08.02.05
If you don’t buy, you’re a bad parent
Some friends have already started pressuring me about getting a baby registry list set up, so I went to what comes close to being the unique place for such a thing in the Bay Area last week-end. Spending a couple of hours there is akin to being submitted to some kind of very refined torture. There is so much…stuff! Just like the wedding industry, the baby industry is quite advanced in making consumers feel they never buy enough or well. Oh the many ways to make you feel guilty and spend your money! Interestingly, with all these options and choices, or maybe precisely because of this multitude of offerings, I still don’t feel that the right products are out there:
- there is a lack of good, conceptually well thought-out products
- there is a lack of modern, elegantly designed products
- the materials used for most of these products are appalling (one word: plastics)
- there is a lack of variety in styles. Things are so cookie-cutter. Take cribs for example! I understand there has to be standards for the mattresses and sheets, but do we need 10 different types of blond wood sleigh cribs?
Comparing what is available in France and here has also been very interesting. Whether it is for something as simple as patterns for knitted baby clothes - ugly and tacky at best here, cute and original in France - or for larger products. Why are portable bassinets a rarity in this country? How else is someone supposed to hang out for a few hours at a friend’s place or a restaurant while the baby sleeps nearby? I wonder if this particular point of the portable bassinet reveals something more serious about the approach to parenthood in the two cultures. Is it a way in the US of telling women that they should not be out and about with their child? That once you have a child, you are not to go out and see your friends anymore? All right, I’m probably reading too much into this and projecting my own fears into it. I’m sure I’m not the only one who fears that her existence as a human being will end as her child comes to life.
Still the portable bassinet mystery puzzles me…