Parenting
It Takes
A Whole Baby Product
And Toy Industry To Raise A Child
By
Cynthia Peters
Buy a copy of the Prenatal Classroom
and learn how to give your fetus a jumpstart on learning.
Have a "Babyscapes Video Mobile" installed in your
baby’s crib to ensure proper infant stimulation during
the crucial first year. If baby gets over-stimulated, simply
switch on the soothing white noise machine instead. Get your
toddler interested in food by serving it in a plate shaped
like an airplane (cockpit holds the cheerios; tail holds the
drink cup; fork and spoon look like miniature planes), or a
musical plastic train that includes teething rings, snack
bowls and bottle holder—all the while playing,
"I’ve been working on the railroad." Feel more
in control of your environment and your child’s life by
purchasing just the right safety devices, such as the
specially designed cover for their seat in the grocery cart
to shield them from germs. Purchase the best "feeding
system," the right education, the most stimulating toys,
and organic cotton bed sheets, and your child will be happy,
healthy, and brighter than other children.From your first moments as a parent,
you will be inundated with the idea that well-being for you
and your child can be purchased. Good parenting is a matter
of owning the right products. The human act of parenting has
been harvested for profit, and the harvest has been
bountiful. In the last 30 years, for example, Toys R Us has
grown from a 4-store $12 million a year operation to a
540-store $6.7 billion one. (Playthings, September
1993.) Meanwhile, many parents struggle in isolation to do
the right thing by their offspring, scrutinizing product
catalogs and magazines (essentially ad conduits) for
solutions to their parenting dilemmas.Mothers in particular are deluged with
advice and product information from the experts about how to
properly raise our children. We are saddled with
responsibility for every element of their well-being. Shari
Thurer, in the Myth of Motherhood, argues that in the
last 40 years when more and more (particularly white) women
have joined the work force (both out of need and desire), and
since feminism has allowed many women to pursue life outside
the private sphere, so the demands on mothers have reached an
all-time high. The idea that a baby’s education begins
in the cradle was popularized in the post-WW II baby boom,
and provided a huge market for just the right stimulating toy
at every stage of development. It also provided experts with
ample opportunity to micromanage every element of
mother’s behavior toward her child. The privatization of
child-rearing is reduced not just to families but to the
mother-child relationship in particular. Mothers are
isolated, then they are hit hard by the marketers for the toy
and baby product industry.Just as the marketplace wants you to
think sports shoes will make your life more cutting edge,
beer will make you younger, and Coke is not just a bubbly
brown liquid but "the Real Thing," so the right
parenting gadgets—along with their portable
versions—will make you a good parent. Indeed, many of
the gadgets are useful and sensible to own. As a parent I
know that much of what is available in the marketplace can
facilitate the work of raising children. Products can bring
enjoyment, educational value, or ease daily life with kids.
In this day and age, while moms and dads largely struggle in
isolation from each other and from community support systems
that once might have been there to relieve self-doubt and
offer guidance, we shop for our parenting supports. In doing
so, we pass consumption values onto our children, training
them in the ways of a throwaway society and readying them to
be little shoppers who believe that products determine our
identities and are capable of solving our problems. We also
buy into an ideology that at best helps us rationalize a
work-a-day world that is extremely unfriendly to children and
families, and that at worst steers us away from seeing and
protesting structural inequality, including the global
impoverishment of children.
The Crib As A Form Of Social Control
Cribs have not always been considered
the most essential piece of baby furniture you could own.
Even today, in most countries (particularly in the Third
World), babies do not sleep in cribs. Throughout human
history, babies have, for the vast majority of the time,
slept with their parents. In this current historical-economic
juncture, however, sharing sleep goes decidedly against the
ideological grain. In the early 20th century, health workers
"zealously handed out banana boxes…to serve as cradles
in order to try and stamp out the habit of mothers and babies
sleeping together." (The Politics of Breastfeeding.)
