Customer Reviews

Parenting, Inc.

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Do they have bugaboo strollers where you live? They've hit New York like an invasion of cockroaches -- $800 cockroaches in artfully named colors like "mocha" and "timbre". Ten years ago you couldn't have spent $800 on a stroller if you had tried, but by 2005 or 2006 they had become the norm in many communities.

This book tackles the question of how this happened. Why do parents think that they need an $800 stroller? Why do they think their kids should watch "Baby Einstein" videos? Does the baby really need $80 face cream? Bugaboo strollers are treated in particular detail, with their initial marketing plan and the response by consumers dissected in fascinating detail.

My favorite chapters talked about the companies that supply this stuff -- from entrepreneurs (especially moms) who had a good idea and are looking to turn it into a profit, to the most cynical and crass corporate marketing machines. Many of the products discussed in the book may harm children, but the companies that sell them spend millions of dollars convincing parents that their children will be somehow at risk without them.

Modern society has weakened the extended families and tight-knit communities that once played an important role in the raising of children. Many parents have no good source for advice about the baby that is about to arrive, or has just arrived. Corporations have gleefully filled the void, and neither the kids nor the parents benefit from this.

To be clear -- this book is even-handed, and where Paul sees value in a good or service, she gives detailed credit to the people responsible. Her discussions of the bad stuff are, for me anyway, more fun to read.

I loved the book. About the only thing I wanted more of was the discussion of "kids as fashion items," where toddlers are dressed in expensive clothes and paraded about by egocentric parents. I still do not understand why people do such things.

Pamela Paul, who has written lucidly and piercingly about other issues in American culture, here examines the money and mentality of raising children. She begins by discussing baby sign language, and, right away I thought about the choices I made for my children. I never did get around to teaching my kids sign language, I didn't buy the most expensive cribs or cradles. Did I screw up?? Did I damage my children? Paul reassures me that, no, my kids will do just fine, thank you.
This book is interesting from a sociologic perspective. But it's also practical. I think that any new parent (or parent of a pregnant child) should read it to get a clearer vision on what children "must" have, and what children truly need.
The bottom line: children need more of what money can't buy. And if you spend less time going out to earn the money, maybe you'll be home more to give your kids what they need: you!

This book finally puts into words what I (and so many others) have been thinking. When did having a baby necessitate a seemingly endless shopping list of 'must buy' consumer goods? And it doesn't stop after infancy. Rather the pressure to over-educate, over-stimulate, and over-indulge in some communities seems to ramp up apace with a child's growth chart. Paul puts all this spending in perspective and offers some context to what has become a multi-million dollar industry: pampering the under 5's. When there are children starving around the world, such excess seems all the more out of whack. Pamela Paul gives you the facts in an anecdote-filled, interesting and comprehensive way. It's up to you to come to your own conclusions. The best kind of zeitgeist journalism.

As many have remarked, the author does an excellent job of pointing out the absurdities of our current child-centered age. The sheer number of times some simple activity is mentioned--a child's birthday party--and an outrageous sum--$25,000 to rent out FAO Schwarz--is enough to make the book worth reading, especially when coupled with the suggestion that we have most of what we need to have already inside ourselves.

I only have two criticisms:

1. Paul doesn't sufficiently emphasize the degree to which a class of people I've dubbed "Mommies" are responsible for all of this to begin with. She tends to present the marketers, manufacturers, and retailers who brought us the $1200 stroller as if they are sui generis, out of nothing. This isn't really how capitalism works. The need had to be there to begin with, however nascent and unformed. A more interesting historical account--perhaps out of the scope of this work--might have mentioned the increasing number of women in the 1980s and 1990s whose husbands had the kind of income to support one parent staying at home, and how these women, disproportionately well-educated and used to corporate projects, began to turn their kids into their corporate projects. The germ of Mommyism exploded into the kind of competition that we see characterizing most playgrounds and making working moms feel guilty in turn, and thus we got the materialism and consumerism that Paul documents so well here. An interesting anthropological observation might have been made about how these economic circumstances and their confluence with the drop of birthrates in the Western world has made each child seem more precious and important, but that's missing here.

2. The chapter Outsourcing Parenthood was a bit critical and off the mark. Some of the services she described with semi-horror--the sleep consultant, for example--seemed like very good ideas for tired parents. Often, professionals do know more than you do when you have a child, especially if it's your first. Paul did some minor equivocating about this, obviously realizing that it was true, but then continued to push her thesis too far. What actually seems to be true of the new upper middle class mothers around here is that they have somewhere and somehow imbibed the notion that if they don't do everything for their children personally, the children will fail to properly bond with them. This creates a class of women who are basically slaves to their children's every whim, and it's a sad thing to see. I can't help but think that this world would be a little better off if the highly educated and capable women who have quit their jobs to wipe noses and personally paint 20 paper plates for their children's nursery group (see Judith Warner's Perfect Madness) didn't outsource a bit more and get themselves back into jobs that would challenge them, instead of manufacturing imaginary challenges out of nursery school craft projects. If hiring a sleep consultant is what it takes to live life like an adult, count me in.

