Ringing up baby

Sighs Guzman: "People get very self-righteous when it comes to parenting." For her, the real value of the baby-product explosion isn't the proliferation of "status" items, but an influx of good design, the sort she says sophisticated parents demand. And it's true: Never before have aesthetics so informed a parent's arsenal; even mundane potties and pacifiers have been subjected to Italian design exercises. "I don't know anyone in New York or Chicago who's having a baby before 32," Guzman says. This older mother, she says, is "often someone who's traveled, who's evolved. She doesn't want her house covered in Barney and plastic." Not that Guzman believes in total design ruthlessness, especially where her own child's yearnings are involved. "We have the SuperSaucer," she admits with a mixture of pain and tenderness, "which is the ugliest thing in the world."

Unfortunately, says Elise Mac Adam, a screenwriter and mother in her 30s who pens the blog Indiemom, which critiques ludicrous parenting, so many of these hiply designed objects become obsolete the second your baby outgrows them. So you honored your exacting design standards and bought the $500 neo-Eamesian Ooba Nest bassinet in walnut? "What do you do with it afterwards?" she asks. (Unlike, she points out, the legendary David Netto Design changing table, conceived to evolve into grown-up furniture.)

Mac Adam reserves special disdain for parents she sees in New York's Upper East Side pushing the pauncey Silver Cross pram (which, as a piece of traditional design, rivals a Bugatti). This pram, she says, only works for a month or two, since most kids want to ride sitting up fairly quickly. "It seems like those parents don't even need to think about practicality," she says. "They don't live in the same world as I do. They live in a fantasy."

There's no time for outrage at another popular blog, Baby Chic 101, updated by Patty Shaw, 25, a childless teacher who's nonetheless nuts about baby stuff. Not when product-deprived moms are awaiting posts like "Britney's Car Seat-Correction!" and "Opinion: Why there should be more Buy Bye Babys." In the latter, Shaw confronts some hard realities: "Sadly," she states, "there are only eight [Buy Buy Baby stores] total on our lovely planet. Eight!?" But, after urging her readers to pilgrimage to these outlets and agitate for a national expansion program, she rousingly concludes: "Together we can change the baby world. One top-notch store at a time."

"This is a phenomenon called displacement consumption," says James Twitchell, Ph.D., author of "Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism." "It always comes out of anxiety and what's more anxiety-provoking than, My god, I have a baby?" He points out that consumerist parents too conflicted to conspicuously indulge themselves (selfish!) sidestep guilt by buying their newborn a status stroller (doting!). "You're spending on your baby, though," says Twitchell, "so the assumption is: No one's going to criticize me."

Another driving force behind such extravagance, Twitchell argues, is the universal need for community. "Americans used to be defined by how we went to church, or by our schools. But now it's really about consumption communities. The question becomes: 'Can you assemble, by buying things, a coherent presentation of the self as part of a community?'" (Bugaboo parents, unite!)

"Have you seen this new magazine, Noodle?" he asks.

Cookie, perhaps?

"Yes, Cookie. I have never seen a clearer acknowledgement that children have been reduced to accessories."

Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg, a clinical psychologist who practices in an affluent Chicago suburb and lectures on "The Overindulged Child," has seen the unsightly consequences of that attitude. "The risk is making your baby an object, someone who eventually learns that her primary value to you is the way she looks. And out of that can grow a child who's consumed with appearance. Anorexia. Compulsive exercise."

Not to mention one who's lazy and unmotivated. "As we all know," says Wehrenberg, "desiring something and knowing you have the potential to get it causes you to work hard and feel very satisfied when you get it. But kids from wealthy families are getting everything they want. They literally have nothing to work for."

Competitive parents who lavish their babies with Ooba bassinets and Russian language classes at 6 months, she says, often develop a mind-set that they can buy their children everything they need. "But what growing children's minds really need," she says, "is time for free play. Time to just stare into space and allow the brain to rest, to form new connections, new ideas, and learn how to soothe itself."

It's all very dire. One can only hope that, just as prosperous Americans tired of the novelty of overindulging their dogs, and moved onto babies, their focus might soon shift to something less likely to lapse into indolence. Plants, maybe. Plants would be a lot more impressive with individual Marc Jacobs cashmere leaf-covers.

Indiemom's Mac Adam, who knows a compulsive stroller-collector ("she has six for two kids"), gave up trying to wow other parents with infant paraphernalia long ago. The emotional cost was too high. "My first visit to Buy Buy Baby made me feel like a loser," she says. "The sheer volume of stuff, and the sheer number of choices that had to be made." Not to mention all the hyper-focused, salivating moms. She says she lost it "somewhere near the cribs and co-sleepers." She didn't quite make it out intact. "I started weeping on the stairs."

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