The Madness of Modern Parenting by Zoe Williams

Author:Zoe Williams [Zoe Williams]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849548472
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2014-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Follow the money

Wherever you see a trend that makes no human sense, there’s always somebody, somewhere, making a lot of money out of it. The baby market – equipment, transport, safety, furniture and feeding products – is worth £900 million a year. That astonished me. When I first read it, I thought it meant children’s products and covered the years nought to eighteen. Nope – that’s just for babies. The more intense the risk aversion is, the more money there is to be made from it. Buggies are the obvious example, with new hazards dreamt up every year to warrant the purchase of a thousand-pound chariot. The reasons you can’t just plop them in a second-hand Maclaren are legion. If they’re not facing you, they won’t learn to empathise. If you haven’t got the right kind of foam, they’ll get a flat head. Childhood is a huge testbed for innovation. You just have to look at the trunki and the microscooter to see that. (If you don’t know what these are: microscooters are those maddening contraptions that bash you in the ankles when under the command of a two-year-old who can barely even stay upright; trunkis are those infuriating suitcases that you trip over in airports.) But babyhood is more like a testbed for exploiting the desperate.

Take sleep: parents would do anything for sleep. Babies who won’t sleep defy the laws of biology. Even the big ones need sixteen hours sleep a day, and yet, against the odds, some of them get by on two. I have friends in their forties whose parents still talk about how little they slept. This is not an impossible quandary; there are things you can do that they teach you in sleep clinics, so long as you are dogged, immovable, desperate and have some blackout blinds. But they won’t always work, and the problem won’t always be bad enough for referral to a sleep clinic. Even when it is bad enough, you probably won’t get referred for a few months, by which time the problem has often gone away. Into this huge breach – the parents whose problem is not quite bad enough for a referral, but is easily bad enough to ruin their lives and make them want to kill each other – steps entrepreneurship. Ewan the dream sheep or slumber bear are cuddly toys with special features – a ‘heartbeat’ or some such. They usually retail at around £30 – enough to make people think they might do something; not enough that they will engage their critical brain.

The pure, wishful-thinking nonsense underlying it all has been going on since the beginning of time. When you get a puppy, lore tells you to wrap an alarm clock and a hotwater bottle in a towel, and it will think it’s still with its mother. It is shamelessly wrong. No puppy in the history of time has mistaken a towel with a clock in it for its mother. I know; I have checked with dogs.

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