If you have been or currently are an expectant parent, then you have faced the daunting task of trying to anticipate what your new baby will need. As you maneuver your empty cart down aisles of car seats, breast pumps and self-help books on how to be a “good mother,” you stand in front of a dizzying collection of baby formulas, unable to choose which one is “best” for your child. Which one are you supposed to choose? How are you supposed to know?
There is a seemingly limitless array of products, services and resources that are deemed “necessary” to raise a child. However, as David Adamson says for The New York Times, “The baby market is essentially a commodity market.” Adamson talks about the 2013 Brooklyn Baby Expo and how shocked he was by the number of companies singing the praises of natural products and organic food.
Before, parents knew that their babies needed clothes, food and car seats, but they had fewer options. They could go to a store and pick whichever product they felt was the best out of the two or three popular brands. But, according to Adamson, Amazon alone has at least 2,417 different pacifiers, 1,000 car seats and 3,085 bath toys, most of which are “essentially identical, made from the same inexpensive raw materials – metal, plastic, foam, wood – and manipulated into similar shapes tested in the same way.”
Of course, it can be argued that having this many options can actually be beneficial for the child and the parents. It has always been said that parenting does not come with a rulebook, but now there are thousands of parenting resources available to help mothers and fathers raise their children. According to Publishers Weekly, Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel’s “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” sold 249,000 paperback copies in 2014 alone.
Not only that, but living in a digitally-driven culture means parents can easily search for blogs, forums and articles to answer all their questions. Barbara Jones, executive editor at Holt, tells Publishers Weekly, “For general how-to type service, we parents can go to the Internet. Personally, I’ve Googled ‘Why is my teenaged daughter being snarky all of sudden?’”
From quick questions about a teenager’s attitude to serious questions about an infant’s brain development, the Internet has an assortment of information available to help parents take better care of their children; and, many of these articles get massive digital exposure. For example, Publishers Weekly shares that family therapist Marilyn Wedge’s 2012 article in Psychology Today titled “Why French Kids Don’t Have ADHD” has over 1.2 million Facebook likes.
This influx of information can also become problematic when it becomes too overwhelming to filter through. When there is a seemingly infinite amount of resources readily available, how will parents know which ones are reliable? According to Fox Business, many proponents of organic materials claim that it is important to use organic products because “Whatever you put on your baby’s skin is being absorbed into the bloodstream.” Do you really want thousands of toxins going into your baby’s bloodstream?
However, other articles such as the Washington Post article titled “Organic Baby Food: It’s More Expensive, but It May Not Be More Nutritious” argue that there is “no strong evidence in favor of the organics.” In fact, Tiffani Hays, the director of pediatric nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, tells The Washington Post, “Vitamins, minerals and fiber have much better research and documented health benefits than does choosing organic.”
Because there is a host of conflicting advice available, parents are not only left with seemingly unlimited choices to make, they are also often backed into a corner of guilt. Although many reputable sources argue that it is okay to save money and not buy organic, the baby industry imposes this strong idea that if, as a parent, you are not taking the natural route, then you are a bad parent.
For example, in a Washington Post article, Amy Tuteur, an obstetrician-gynecologist and former clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, writes about how natural birthing trend has become an industry in itself. Tuteur says that today, “women are supposed to have the most authentic possible experience…they should reject pain relief; eliminate C-sections; embrace midwives, doulas, and childbirth educators; and even defy standard obstetric recommendations when they conflict with these goals.”
Natural-childbirth, similar to the way the wedding industry is marketed, “aims to shepherd women toward an ideal birth experience.’” It imposes the idea that women have one chance to create the perfect day for them, their child and their loved ones. Even if a C-section is sometimes necessary to, according to Tuteur, “save the life of a baby who may not survive without it,” mothers who are looking for the “perfect” experience will feel a “source of bitter shame” if they do not have a natural birth.
In Tuteur’s article, she writes, “[This ideal birth experience] is packed with emotional meaning and marketed as absolutely necessary and life-altering.” Attaching emotions and feelings of happiness and satisfaction to consumer goods is a tactic that was used in the 1950s to manipulate consumer desire and needs.
According to Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” advertisers manipulate a woman’s emptiness and insecurity by bombarding her with products that claim to satisfy her need for creativity. At this time, a woman was considered a “good wife and mother” if she was able to use one product to do multiple household chores, if she picked the safest product for her family’s health or if she bought quality products on sale.
In “Advertising the American Woman” by Joseph Dispenza, for example, there is a photograph for an advertisement for A-penn Home Dry Cleaner that promotes the ability to make “fall cleaning [easier and] thriftier.” Not only does this provide a solution to the unpleasant qualities of time-consuming housework, it also emphasizes the woman’s ability to be “thrifty” and proud of her efficiency. According to Freidan, these feelings of pride and success allow a woman to “[feel] less like an unskilled laborer [and] more like an engineer, an expert.”
If a woman could not be convinced to be happy, then mass media targeted emotions of fear in guilt. In Adriana Gil-Juárez’s article “Consumption as an Emotional Control Device” in Theory and Psychology, she writes, “Through consumption, products are incorporated into our self…with emotions, especially fear, being an essential component of the decision.” Once consumers are taught to invest objects with emotional significance, it becomes easier to, as Mary Edwardsen says in “The Corporate Influence on the Images of Women in Advertising,” “make people feel unsure and then convince them to act in a suggested way.”
Unfortunately, manipulating emotions is just one of the tactics used to figure out which items people will pay more for. In Davidson’s New York Times article, he says, “Because it is extremely difficult to make money in a highly competitive commodity market, manufacturers look for ways to justify higher profit margins.” While some people are willing to pay extra money for more convenient items such as an easy-to-fold stroller, Davidson says, “Many [people] respond to fear.” Parents start asking questions like: “Is my child safer in Baby Trend’s Inertia car seat for $179.99 or with Safety 1st’s Air Protect+ system, which costs $189.99? Davidson even points out that some people are “willing to spend an extra $250 or so for an organic-cotton car-seat cover to minimize the baby’s contact with artificial fabric.”
Having a child is already expensive, but this luxury baby industry multiplies the expenses. According to Parenting, the United States Department of Agriculture reported in 2010 that “the average middle-income family will spend roughly $12,000 on child-related expenses.” But, these prices can easily triple when parents are being persuaded to pay $700 on an UppaBaby stroller or $200 on baby monitors.
Bloomberg writes that the luxury baby market did not really exist before the 1990s. But baby-only “megastores” such as Buybuy Baby and Babies “R” Us are what helped “stoke demand for $500 cribs and $100 baby monitors.” In addition, Bloomberg says the introduction of online commerce is what allowed pricier European companies such as Peg Perego to obtain a high market share with $800 strollers. Although the luxury baby market dropped from a $10.3 billion market to $9.4 billion during the recession in 2008, Fortune reported in 2015 that it had grown much higher than $10 million.
Although the Internet has introduced parents worldwide to important information about childcare and children’s health, the question of “When is it too much?” arises. Do you really need to pay over $700 for a stroller? Are The Honest Company diapers really worth the extra money? According to Statista, today the baby care market size worldwide is estimated to be about $47.7 billion. Imagine how much of that market comes from overpriced baby products. Every family is different and every baby will need different things. One of the best ways to filter through this information is by, as an article on Racked suggests, “taking a parent or grandparent with you to the store. If they didn’t use it, odds are, you don’t need it!”
