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Pamela Paul calls it the anxiety of underspending. She’s referring to the cold sweats that parents experience when they don’t spend enough on their children. Like, maybe, as parents, we aren’t providing our children enough opportunities to develop into the potential uberchild and eventual super-achieving teen/adult that they can and should be. Paul’s book Parenting, Inc: How We Rare Sold on $800 Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, Toddler Couture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers–and What It Means for Our Children was quite interesting and addressed the reason for the anxiety I experience each time I enter a baby superstore.

Basically her book critiques the manufacturers of baby products and the marketing of their products to new parents. Marketing efforts prey upon our insecurities, as well as our need to give our children all the advantages that we can purchase. Then too, there’s the keeping up with the Jones’s aspect of buying bigger and better baby buggies, $35 onesies, and exclusive membership to baby country clubs.

Paul describes this new type of parenthood where “what we choose to register for comes to symbolize the type of parent we want to be and the way in which we want to raise our children.” Of course, this ultimately backfires because children learn from parental observance that their identity is tied up in what they own, or what they buy, or what kind of style/taste they display from their consumer purchases, and that’s ultimately rather sad and false. Somehow parents “throw out their healthy skepticism when it comes to shopping for their children because such decisions are deeply emotional,” and Paul goes on to write that when we’re wrapped up in nurturing our children, often logical thinking flies straight out the window. That’s how come we end up with far too much stuff.

Why are parents so anxious? Paul writes that many new parents live far away from their families and thus have no regular and ready support system to turn to when baby won’t latch on or sleep through the night. And most children of my generation (X, that is) were not breastfed because formula was pushed so heavily in the 1960s and 1970s. Not until 1982 did breastfeeding make a comeback. My mom won’t be a resource for any breastfeeding issues I may have because she bottle-fed me formula. Should I experience problems, I’ll need to hire a lactation consultant, which probably isn’t a big deal and won’t be a great expense, but still, I wish I could solely rely upon my mother’s wisdom. And yet, I have several friends, as well as my SIL, who can advise me about dicey breastfeeding problems as they occur.

Apparently the pressure to have an early-achieving child is immense. From what I read of Paul’s book though, it seems more geared toward urban parents. Getting their child into the “right” pre-school is key to baby getting into the “right” private school, ad infinitum. Since I live somewhere that there are few options, I’m not worried about whether my child will be accepted at a pretentious preschool, though I’ve long bemoaned the absence of a Montessori school (and possibly Waldorf, though it is not something that I have any familiarity with). And while I’m terribly skeptical of the current effectiveness of public schools, given the No Child Left Behind debacle, as a product of public schools, I have to say that I did okay, that Ian did okay, that we are both college graduates who can support ourselves, and thus public schools are where my child will grow and flourish. Ideally, I always hoped to homeschool. But the financial realities don’t allow for that.

So there’s a push for pre-natal education from the manufacturer’s of baby products. Crazy, I know. And there’s no research to support any claims that pre-natal education really works miracles. And there’s a push for all children’s play and activities to be educational, to be serving an objective. Parents push their children to read before they are ready, and learn their numbers and colors, too, all by age one, believe it or not. Because, apparently, it’s a status thing to boast to the other mommies and daddies that your baby einstein is so far ahead of the others. All of this over-education robs children of their childhood and their time at play. Toys and play are supposed to be for fun, not to reach certain objectives by a certain month.

Much of of the under two or three years old’s education, or edutainment, as Paul refers to it, comes via TV, or educational DVDs. Somehow popping a child in front of an “educational” DVD is preferable to popping baby in a playpen while parent showers or tends to dinner. The playpen option is what I was raised on. That’s how my mom made time to do all that she needed, unhindered by me. But somehow playpens don’t appeal to today’s parents. They liken them to jail and cannot imagine any useful purpose to playpens. And so that explains the popularity of baby in front of educational DVD. I’ll take the playpen, thanks. Our household currently doesn’t revolve around the TV, and I may be exceptionally naive, but I don’t expect for it ever to. Edutainment DVDs were originally marketed toward parents as a way for them to have a short break from baby. But now, they’re marketed differently. Baby and parent are supposed to watch together, learn together, interact together. And most early childhood development experts say that it’s ridiculous to learn about a flower from a TV set. That the logical thing to do is for baby and parent to explore those things together in real life.

Paul also suggests that new parents’ anxiety stems from their lack of experience around babies and children. While that is not the case for me, a whole generation of women, and men, didn’t babysit, or didn’t spend time taking care of younger siblings. And so the inexperienced impulse is to over-comfort baby, to want to be our child’s friend, which then leads to real issues with boundaries and authority. The over-comforting of baby goes hand in hand with wanting to create a perfect environment for our child, one in which she/he knows no pain, no germs, no failure.

