The parent trap

As the market for infant products grows ever more absurd, author Pamela Paul takes on $800 strollers, Gymboree and the bamboozle that is Baby Einstein.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Parenting, Katharine Mieszkowski, Life, Salon Conversations

March 29, 2008 |

Oh, Linus, how childhood has changed. If Charles Schulz's security-blanket-toting tot were a kid today, would he even recognize a baby blanket? In today's infant product marketplace, the humble blankie has been reengineered, upgraded and allegedly improved.

To comfort the squalling newborn, there's now the Miracle Blanket ($29.99) and the Kiddopotamus SwaddleMe ($9.99) with specially designed flaps for snug newborn-wrapping; both claim to be a one-stop swaddling solution that will soothe a fussing little one. To protect the sleeping baby from sudden infant death syndrome, there's the Halo SleepSack Wearable Blanket ( $19.99), which zips baby in tight, so she won't be at risk of inadvertently suffocating under her blanket during the night. Even that seemingly timeless icon of infancy, the baby blanket, just isn't that simple anymore.

The clever, bizarre and sometimes insidious ways that marketers capitalize on today's parents' fears and aspirations for their children is the subject of a new exposé by journalist Pamela Paul titled "Parenting, Inc." Paul documents how, in recent years, the market for baby products, services and equipment has ballooned like a giant inflatable bounce house. In 2005, baby soap sales alone raked in almost $100 million, an increase of 17 percent in just one year. That's a lot for soap bubbles.

As a mother of two young kids, Paul, whose previous books were about starter marriages and porn, found that she was not immune to the seductions of the burgeoning parenting industrial complex, from baby sign language classes for babies who hear just fine to infant sleeping positioners. Surveying the staggering array of products, classes and services that are available for today's tiny tots, Paul found much to skewer, including professional baby-proofers, fetal and infant education and the Time's Up/Time Out Teddy Bear, which promises to comfort a child banished to his room with a timer that soothingly counts down the minutes until the punishment is over.

Salon spoke with Paul, who has a 3-year-old daughter and a 16-month-old son, by phone from her home office in New York.

Where did the $800 Bugaboo stroller come from?

The Bugaboo stroller was the brainchild of a marketing director for Bugaboo North America, named Kari Boiler. She was living abroad, and this is a European stroller that's par for the course among a certain set in Northern and Western Europe.

Before Bugaboo, there was this sort of understanding that no one would spend more than $300 on a stroller. That actually makes no sense, because certain moms spend $200 or $300 on a pair of shoes, something that is much more ephemeral. So, Boiler basically blew the cap off of what was supposedly the maximum of what any parent would spend.

At first there was a lot of resistance and joking that nobody was going to buy this insanely highly priced stroller, but as it turns out they were completely wrong. Now, there are more expensive models available. There's the Stokke XPlory for $1,000, so you can break that four-figure mark if you want to. All of the other stroller manufacturers were smacked awake by what Bugaboo did: "Well, wait a minute, if they're changing $800 for their strollers, why are we only charging $100?" There aren't as many cheap strollers out there as there once were.

Yet, there's been an upscaling phenomenon in everything from designer chocolate to handbags to over-the-top weddings. Are luxury goods for baby really any different from these other luxuries?

It's much easier to rationalize. It's not for you. You bought it for your child, and that's because you want the absolute best for your child. I think that we have professionalized parenting, and in a consumer society that becomes translated into buying a lot of things. Parents aren't as worried about spending too much as they are about not spending enough. It's what I call the anxiety of under-spending: "Wait a minute. Why didn't I get that for my child? All these other kids are getting it, and if I don't have it what does that mean for my kid?"

How have toys changed in the last 20 years ?

Hugely. When you think back to the '60s and '70s, all the right-thinking progressive parents thought toys should be natural and open-ended. Crayola and Kinder Blocks and Lego were considered raise-your-kid-smart toys. Then, all this data that came out which said that kids need to be stimulated. They need sound! They need multi-sensory experiences! Now, the more bells and whistles a toy has, the supposedly better it is.

Our parents' generation actually had it right. The less the toy does, the better. Everyone thinks: "Toys need to be interactive." No, toys don't need to be interactive. Children need to interact with toys. The best toys are 90 percent kid, 10 percent toy, the kind of thing that you can use 20 different ways, not because it has 20 different buttons to press, but because the kid, when they're 6 months old is going to chew on it, and toss it, but when they're a year they're going to start stacking it.

There's also a misunderstanding of what's worthwhile to do with your child and what's not. Doing the things that our supposedly neglectful parents did, like toting us around town, from the dry cleaner to the grocery store, that's all incredibly informative and worthwhile for kids. It's better to do that with your kid than plant them on the floor with a Fisher-Price learning table that has 25 noise-making buttons, while you're checking your e-mail.

Is the problem with these so-called educational toys that they really can't teach what they claim to, or is it more insidious? Do they actually inhibit learning somehow?

It's both. They do actively inhibit learning. There have been lab studies that show that once a kid figures out how a toy works, they're done with that toy. A toy that goes "Ring!" when the kid presses a button is really exciting at first, but once the kid figures that out, where is there to go with that? And bad toys ruin the good toys. I talked to teachers, educators and psychologists who are finding that kids are less interested in the good toys, because they seem relatively boring.

How did this idea take hold that babies' brains won't develop properly if they're not given this incessant barrage of stimulation?

A series of events took place in the '80s and '90s that convinced parents that they need to stimulate their kids. A lot of people remember the Romanian orphan crisis. These orphans were incredibly screwed up developmentally for life, because they had been languishing in cribs without any stimulation. This taught child development experts that there is a window where kids really need to be stimulated in order to thrive.

But just because kids aren't supposed to be under-stimulated, doesn't mean that over-stimulation is necessary. All those kids needed was adults holding them and singing to them and talking to them and reading to them. That's enough. It's not like the more you stimulate your child, the more you can sort of propel them to greater heights.

Next page: "Child classes for babies should be called child classes for parents"