Big Business of Parenting.
Pamela Paul’s new parenting tell-all, Parenting Inc., promises to answer How We are Sold on $800 Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, Toddler Couture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers – and What It Means for Our Children. The book makes for provocative, insightful reading. But we don’t need 271 pages to tell us why parents today do such nutty things. It’s actually pretty simple.
First of all, the average family size has decreased from 3.5 children in the 1960s to 2.1 in 2006, according to U.S. Census data. Simply put, there are fewer children to go around. So parents lavish proportionately more love and money on a smaller number of kids.
Second, the number of college educated women in the U.S. has more than doubled in 20 years, and the percentage of working moms has tripled. We currently have the best educated, most empowered, confident generation of mothers in the world. No wonder we want the latest high tech gizmos and support for ourselves and our children.
Third, as much as motherhood has transmogrified within the last few generations due to the rise of highly educated working moms, fatherhood has changed even more dramatically. Dads today spend three times as much time with their children on a daily basis as their own fathers did, according to University of Maryland time diary research from the past 40 years. When dads enter their children’s lives in droves, the stakes get higher. Parenting expertise, parenting books, and the need for the latest and greatest consumer products all multiply exponentially. Spending dollars follow.
Naturally, companies who manufacture and market baby and child development products notice these trends among families in the U.S. The big question remains: is this trend toward big business parenting good for parents and kids, insidiously destructive, or at times both?
I, for one, am grateful for the myriad choices of high-quality, often practical information and products. No one is forcing me to buy a stroller that costs more than our monthly food bill or to teach my kids to sign for more Cheerios. I remember all too well my mother’s experience raising four children in the 1960s and 70s. She used cloth diapers with huge safety pins. A hand-held rubber breast pump. We rolled around in the back of our VW Bug since car seats hadn’t yet been invented. We licked the lead paint off our baby rattles. The good old days? I don’t think so.
Parenting is big business today. As it should be. What do you think?
07.29.08
I am still reading Parenting, Inc. Don't tell me how it ends! Will I feel gullible, annoyed, oddly proud, ashamed or comfortable with the fact that we own a Bugaboo Chameleon? I can't wait! So far, I've felt all of those things, so I'm anxious to see what the final outcome will be.
In all seriousness, I like having the choices and feel fortunate that we are able to afford many of the "cool" products on the market (which we buy mostly because my husband is a gadget freak), but I resent the insidiousness of the marketing (as Veronica put it, the "Scare Tactics" - which includes the safety scare and the "you don't want him to grow up stupid, do you?" scare tactic as well). But the reality is that my son is not going to be permanently psychologically scarred if his diaper wipes are not warmed. He will not die from a bacterial infection if I give him cool or room temperature milk instead of perfectly-heated milk at bedtime. He may very well succeed academically even if I decline to purchase yet another talking piece of tacky plastic that mumbles incomprehensible and garbled (and often times, gramatically incorrect, by the way) Spanish phrases. And I am not a bad parent if I leave some of my cabinets in a less secure state than the safes at Fort Knox. It's the implication that you are somehow not doing something you are supposed to be doing if you fail to acquire the myriad products that is the problem, and the plays on parental guilt cross the line. I find it interesting that so many marketing people are willing to go on the record in this book and say "yes, of course it's about the parental guilt and playing on that, but goodness no, we would never come out and SAY that." No... maybe not directly, but they can rest assured the message is getting across loud and clear...
LMS is right that it is wonderful to live in a time with so many choices and so much good information, but it is sometimes very hard to filter out the good information from the spin. I've given up on going to the dozens of websites that claim to filter out the crap and present only the best products for my child - because they don't. They are perhaps even worse than your average online store, because the "information" they are giving is nothing more than the spin provided by the companies. You know who you can rely on for good information about products? Consumer Reports and YOUR OWN INSTINCTS. If either one says "don't buy it," DON'T, and don't let anyone make you feel like less of a mom for saying "no."
07.28.08
Leslie Morgan Steiner
Just like with all child-rearing decisions, it is soooo nice to have a range of choices -- and to do your own research and make your own decisions. My favorite stroller (I still have it in the basement) is a cheap but sturdy Graco that served us so well. And I also still have a $15 umbrella stroller that we take on trips for when our six year old gets exhausted.
07.15.08
I agree with Veronica. Yes, there have been a lot of advances -- my mom was just telling me yesterday that when I was born in the 60s, there were no infant carseats, so they just buckled my carrier in with the lap belt. Clearly a good thing. But on the other hand, are booster seats for 6-8 yr olds equally good? The Freakonomics guys say no -- basically, there's no data showing carseats are at all helpful after about the age of 4. So is it really good to spend $200+ on boosters for older kids, when we don't know if it helps? If my kid isn't actually safer in a booster, wouldn't she have been better off if I'd put that money into her college fund?
I am especially leery of the explosion of high-end baby stuff. Interesting psychological data shows that the existence of higher-priced stuff makes people more likely to spend more on mid-level stuff. That's why restaurants offer a $45 surf-and-turf, or a $60 chateaubriand -- they don't actually expect to sell it, but they've found time and again that more people will buy the $32 strip steak when the more expensive entree is on the menu. Same way an $800 Peg Perego stroller makes a $300 version suddenly seem reasonable.
07.14.08
It's one thing to say we "choose" to buy $300 strollers, it's another to look at the scare tactics in the market that get us to "choose" to spend more on a "safer" stroller/care seat or educational toys that will get our kids speaking Mandarin before kindergarten.
I loved Paul's book because she confronts that notion of "choice" head on.