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Fear and shopping

A nurse at Squamish General Hospital gave us just one simple piece of advice on child rearing before we brought Eleanor home from the maternity ward — “all you have to do is love her, and don’t drop her on her head.

A nurse at Squamish General Hospital gave us just one simple piece of advice on child rearing before we brought Eleanor home from the maternity ward — “all you have to do is love her, and don’t drop her on her head.”

I’m pleased to say that we’ve succeeded on both accounts so far, despite her best efforts to squirm out of our arms.

But while babies start out simple, like everything they tend to get more complex over time. The things we do or don’t do in the first two years of her life will help determine who she becomes emotionally and intellectually.

These days that apparently means filling your house with all kinds of brightly coloured, Made In China plastic toys that may or may not be toxic, or stitched together in sweatshops.

The companies that make these toys would have us believe that our children’s emotional and intellectual development hinges on the things we buy. Having a child may be one of the wonders of life, but it’s being commercialized like Christmas or Valentine’s Day.

Take Baby Einstein, a maker of toys and multimedia products for kids of all ages — including a line of controversial DVDs for children as young as three months. I don’t want to take a swing at a company that seems to have done its research and manufactures some pretty good products, but I’d argue that showing your three-month-old baby DVDs probably makes you a bad parent no matter what your intentions are. Television, no matter how well conceived or executed, can never be a substitute for face time with your child and experiences in the real world, unless all you care about is intellectual development.

Even then opinions are mixed. The American Association of Pediatrics discourages TV completely for children under the age of two, while a study by the University of Washington found that kids who watched educational DVDs under the age of two were actually behind other children in language development. For kids 17 to 24 months there were no significant effects from watching video either way, while daily reading and storytelling almost always results in higher language scores for toddlers.

I could excuse Baby Einstein, and their parent corporation Walt Disney Company, for agreeing to disagree on the impact of these videos, but the whole premise of their brand is based on guilt — use our products, the name suggests, and your kids can be as smart as Albert Einstein. Or don’t and live with the consequences.

It not-so-subtly preys on the natural guilt that parents have that they may be too busy to spend a lot of face time with their children, and our fears that our kids will be left behind, first at school and then in life.

Never mind that Albert Einstein himself grew up without plastic playmats or Baby Bach ™ — Musical Adventure on DVD, or the fact that for all his extreme genius in the world of physics Einstein is probably not the best example of a happy, well-rounded individual.

Baby Einstein isn’t the only company out there pushing the genius child fantasy — far from it. And the genius child fantasy isn’t the only marketing gimmick out there for new parents to look out for. There’s the “safe baby” fantasy, which implies that the world is more dangerous than it is and the only way to be safe is to buy certain things. And then there’s the “happy baby” fantasy, which suggests that babies pictured on the box are smiling because they’re using the right products instead of the more likely explanation that mommy is standing next to the photographer. It also wrongly implies that happy babies will always grow up to be happy people, that happiness is somehow more important or more valid to development than the whole range of human emotions.

The last marketing gimmick is the good parent trap, where we think we have to buy the best of everything to prove we love our baby.

I confess that I’m not entirely above the good parent trap. This week I shelled out $200 for a baby carrier because it came with an extra strap for lumbar back support. I also seriously considered spending another $200 for a state of the art humidifier when my baby caught a cold.

Somehow I’ve bought into the idea that babies are incredibly fragile, but if that’s the case how can I explain my own existence? When I was born people still smoked in hospitals, drank while pregnant to calm nerves, and fed us bottles of cow milk formula instead of human breast milk because it was supposed to be better. I never had a car seat, and I’m pretty sure my crib and stroller were coated in lead paint and would have been recalled today.

I had one of those walkers with the wheels attached that were permanently recalled after probably dozens of kids tumbled down stairwells. When I was teething, my parents rubbed brandy on my gums to numb them.

Today, any parent who did any of the things that parents were taught to do when I was a child would be visited by child services.

It’s time for a little sanity in child-rearing.

Being the first kid in preschool to speak or use a potty doesn’t make you a genius. Being the last kid to learn to read or add two and two doesn’t make you a dunce. We all learn differently and at different speeds, and in ways that can’t always be measured by standardized tests.

We are all the sum of a million little experiences in life and in school, and not a product of the products our parents bought for us when we were three months old.

We all just need love, patience and encouragement. And to not be dropped on our heads.