No Product Left Behind
“Ah son, you don’t need all that junk. I’m sure you’ve already got something much more important, a decent home and a loving father who would do anything for you.” - Homer Simpson
I was in a Babies R Us for the first time in five or six years yesterday. It was a surprising island of calm amidst the hubbub of Christmas shopping. The clerks asked each customer if the purchase was off a baby registry and at least half the answers I heard, including my own, were affirmative. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by the lack of holiday frenzy; humping, and its inevitable byproducts, are about as non-seasonal as things get.
The store is still pretty creepy though. For one thing, the staff was comprised almost entirely of girls either in high school or not far removed from it. On a completely logical level there’s nothing strange about that, but in a country that has a constant background hysteria over teenage pregnancy (witness the hand wringing over the Spears girl this week) it is a little off putting. For another thing, there are huge posters and hanging pictures (6′ x 4′ easy) of smiling, Caucasian infants all over the place. As strange as it is to try and conduct a business transaction with barely post pubescent females beneath cherubic iconography, that isn’t the creepiest aspect of the place. The most disturbing thing is the way the entire store is set up to indoctrinate adults into the consumer ethos of American parenting.
While perusing the baby registry I jumped to the websites of some of the manufacturers. The utter lunacy of some of these products cannot be overstated. To call many of them insane is inadequate; I don’t think there’s a word for what they are. The amount of shit people buy and use for their kids is incomprehensible. Over at Safety 1st, they have three different nail trimmers of various complexities. The sales message of marketing a product as unremarkable as nail clippers under a brand of “Safety” is a simple one: You are a Bad Mommy if you use regular nail clippers - because those might chop off a finger! Never mind the fact that the world is not filled with people walking around with missing fingertips because their parents had trouble clipping their nails when they were infants.
Just at the Safety 1st website (I don’t like exclusively picking on them because I’m sure they have a lot of company, but they have the most egregious website) there’s a blanket shaped so that it will protect the kid from the seat built into shopping carts, a “Play Yard” which appears to be a play pen but without implying that your child is in prison, knee pads for when the little sperm sprout is learning to crawl and a whole host of other shit you can use to overprotect your child.
If you want to see something absolutely disgraceful though, check out this video. It’s a product sales pitch built around the idea that everything in your home is a potentially fatal hazard. While that’s certainly true in a very paranoid way, any innocuous object can be fatal given enough cockamamie and improbable scheming, it’s also wholly disingenuous. But claiming, as the video does, that, “This year, more children will die as a result of an unintentional injury than from all childhood diseases combined,” is boldly dishonest. I have no statistics to back me up, but I’m calling bullshit on that. I can’t believe that’s true even if you restrict yourself to someplace like the Upper East Side where wealth and adult attention know no bounds.
No wonder parents in this country are all nuts. Just having the kid is probably one of the most stressful things you’ll ever go through and on top of that you have to deal with the Safety 1st mafias of the world? Raising a kid, creating another person who will in turn influence other people and the world in general in ways large and small, is an awesome task. There is no right or wrong way to go about it because every individual human being is unique and so is every relationship between a parent and a child. But scaring the shit out of new parents isn’t the way to go. In it’s small sop to honesty, I’m sure compelled only by liability concerns, that video even says that no matter how many of their products you purchase, it’s no substitute for adult supervision. That’s the rub.
If you want to keep the little tyke from getting burned, don’t put child slowing (anyone who tells you something is child proof is lying) pieces of plastic over your oven controls, teach him that fire is hot and can burn you. It’s a simple lesson and learning from adults is the only way kids really grow up.
