many parents buy, and it shot positively through the roof after reading the testimonials from those who insist that the “Your Baby Can Read!” videos allowed their child to read by age 1. But Paul nicely dismantles the claims of the “edutainment” industry, exposing the videos as little more than digital baby sitters. (Cancel my order!) Babies, one expert notes, simply filter out a lot of the stimulus from educational toys.
Paul tries to lead us out of the catastrophization of childhood but too often plays right into it. “It may sound like a leap to go from baby toys to the death of democracy, but it’s a valid concern,” she approvingly quotes a child advocate saying. “A democratic populace relies on people who know how to think critically, who are willing and able to take action.” She overreaches with statements like “Any woman worth the cover price of InStyle fantasizes about an array of diaper bags to suit various outfits and occasions.” Well, no. And, as she notes, the No. 1 registered-for item at Amazon’s baby store is diapers.
Paul is right that for some parents, children have become status symbols. “Three is the new two when it comes to having kids,” a Manhattan preschool admissions adviser tells her. (Or, as my sister-in-law, an Upper East Side obstetrician, says, “Three is the new Hummer.”)
Paul also correctly notes that the frenzy she chronicles is most acute in New York City, where she lives. But she strains when she argues it exists beyond the coasts and in small-town America, and then identifies these places as Newton, Mass.; Bethesda, Md.; Falls Church, Va.; and New Canaan, Conn. — hardly Peoria, where the median price of a house is less than that PoshTots Tumble Outpost. And she backs her case with poll and survey results that convey a breezy certainty, but on reflection can seem a little thin. One online survey of mothers, she tells us, found that “18 percent wanted to spend less time doing housework and more time with their children.” Only 18 percent?
Paul says she talked to parents, but I would have liked to hear more of their voices and less from the news stories and experts she quotes extensively. My guess is that most parents would share my panic in the face of Buy Buy Baby and then discover, as I did, that even the product that friends insist you must have is actually an encumbrance (and that all your lovingly selected toys pale when the kid discovers he can pull the saucepans out of the cupboard).
Most of us feel the pangs and then figure out some happy medium. We hyperventilate, we overbuy, and then we get a talking-to by a friend, a mother or a pediatrician (like the one who told me after we’d spent hundreds of dollars on a changing table that the only place to change the baby was on the floor), and we self-correct. Paul herself seems to come to this conclusion as she describes working out her son’s feeding woes. She even finds some good in the parenting industry: Web sites have put experts and blogging parents at our fingertips, and make it “a snap” to buy toys from abroad or the latest baby gear from Amsterdam, Sweden and New Zealand.
I, sanctimommy, raise an eyebrow at that carbon footprint. But then, Paul frowns on my Stokke highchair. So see? Not all models look the same, but in the end, we each figure out a way to, yes, trust ourselves.