And quite without having read Paul’s book, I felt that wasn’t the right path to take. Sure, parents wish to protect their children, but Ian and are are firm believers in the School of Hard Knocks. It worked for us. We both had working mothers who didn’t coddle us. Neither of us were happy all the time, for various and different reasons. Paul writes that trying to shield children from discomfort shouldn’t be a goal because it’s as if we’ve forgotten the essence of human experience. If we solve all our children’s problems for them, how will they learn to self-soothe? How will they learn to solve problems for themselves? It seems that the new parenting is actually creating a generation of completely lost children. And that’s scary. Paul mentions “problem-solving deficit disorder” which describes this generation of children who enter school without critical thinking skills or even the desire to problem solve. Children are easily frustrated when asked to work on projects alone because they are so used to having their parent do it for them. We actually see a lot of this at my university with Millennials who want we librarians to essentially complete their assignments for them. Coincidentally, Paul quotes from another source that Millennials have near zero-resistence to consumerism.

Expectant mothers are targeted for a glut of marketing materials from the start. Last week I bought a maternity top and two of those belly bands at a maternity shop. I received a starter pack from the cashier which contained samples of lotions, etc., as well as a Playtex bottle; our first. When she ran my credit card through her register/computer, she asked for confirmation of my mailing address. Creepy that it was already in the system. Now I expect to receive tons of crap in the mail targeting me and my baby as future consumers of unnecessary products. Basically, it seems, that companies use a hard sell and try to frighten parents into buying their products, otherwise they are not being the best parents or giving their children the best foot forward. Companies also rely on brand loyalty and are expanding their products to grow alongside baby.

One of the positive aspects of this boon of baby products is that mompreneurs are starting businesses that fill a need. And I’m all for mom’s going into business for themselves to make things easier for subsequent generations of parents. Often, they fill a need, a niche, that the mega-companies overlook. That’s how Baby Einstein (sold to Disney for $25 million) and Giggle developed.

Surely, the thing I liked best about the book is that Paul affirmed my thoughts about the necessity of toys, DVD, animatronic devices, etc. for the development of baby’s skills. There is no research proving that any of these thing help babies grow into smart beans. In fact, most media are detrimental to baby’s development. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that children under two not be exposed to TV, computers, or video games.

Here are two reasons why TV and babies don’t mix: “Studies show that high levels of television viewing before age three are associated with subsequent bullying, impaired reading and mathematical proficiency. A 2006 study in Pediatrics found that the more television children under five watch, the less likely they are to engage in curative play.”

And then this: “Early exposure to TV and video games conditions the developing brain to expect very high, unnatural level of input. Real life by comparison becomes boring.”

Perhaps its my Gen X skepticism at work, or something else, but honestly, what was good enough for me, is good enough for my children. In fact, Paul says that children get more out of playing with ordinary household (but safe!) objects than with all those expensive, expendable plastic gadgets with all their bells and whistles. So many parents are guilty about working too much or not spending enough time with their children that they buy buy buy. The average American child receives seventy new toys each year. How excessive is that? Companies rely upon parental feelings of guilt and manipulate parents into spending outrageous amounts on their children.

Yeah, I feel like I’ll be one of those nazi parents. Don’t let my child watch tv. Don’t buy my child plastic toys. Don’t over-protect my child from germs and falls and spills and such. And none of those cheesey singing animatronic holiday toys, either. I hope I won’t be too unbearable. No sugar, either! Haven’t even explored the issues around feeding baby.

In closing, I highly recommend this book. While Paul doesn’t necessarily offer solutions to warding off the problems she describes, awareness of them is the first step. Librarian that I am, I found the lack of bibliography disappointing. But she mentions books throughout its pages, and if you note them as you read, you’re all set. Paul does include several pages of notes documenting her sources, and that was reassuring. And by the way, the book was so well-written as well. Very easy to read.

Naturally I fed off the author’s vibe because I agreed with her assessments of the burgeoning baby market. Every other paragraph I was “Right on!” after reading “Parents who discuss the content of traditional books while reading to their children promoted early literacy, while electronic books encourages a slightly coercive parent-child interaction and were not as effective. The researchers described parents and children reading electronic books together as a severely truncated experience.

Two of the areas Paul wrote about that I didn’t address in this very lengthy post are the outsourcing of parenting and celebrity baby culture. Paul describes the plethora of services that baby and mom can take at upscale centers that include spa and cafe for parents and courses in which to enroll baby. Such centers seems as much an avenue for ending the isolation of new mothers as true educational opportunities for babies. Since the media focuses such extreme attention on celebrity babies, an entire luxury market opened up to serve them, thus $800 imported baby buggies and designer baby duds by Escada and Marc Jacobs.

Here’s a list of books from which Paul drew many of her statements:

Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America

The Hurried Child: : Growing Up Too Fast, Too Soon

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture

The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

The Better Brain Book

What Kids Really Want Money Can’t Buy: Tips For Parenting in a Commercial World

The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids

cross-posted at bekka.