As babies graduated from the banana box to the crib (mattress
sold separately), a whole baby product industry, along with
the attendant baby advice industry, was spawned. Think of all
the things you did not need to own in the pre-banana box
days. First, you wouldn’t need the crib—the
stay-at-home version or the portable one. Nor would you need
the additional room (or rooms if you have more children) in
which to put the crib, along with its matching changing
table. You wouldn’t need the bassinet that preceded the
crib nor the toddler bed that comes after. You wouldn’t
need the dancing bear mobiles or the little machine that
simulates flashing TV images to keep your baby entertained
while she is alone in her crib down the hall. You
wouldn’t need the white noise machine, the pacifier, the
special blanket and array of blank-faced stuffed animals, or
the blanket with the vibrator to soothe your baby (because
you’re not there, because you’ve been told that
it’s best for your baby to soothe herself). You
wouldn’t need the special feeding system that you keep
in the baby’s room for convenience. You wouldn’t
need the bumpers, the sheets, and all the decor to match. And
because you wouldn’t be accustomed to being separate
from your baby, nor would you need the "Good vibrations
hammock swing" that can be upright for playtime when it
rocks, bounces and vibrates. (Right Start catalog,
summer 1997.)The requirements of the crib don’t
just boost the economy, they also teach certain behaviors
that are important in an industrial society dominated by the
clock and inane rules that enforce hierarchies. Baby must
learn that when he’s in his crib, he must sleep or play
quietly. If he cries, he will be ignored. If he’s
hungry, he must wait. Parents must listen to the crying and,
even if they find it difficult, must squash any desire to go
to their child. How will he learn otherwise? It can be
difficult to adjust to rigid sleeping and eating schedules,
but it must be done. Why? Because we have internalized the
notion that our babies must be independent. That they should
squash needs that could be met with human comfort and learn
to get needs met by comfort objects. We are not only training
them in the rhythms of the workplace, we are teaching them to
orient themselves and their needs toward objects. The
responsibility for most of this training is placed on
Mom’s shoulders. She is the target of the more than
1,000 parenting books listed in Books in Print, the
countless advice columns, TV and radio shows, and
videos—all dictating the minutia of everyday life with
children.The all-time best-selling Baby and
Child Care by Dr. Spock, a book that has influenced
millions of parents for over 40 years, recommends that if the
newborn starts out in her parents’ room, it is a good
idea to get her out by the time she is six months old. This
is the right age to move her because by then, she has
"the strength to take care of [herself] pretty
well." Perhaps what Dr. Spock has in mind is the fact
that a six-month old is strong enough to change position if
need be. In other words, she probably won’t suffocate
because she has the neck strength to lift her head. Other
problems—hunger, loneliness, boredom, insofar as they
are not rectified by the pacifier, bottle, mobile, or white
noise machine—will have to be tolerated.Dr. Spock suggests that if children are
still in their parents’ room by the age of six months,
"there is a chance that they may become dependent on
this arrangement and be afraid and unwilling to sleep
anywhere else." He doesn’t say that human children
are born dependent on their parents for many things, and that
children around the world and across time have slept with
their parents with no harm done as far as anyone can tell. He
doesn’t mention that his advice about where your baby
should sleep is historically specific and has more to do with
his personal prejudices and cultural roots than anything
else."Sometimes a small child is going
through a period of waking up frightened at
night—perhaps coming repeatedly into the parents’
room, perhaps crying persistently—and is taken into the
parents’ bed with them so that they can all get some
sleep. This seems like the most practical thing to do at the
time, but it usually turns out to be a mistake. Even if
the child’s anxiety lessens during the following weeks,
he is apt to cling to the security of his parents’ bed,
and there is the devil to pay getting him out again."
[italics added]His main priority seems to be that the
child not end up in your room for the night under any
circumstances. He does not say why. In the face of some very
strong emotions—fright, persistent crying,
anxiety—a parent may "comfort the child in his own
room" or "consult a doctor," but not do the
practical thing, and the thing that many parents know
instinctively will work the best, which, by the way, may also
be the thing the child is actually asking for: physical
comfort and company from his parents. Meanwhile, in resisting
the urge to do the "practical thing," we are
absorbing the lesson that we probably should not trust our
own instincts. We set ourselves up to require the aid of
experts simply to make it through the night or at least to
need more advice books. We are being directed away from the
solution that will allow us all to get some sleep.Dr. Spock does allow that a child could
share a room with a sibling but believes that "it’s
fine for children to have a room of their own, especially as
they grow older, where they can keep their own possessions
under control and have privacy when they want it."