Still, an enjoyable book with a very valid thesis and howlingly horrifying anecdotes.

Anyone who has been a parent for more than a few years has probably noticed a change in style among many of today's new parents: a more anxious, urgent, competitive, and consumptive style. For example, in my neighborhood a large number of after-school tutoring centers have sprung up. They seem to do a brisk business. Parenting, Inc., by Pamela Paul, explores the big business that parenting has become and how that business both results from and contributes to the heightened anxieties of today's parents.

In countless ways parents seek the health, safety, comfort, happiness, and positive development of their children. According to Ms. Paul, this understandable impulse has lost all sense of proportion in America. She describes an explosion of baby stores and internet merchants that sell tens of thousands of products to new parents. Not just normal necessities. But extravagances like stroller speedometers, child-size toilet paper, infant perfumes, and baby monitoring systems that employ multiple infrared cameras and wireless technology. She also describes a growing designer aesthetic for baby gear: $55 pacifiers, $195 children's jeans, $900 high chairs, $700 crib mattresses, and a $1500 diaper bag.

For parents who want to give their children an academic head start, there are in-utero educational programs, infant flash cards, infant and toddler reading and foreign language instruction, music appreciation programs, and countless educational DVDs. Instead of the traditional play date or visit to the playground, parents can now enroll their children in junior country clubs, various infant and toddler classes, and countless other structured activities. And the average American child is drowning in toys. According to Ms. Paul, the U.S. has 4% of the world's children, but 40% of its toys.

Parent "outsourcing" businesses are also booming. For expectant mothers there are prenatal personal trainers, masseuses, and nutritionists. For childbirth itself there are childbirth coaches and doulas. For the period immediately following childbirth, there are lactation consultants, baby nurses, coaches, and mother's group leaders. And as the need arises, there are shopping services, meal preparation services, professional home baby proofers, experts that teach older siblings how to adjust to a new baby, psychologists for child and parent, tantrum tamers, nannies, nanny surveillance services, "momcierges," delousers, birthday party planners, kiddie taxi services... And numerous other "experts" who now perform tasks that were once performed by parents themselves.

I have two criticisms of this book. First, it is almost entirely anecdotal. Every chapter is a string of anecdotes, interviews, and opinions. I found this format tiring and I began to get the feeling that generalizations were being made about a whole generation of parents that are probably true for only a wealthy subset of them. Second, the book would have been more interesting if it contained more analysis of the motivations and consequences of the parental behavior it describes.

Ms. Paul touches briefly on various parental motivations, but she does not delve deeply into any of them. She suggests that parenting, like everything else in our culture, is becoming increasingly consumerist, that parents use their children to exhibit conspicuous consumption, that parents want their children to excel because their success reflects well on them as parents, and that first-time older parents often try to fit children around their lifestyle rather than change their lifestyle to accommodate children. However, she also suggests that many parents want to be good parents, but are terribly pressed for time, feel guilty about how little time they spend with their children, are anxious about their children's development, and are racked by self-doubt (possibly a result of ever increasing reliance on specialists and loss of traditional communities through which parenting skills are transmitted). All of these things add up to vulnerability to the parenting industry's advertising pitches.

Ms. Paul also mentions some of the consequences of over-anxious, over-structured, and materialistic child rearing. She suggests that we're creating a generation of kids who don't know what to do when left to their own devices. She says we're teaching instant gratification, but not problem solving, coping with frustration, or self-discipline. She questions whether it makes sense to try to make children happy all the time because it's when they're unhappy that they learn what they need to do to be content. She suggests that children learn primarily through play and interactions with others. And she opines that much of the stuff of today's parenting is touted as having educational or other benefits, but it really just takes the place of interactions between children and their parents.

If these ideas had been further developed, the book would have been more interesting, and probably more helpful to parents. Nevertheless, this is an interesting book that tackles an important topic and offers many good observations and insights.

Now i get it! This book is a must-read for grandparents who have been observing strange things going on in the world of parenting. Observation alone can be confusing and even demoralizing. This book has allowed me to understand the roots of seemingly bizarre, ever well meaning, definitely extravagant, behavior in my children's generation.
The easiest explanation for the seemingly ubiquitous hysteria of parents of young children is that they have all lost their minds....but now I get it! This book is a wonderful, intelligent examination of the pressures and temptations that distort good sense and lead normally sane and smart people to reach into their pocketbooks for all kinds of expensive goods and services that never existed before or were free or relatively cheap. Yikes.
If insight can help young parents resist French lessons for their fetuses or thousand dollar strollers, this book is the perfect gift to get into their hands, quickly, before the baby is born, while they have time to read it. For the grandparents, also a perfect book, because understanding is always a good thing.

