The experts told us what to do, and we screwed up.
So what’s the alternative? Reading every book and article and trying to do absolutely all the stuff they recommend? (She asked rhetorically.) Or avoiding the experts entirely and perhaps missing out on some good advice?
Well, it’s obviously somewhere in the middle, according to a bona fide expert expert, Dr. Stephen Barrett. Barrett is board chairman at Quackwatch, a nonprofit group that examines the health advice being given to the public and flags the information that is scientifically unproven—or just plain wrong.
If you’re looking for answers and don’t know where to turn, Barrett says, “Look for credentials.” A book by the American College of Obstetricians, for instance, or a site run by the American Academy of Pediatrics. “I don’t recommend that people use Google to search for health advice,” Barrett adds, because so much of what pops up is wacky. (More on that in a sec.) “The Internet has made many people more visible. I’m not sure that when it comes to advice, this is helpful.”
I’m not sure, either. That’s why Barrett’s other suggestion—“Ask your doctor”—seems obvious, but smart. If you have a whole lot of questions, then ask your doctor to recommend a reliable book.
But of course, plenty of parents don’t trust any of the old “reliable” sources anymore. They’re more ready to believe the ones who say, “Whatever you’ve heard is fine, isn’t.” So sometimes, even if there’s reassuring news—such as that the FDA has determined that the chemicals in plastic baby bottles are not going to turn your boy into a girl—it’s hard to hear that message because it’s the nay-saying “experts” who get the attention and airtime. (Did I mention in the media chapter preceding this one: fear sells?)
Our generation is remarkably receptive to skepticism because we grew up learning not to trust any company or institution that says, “Trust us—you can trust us.”
Most of us came of age right alongside the consumer protection movement. As kids we learned that car companies knew about brake problems but hid them from the public, even as the cigarette manufacturers knew they were giving us cancer but pretended that they didn’t. Understandably, we grew up pretty cynical.
But over the years, as we stopped trusting additives and preservatives and pesticides and saccharine and Western medicine and government and pretty much anything that wasn’t an organic potato wrapped in a recycled paper bag from Whole Foods, some of us just threw up our hands and decided it was impossible to trust anything or anyone. (Except Oprah.) The minute we heard something new and nefarious about a time-honored product or practice, a whole lot of us were ready to embrace it. Shampoo gives you cancer? We knew it!
The Web can confirm these fears—and spawn new ones. Is your water safe? Your cereal? Your sandbox? But as Barrett points out (knowing full well he will sound like just another “establishment” source not to be trusted): most companies really do not try to sell us deadly or defective products. Even if they have no corporate conscience whatsoever, doing wrong is still not worth it to them, because if they harm a single child, they’ll have to recall millions of products. Or millions of us will join a class-action suit. Either way, that will hurt their bottom line.
So we have a choice: we can trust the self-proclaimed experts warning us that our body wash is toxic—and by the way, so is everything else—or we can just be glad we’re living in a highly regulated society that truly isn’t teeming with killer products.
In 1946, Dr. Spock famously began his baby care book with these reassuring words: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” The mantra of today’s experts—“Trust us. There is so much you don’t know”—seems designed to drive us mad.
To calm down, remember that the best child-rearing advice boils down to the old basics. Listen to your kids. Love them. Keep them out of oncoming traffic.
And when you’re pregnant, don’t eat a baloney sandwich in oncoming traffic, either.
REAL WORLD
Baby Magazine Madness
A Free-Ranger who signs herself, “Living in Fear” writes:I read some “advice” from a baby magazine saying that you should not leave the baby in the house and run out to get the mail—you never know when a fire may start. It’s making me crazy.
Going Free Range
Free-Range Baby Step: Don’t buy any new parenting books unless they have the words “Range” or “Free” somewhere in the title.
Free-Range Brave Step: Immediately stop Googling any and all combinations of the words “toxic,” “childhood,” “should,” “esteem,” “whole grain,” “cover-up” and “guilt.”
One Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: Free yourself from advice overload by remembering that we got to this point in human history without the benefit of child-rearing manuals, pregnancy diet books, or potty training treatises. If you seek parenting advice, first try asking an older parent you admire. She’ll be thrilled, and her advice won’t last 378 pages.
Commandment 4
Boycott Baby Knee Pads
And the Rest of the Kiddie
Safety-Industrial Complex
The jazzy strains of the CBS Early Show theme song are coming from the living room. “Parents of any age are about to get something a little extra on Mondays,” promises the pleasant host. “This morning we launch our weekly segment called ‘Parental Guidance,’ with a look at some potential dangers found in almost every home.”
Help for us clueless parents. Hooray.
The show goes live to a Manhattan apartment where James Hirtenstein, a professional babyproofer—yes, it’s a real job now—is perched at the top of a steep staircase. He is about to take us on a tour of all the scary parts of this apartment, though I promise you, if you’re talking about a duplex in Manhattan, the scariest part must be the mortgage. Hirtenstein begins with the stairs, of course, recommending a special kind of gate. Then he goes to the living room, where he recommends little stoppers that keep the doors from shutting all the way, lest they chop off a child’s finger. In the kitchen, he recommends locks on the fridge, lest a child . . . I’m not quite sure what. Grab a beer? And then he is ready to discuss perhaps the scariest room in the house.
