Letters to the Editor
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Blankies
Don't pick on the blankets...the swaddling blankets helped our very fussy baby to finally sleep. Although the Halo sleepsacks with the swaddling feature are better than the SwaddleMe.
But the $1000 strollers are ridiculous.
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Fussy strollers
I was at Pete's in San Francisco watching mom's and their kids and it occurred to me that it was impossible to lose money by selling a too fancy stroller. Some people had what was essentially a rolling piece of artwork. I don't think the idea is to provide better care for the baby, but rather to impress other people and other parents that in your family budget there's almost no constraints. It's what used to be called conspicuous consumption. I'm so damn rich I can spend $2000 on a stroller.
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Two things
As the mother of a toddler, and a girl on the way who will spend the first year of her life in "boy clothes", I have to disagree with the author's idea of baby sign language. Paul is completely missing the point. Children are able to sign long before they are able to speak words, and this was particularly true for my son. Though he was verbally quiet his first 15 months (due to a late-diagnosed physiological problem with his mouth), he did learn four signs that communicated everything: eat, milk, more and water. Add in pointing and we usually knew what he needed.
Of course, we didn't teach him because we thought he'd ace his SAT's later on. We taught him because several pediatricians and published research said this was beneficial to letting toddlers communicate their needs at an earlier stage than they normally could.
Not *everything* is hype. But sometimes things are hyped unnecessarily.
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wouldn't baby sign language retard a kid's talking?
I don't know; I don't have kids and I'm not a pediatrician.
But it seems that if a kid learns how to make signs for various things he wants and Mommy jumps up and gets those things for him, he doesn't have as much incentive to learn to speak clearly.
(My very earliest memory is of incredible frustration. I was laying on my back in the stroller, unable to lift myself up to where I could stick my hand in a rip in the stroller lining--it was navy blue vinyl, there was an L-shaped rip in it, and the padding inside was a green foam--and trying to make my Dad understand that I wanted to be lifted up THAT FAR and NO FURTHER so I could feel the green stuff. I don't know how old I would have been at the time, but I talked at eight months and haven't shut up since.)
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yeah, exactly
The sign language thing is exactly like with those other fancy languages like "Chinese" and "Spanish". I mean, I don't understand why anyone would bother to learn them when the world already has a perfectly good language. That's English, of course, and not that high-falutin' British kind -- regular good old American English.
Exposing kids to those foreign sounds could hurt their proper development and screw up their whole life by giving them the notion that not everyone is the same. Can't have that at an early age!
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my $800 stroller
...me loves it. I won't try to legitimize its price (and I don't really have to seeing as it was a gift from Auntie), but let me tell you as a first-time parent, I was overwhelmed with the logistics of transporting an infant around. With all of the difficulties of a colicky baby, I couldn't imagine how I would've gotten out of the house without it. We don't do Gymboree; we don't do Baby Einstein. We breastfeed, go to free mom's groups, use cloth, and there's no tv for the baby. But I dare anyone to figure out how to take my nonstop crying baby out the door and down four flights of stairs for a walk without my stroller.
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Okay, but seriously.
Bashing the pricey strollers is basically a trend in itself. There was an article in the Boston Globe doing the same thing a few years ago, featuring some choice quotes from suburban parents who felt like they had to somehow buy, buy, buy to keep up with the hip city parents.
The thing is, if you're just using the thing to move your kid between your house and your SUV and the mall, you certainly don't need a fancy stroller. That doesn't mean the solidly-built well-featured models aren't useful for those of us who do live in the city and walk as our primary means of transportation -- even when there's 18" of snow on the sidewalks.
I'm sure lots of people buy hiking boots and then sit at their desk all day -- but that doesn't mean one should bash the availability of $200 boots "when $20 models will do just as well for everyone".
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whoa, whoa, whoa...
I got nothing against ASL or any other foreign language. (I minored in Spanish and know a little French, BTW, and wished I'd had the opportunity to be exposed to those languages more when I was younger, could hear better, and could pick them up easier.)
I don't think parents who teach a kid "baby sign language" are doing it to teach them about diversity. They're doing it to make it easier to understand what the kid wants, which is perfectly reasonable.
My point was that part of what makes a kid learn to talk is realizing he NEEDS to know this in order to get what he wants. A little bit of frustration is probably good for babies' brains.
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Baby Einstein and parent-and-me classes
I agree with the basic premise of this article, but I think it complains about some things that are actually pretty useful. Have you really met anyone who uses Baby Einstein in order to make their kids smarter? I haven't. I doubt very many parents are getting "bamboozled" by the marketing. It's pretty well understood that its best use is to give parents a break. And, unlike a 2-hour Disney film (or even a 1-hour Sesame Street), the DVDs run around 20 minutes or so, so it's easy to limit the TV time. I don't think it's a bad thing for children that their parents get a few minutes to eat lunch or throw in a load of laundry.
Also, parent-and-me classes are wonderful. I can't speak to Gymboree (which may well be overpriced), but the YMCA offers classes for a very reasonable price. The kids get a kick out of the change of scenery and song-time and the ability to run around in a big open area with a bunch of other kids. Certainly it is great for parents, but a happy parent contributes to a happy child. Sure, it would be great if I could hunt up ten other parents in my neighborhood with babies around my daughter's age and find someone's house that was big enough, safe enough, and had decent play equipment for the purposes of having biweekly community play-dates twice a week for free, but what is the likelihood of that (especially in the city) -- and what is the problem with having it at an offsite location, if it's not busting your budget?
I also agree with a previous poster that baby signing has a lot of benefits. My daughter never took to it, but I don't see any reason to assume that parents who do it and like it are being bamboozled.