Pamela Paul captures the culture of commercialism for child-rearing.The anxieties of being a parent have been capitalized on by manufacturers; and, parents are distracted from the realities of raising a baby.Not only is "stuff" stuffed down new parents throats,this is accompanied by false claims of excellence.Pamela Paul has researched her topic and added a dose of intuition, inspiration,common sense and humor to drive her point home. BRAVA!!!!!

I love Pamela Paul's book - it is one of the few "parenting" type books that I have read multiple times. I live in Manhattan with two young children, so many of the author's examples resonate with me. I particularly liked her chapter on toddler classes. When my first child was a toddler I tried out several "mommy and me" classes with him in an attempt to get out of the house and meet other parents. Most of the classes were shockingly inappropriate for young children, yet I seemed to be the only one in my peer group who felt that way. I continue to be amazed how willing my friends are to spend very significant amounts of money on classes for their children that may actually be developmentally harmful (such as the product based art classes Ms. Paul describes.) Why are very educated, successful and well-meaning people so completely clueless about child development?
I also enjoyed the chapter on "outsourcing parenthood:" While the author acknowledges that some parenting experts can provide valuable and important advice, she questions the general tendency to solve any parenting problem by involving a so-called expert. I tend to agree with her that in order to develop confidence as a parent it is important to tackle "difficult" parenting milestones yourself. I may not exactly have enjoyed potty training my son but it increased my confidence as a parent - and each such milestone provided me with important information about my son's personality.
My only quibble with the book relates to the chapters on baby gear. I take the author's point that it may be problematic and at the very least expensive to address each parenting hurdle by purchasing another gadget. When you have your first child, it is easy to fall into this trap and to end up with way too much stuff that may have served a purpose for a month or two and becomes quickly obsolete after that. I was certainly guilty of this approach myself, and when I first entered a Buy Buy Baby store after reading Parenting Inc. I started to laugh at all of the "necessities" on the shelves. However, I think that focusing on the high price tags of certain objects stokes the fire of the mommy wars unnecessarily. In my mind, there is nothing wrong with an $800 stroller provided that you can afford it. In fact, in Germany where I grew up people spend much less money on baby gear and plastic junk in general but tend to pay a lot of money for high-quality strollers because they walk much more with their children. There is no question that no one "needs" an expensive stroller. But is it any more wasteful than purchasing an inexpensive stroller and then replacing it twice when the wheels fall off (as many of my friends have done)? I think it is more interesting to focus on the consumer goods that may actually harm children - or at the very least the parent child relationship - rather than simply on luxury goods that may not be everyone's cup of tea but are hardly harmful.

I read this book from the perspective of a first-time grandfather of a toddler. I expected a number of changes in the art, science, and practice of parenting in the generation since I was a parent. I fully expected advances in pediatrics, the infrastructure of the child care system, and the application of technology to child care goods and services. I was not
prepared to read the author's description of the unleashing of frenetic consumerism on the children or on the development of narrow specialists in a field that was once considered as part of normal parenting skills. After reading this seminal expose I indulged in a touch of macabre by visiting the website that offered the thousand dollar BUGABOO stroller.

This book came to me highly recommended, and frankly - I agree with its title, subtitle and all of the precepts it puts forth. I was very much looking forward to seeing what the authoress had to say.

So I was nearly shocked into dropping it when, out of the gate, Pamela Paul chose Baby Sign Language as her whipping boy. Just how much further she could have missed the mark on this topic, I do not know.

As a parent of two boys under four, we found BSL to be an invaluable tool for understanding, communication, and above all avoidance of frustration.

A baby has more going on in his or her brain than he can possibly express. Without proper control over vocalization, all he can do to get his wishes across to his parent is to cry or flail.

Instead, giving your baby the tools she needs to communicate is a priceless and amazing gift. You do not need to spend hundreds of dollars on this. Classes are optional - it needs only be between you and your infant. You can get a secondhand book with basic signs for under ten dollars. In fact, MAKE UP YOUR OWN if nothing else! ("hungry" "thirsty" "tired" "pick me up" "diaper" and "pain" are good starters) The important thing is that you and she understand each other, not that she's got proper grammar.

In fact, the first time your baby TELLS you that she's HUNGRY, instead of crying while you ineffectually ask "Are you cold? Hot? Tired? Wet? Want a toy?" you will realize just how valuable this is.

Do not treat it as Pamela Paul apparently did - it is not a status symbol, checkbox for a baby's resume, or fad for Brooklyn yuppies.

It is, however, a wonderful step toward connecting with your baby, and letting him feel safe in the knowledge that (a) he has a voice, and (b) mommy and daddy actually hear him, and are there to take care of him.

Rob