“Bathroom!” he says. “Extremely dangerous.” He’s speaking in staccato now, like a Marine. “Toilet lid locks have to be on every toilet in the house!”
“Why?” asks the host.
“Why?” the babyproofer replies. “On average two children a week die in toilets.”
Two a week? What a horrible way to go!
Some parents probably didn’t even wait for the commercial before sprinting off to the babyproofing store—or sprinting off to call Mr. Hirtenstein’s babyproofing company. But if they had sprinted off instead to the Web site run by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission—the federal agency that warns us about everything from recalled baby swings to defective toasters—they could have looked up the actual statistics on death by toilet bowl drowning. And guess what?
“The typical scenario involves a child under three years old falling head first into the toilet,” reads the agency’s home drowning study. “CPSC has received reports of sixteen children under age five who drowned in toilets between 1996 and 1999.”
Sixteen children over the course of four years. That’s four a year.
Not two a week.
Of course, any drowning is a terrible tragedy. And little children do need to be supervised in the bathroom, and never left alone in the tub. (Read the Safe or Not? entry “Pools and Water and Kids and Toilets” to see why.) It is always a good idea to keep the bathroom door closed. But the babyproofer’s stats were off by 2600 percent! The fear that he sowed in millions of viewers will now make them more certain than ever that their children are living in incredible danger.
Which works very nicely, if you happen to be in the biz of selling kid safety products to parents.
This is not say that all purveyors of these products are out to hoodwink parents. It’s not even to say that there aren�
�t some wonderful products out there that really do make children safer, like car seats, which have lowered the chances of a fatal car injury by over 50 percent. It’s just to say that in order to sell $1.7 billion worth of products to parents and make raising a child an extremely pricey—not to mention nerve-racking—proposition, businesses have to convince parents that minor dangers are major. Which is exactly what has happened.
Let’s take a look at some of the newer safety products being marketed to parents, starting with baby knee pads.
Yes, knee pads. Exactly what you’d want your nine-month-old to wear if he were drafted into the NFL. Except that these pads—“the cushiest, comfiest knee pads ever,” according to the One Step Ahead catalog—are for crawling. “These medical-grade neoprene knee guards give little crawlers unparalleled protection, while slip-proof ‘traction beads’ guard against skidding.”
Skidding? Like your baby is going to round the corner so fast, we’ll see sparks shooting out of her Huggies? What kind of fools do they take us for, that we’d be worried about this time-honored stage of babyhood? Knees were made for crawling. So were kids! Yet look what one mom wrote on the One Step Ahead Web site, under the baby knee pads “product review.”
“Sometimes my daughter has problems going from carpeting to the wood and marble floors. It helps her with traction to keep from spinning out. Unfortunately, she did not like the feel on her legs and refused to wear them.”
Score one for the baby! But that mama—she really worries about her daughter “spinning out” while crawling. And other parents writing to the site were just as sold.
Another product you see advertised in parenting magazines lately is the “Thudguard”—a helmet to protect your child while he’s engaged in that extreme sport known as toddling.
“It’s about time that someone has addressed the diffuse head injuries that are . . . on the rise for toddlers learning to walk,” wrote one doctor in an endorsement of the product.
Oh really? On the rise? Because suddenly evolution made a U-turn and now children are careening into walls and tables like never before?
And even if babies do bump and bumble, are they really in danger of sustaining serious “head trauma,” as claims the ad for this $39 helmet (that makes your child look like he just had brain surgery)? Let us consult again with calm, wise Dr. F. Sessions Cole, chief medical officer at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
“We see 65,000 to 70,000 patients a year,” says Dr. Cole. “How many are associated with significant head trauma that resulted from instability as toddlers learned to walk?” he asks.
None.
That’s a number that’s not going up and not going down. Unlike sales of Thudguard, which was originally a British product but is now available in America and everywhere else parents are flipping out.
At the Babies R Us near me, there’s an entire room devoted to child safety devices: unsurprising stuff like cabinet locks and electrical outlet covers. Ridiculous stuff like easy-to-grip baby soap. (Good in baby prison, I guess.) And then there’s a whole display of special car mirrors that allow you to watch your baby in the backseat as you drive. “Why do you need one of these?” I asked a dad reaching for one.
“To see if the baby’s OK,” he said.
I suppose I knew he’d say that. But what we’re talking about here is a parent checking up, while driving, on a child who is already strapped snugly into a federally approved car seat. A child strapped in there with a five-point belting system specifically to be “OK.” It’s really hard to imagine how the child would not be OK, and besides, if he were fussy, you’d hear him. Then, at a stoplight, you could turn your head and look at him.
But now, with about ten different special child car mirrors to choose from, it starts to feel as if good parents do have to check on their car-seat baby even more often. That means they have to take their eyes off the road. And that’s really too bad, because car accidents are the NUMBER ONE PREVENTABLE CAUSE OF CHILDREN’S DEATH in America. Naturally, we don’t know how many are caused by parents taking their eyes off the road and peering into their baby rearview mirrors. But as parents are always saying, better safe than sorry.