Off to the Right Start
The message to children via their
parents is: don’t look for comfort from us, but
here’s a room where you can comfort yourself and
privately control your possessions. The cycle builds on
itself. The more a parent is advised and influenced by our
self-reliant consumerist culture, the more he is attracted to
the baby and child products that actually serve to distance
him from his child. How else could a catalog that promises to
"get your child off to The Right Start" feature a
"playful little timer [that] lets you record a personal
and positive time-out message. Clock face starts out
frowning, and at the end of time-out turns into a smile as
your personal message plays. Batteries included." So now
we not only send them to their rooms for soothing comfort
from machines and objects, we also send them there to be
disciplined by toy clocks that play back what could only be
some trivial sound bite of parental guidance. For only
$19.95, you can remove yourself another step from your
child’s life.Our children are good consumers in the
making. Toymakers have long been aware that successful toys
imitate adult activities. (Playthings, September
1993.) Shopping is an essential American skill.
"Melanie’s Mall is a center for more than just
shopping. Take the escalator to Beauty World, then head to
the food court, or head out through the revolving door!"
Or you can purchase for your child a "Supermarket
Check-Out with electronic scanner that beeps, a play credit
card, and pretend food." ("Boys Have Better
Toys" by Lydia Sargent, Z Magazine, November
1996.) The Boston Children’s Museum features as one of
its permanent exhibits a make believe grocery store where
children can wander down the aisles, loading their baskets
with plastic grocery replicas, and then purchasing them at
the pretend check-out counter.Toys also privatize the relationship
between parent and child. Parents think they can buy their
child the tools to make them smart, happy, and well adjusted,
and so their attention is directed away from the larger
social forces that might be affecting them. There’s a
new toy on the market called Sticky Situations. It allows
parents and children to work together placing stickers on
design boards to help them sort through difficult life
experiences, such as "Mommy’s having a baby,"
or "When will you be home?" There is also a version
that helps you explain to your child what he or she will be
doing the next day—"think of it as a sort of
Franklin Planner or Day Runner for kids who can’t read
yet." (Nation’s Business, January 1997.)
Rather than look to your community, extended family, or
social benefits package for help getting through sticky
situations, you can purchase a toy instead. As the
entrepreneurs have figured it, "There’s been a ton
of stuff with stickers out there—jobs charts and
calendars and more stuff than you can imagine—but nobody
has picked up on the emotional side yet." Although the
folks in the sticker business are just getting around to
using their product to meet emotional needs, Hallmark has not
been so slow on the uptake. A new line of their cards is
designed for absent parents who want to brightly remind their
child to have a good day or be good at school.The Boston Globe’s
"Child Caring" column advises us in an
"afterthought" to improve our children’s
self-esteem by saying something positive to them at least
five times a day. These quantified and purchased moments with
our children give us false comfort, even as the social
supports that might truly guide them as they grow up dwindle.
They do not encourage us to challenge our workplaces for more
leave so that we don’t need Hallmark to communicate with
our children. They don’t lead us to question whether
self-esteem-building comments can be squeezed into five
minutes of quality time or whether we will be capable of
keeping track of the count when we are run ragged by the
demands of home and work life. They don’t get us to
think about some of the stickier situations kids find
themselves in—poverty, bad schools, a toxic environment,
and unsupported families.
It Takes A Whole Baby Product
And<R>Advice Industry To Raise A ChildHow we parent, and what is considered
good parenting is historically specific. Practices that are
considered detrimental today were endorsed in our
parents’ or grandparents’ day. The marketplace is
one of the forces that shapes our opinion of good parenting.
Obviously, as parents, we don’t see our job as a mandate
to train little workers/shoppers, but the subtle and
not-so-subtle messages from baby books, magazines, and
advertising greatly affect our decisions about how to raise
children. The result is parents are made complicit in
society’s need for a population trained in the whys and
wherefores of a throwaway consumer culture, dependent on
gratifying needs through objects, able to accept and even
thrive on rigid schedules, and satisfied with—even
embracing—a work culture and a set of social services
that make it virtually impossible for families to choose an
attachment style of parenting that eschews the
objectification of the parent/child relationship and that
recognizes larger social forces (beyond the narrow confines
of the family) that influence a child’s well-being.Hillary Clinton says it takes a village
to raise a child. But in late 20th century North America,
there are few villages—unless you count the shopping
mall or the mail order catalog that just dropped through your
mail slot. To resist the commodification of parenting, we
have to reverse the isolation that most U.S. families
experience today. We have to give our children the
stimulating enriching experience of the presence and support
of their families and their communities, not the presents
brought to you by Mattel and licensed by Disney.
Cynthia Peters was a member of
South End Press for over ten years, and editor of Collateral
Damage.