Leave the mirror at the store, and the whole family will probably be better off. And you’ll save enough money for ice cream for everyone, too. (There is nothing dangerous about ice cream. Nothing.)
Here’s one last example of a safety product that we don’t need, and how it undermines our own good sense: the heat-sensitive bath mat.
This is a mat you put in the bottom of the tub. Turn the water on, and if the words TOO HOT! magically appear in a bubble near the duckie’s head, you know that the water is, indeed, too hot! Because who can trust her own wrists anymore?
Oh wait a sec. We all can. Dip a wrist in the water, and you yourself can tell if that water is warm, cold, or boiling hot. (Key word: YEOW!) So why on earth is there not only this heat-sensitive bath mat for sale but also a competing turtle you can put in your tub that will indicate TOO HOT! too? (Not a real turtle, who would indicate that by turning into soup.)
Why? Same reason you can buy a blanket with a headboard built into it, in case you want to hold your baby but are worried about breaking his neck. Forget the fact you have an arm built for that job.
Same reason you can buy a harness to hold up your kid up like a marionette while she learns to walk. Forget the fact you could hold her up yourself, or even let her fall. She’s got a bottom built for that job.
In fact, forget the fact that three hundred thousand years of evolution have made human children pretty sturdy and parents pretty competent at raising them. We have entered an era that says you cannot trust yourself. Trust a product instead.
It’s hard to pop outside this snow globe of fear and gaze down on it objectively, but for Susan Linn, a mother and stepmom, that happened when she went to Chile to adopt her baby.
“I live in Brookline, Massachusetts, where everybody wants to do the very best for their children,” says the Harvard psychologist. “So I was obsessing about crib bumpers and what are the best kind blah, blah, blah and then I got down there and she was in this teeny, tiny doll’s crib and she was doing just fine.”
So what kind of bumpers did Linn eventually buy?
“We never got them. It just didn’t make any sense. She had a wooden crib, and if she banged her head, it wasn’t going to hurt.” And now that little girl is twenty-something and just fine.
Linn went on to found the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. Its goal is to get companies to quit marketing stuff to kids (good luck), while also trying to counter all the marketing aimed at parents. She’s especially miffed by the marketing that tells parents their children need educational toys to get ahead.
“The message that parents are getting from birth is that they need these things to be good parents,” says Linn. She adds: “They don’t.”
It was her organization that forced the Baby Einstein people to drop the word “educational” from their marketing materials, “Because there’s no credible evidence that baby videos are, in fact, educational for babies,” says Linn. “What evidence exists suggests that they may actually be harmful. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time for children under two.”
So forget the idea that a child learns best by watching TV—even if the soundtrack is by Mozart. When they’re glued to a DVD, no matter how PBS-approved, they are not doing the one thing that really has been proven to enrich them and stimulate their neurons: interacting with the world.
Linn’s current bugaboo is the Einstein line extension, Baby Neptune, which promises to teach children all about water.
“Within a baby’s first year of life, new experiences can transform what might otherwise seem to be ordinary events into exciting opportunities for imaginative play,” claims the Baby Neptune blurb. “Baby Neptune exposes little ones to the wonders of water in their world—whether they’re stomping in the rain, splashing in the bathtub, playing ‘catch me
if you can’ with the tide on the beach. . . .”
Stop! Oh please, stop! First of all, the idea that “within a baby’s first year of life” a baby is already bored with “ordinary events” is ludicrous. How can babies be jaded about ordinary events? Nothing is ordinary to them yet! If it were, they wouldn’t find their toes so endlessly fascinating. Or those black-and-white mobiles. Or their spit.
Second, the blurb talks about “exciting opportunities for imaginative play.” But where, precisely, is the imaginative play in watching TV? If you want your kids to learn all the wonders of “stomping in the rain” and “splashing in the bathtub”—put them there! Water is not difficult to find. Let them feel it and taste it and enjoy it, not just stare at some other kid frolicking on a $14.99 DVD!
Okay. I’ll calm down. Point is: educational baby media products are brilliantly marketed and utterly unnecessary. But even if you don’t buy into them, they reinforce the idea that babies need to start their “education” right away. Sometimes even in utero. (You’ve heard of those tapes, right, that you play to the fetus? Or at least aim at your belly button?)
Now if all these videos were just marketed truthfully: “Here’s something for your kids to watch while you answer your e-mails and then start mindlessly browsing the Web. It won’t make them any smarter, and it may make them cranky when you turn it off, but it’s not the end of the world if they watch it, either”—that, at least, would be fair. It doesn’t promise us too much; it doesn’t damn us too much, either. But best of all, it wouldn’t make us so confused about what is “best” for our children and what isn’t. Otherwise, it’s really hard to tell, because it seems that lately every possible toy or class or activity or event or show or utter piece of junk is peddled to us as “educational.” (Though once in a while, someone may substitute “stimulates creativity.”) This is not only bamboozling; it also leads us to assume we’re supposed to spend every second of the day pumping our kids full of brilliance. Another thing to worry about.
Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry) Page 5
