Читать книгу Free-Range Kids - Lenore Skenazy - Страница 19

The jazzy strains of CBS's morning 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 is 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 fingers. 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 call a professional babyproofer. But if they had sprinted off instead to the website 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” (the most recent stats they've compiled).

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. It is always a good idea to keep the bathroom door closed for a whole lot of reasons. But the babyproofer's stats were off by a whopping 2600%! Millions of viewers will now be 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.

This is not to 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%. It's just to say that in order to sell literally $94 billion worth of safety products to parents worldwide 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 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 are for crawling.

“Non-slip silica gel points … can protect the baby's knee from abrasions and prevent the baby from slipping while crawling.” Who doesn't want to prevent slipping and abrasions? Luckily for humanity, those safety features come standard in almost all infants: Dimpled, all-terrain knees covered with the tough, flexi-grip material known as “skin.” And yet there's a whole slew of baby knee pad companies plying their wares on Amazon.

What kind of fools do they take us for, that we'd be worried about this time-honored stage of babyhood? Yet look what a mom wrote on the One Step Ahead website, 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” like a Buick in a blizzard. Parents writing to other knee pad sites were just as sold.

And I would have left the whole topic right there but literally TODAY, even as I was scrolling through my e-mails to avoid my writing duties, I got THIS PITCH:

“Learning to successfully crawl and creep are critical milestones for motor development for babies and there's a new line of specially made clothing that gives your child the best advantage!

“Progressive Crawlers makes organic cotton pants for babies designed by a pediatric physical therapist. The pants have specially placed innovative grip patches …”

The thing that kills me about a product like this is that it suggests that it is normal to need and heed a “pediatric physical therapist” even if your child has no discernible disabilities. People talk about the “medicalization” of common human predicaments, like shyness, or loneliness. But in these products we see the “physical therapization” of childhood, as if no child is up to snuff—or at least that they will fall behind the kids with superior crawling abilities, perhaps forever.

Another dumbfounding safety product 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 helmet (that makes your child look like he just had brain surgery)? Let us consult again with calm, wise pediatrician/professor Dr. F. Sessions Cole of Washington University and 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?”

None.

It's enough to make you bang your head against the wall—and wouldn't that be ironic?

Scroll through Amazon's world of child safety products and you'll find unsurprising stuff like cabinet locks and electrical outlet covers. Ridiculous stuff like spoons that change color if your baby food is “white hot.” (Good if you're cooking rice cereal in a forge.) And then there's a whole display of special car mirrors that allow you to watch your baby in the backseat as you drive. I once saw a dad buying one of these in a store and asked, “What do you need that for?”

“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 DEATHS 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 bathmat 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 baby bathwater temperature 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 that you have an arm built for that job.

Same reason you can buy a harness to hold up your kid like a marionette while she learns to walk. Forget the fact that 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.” Spoiler alert: She made it to adulthood. And in fact, now the safety advice is to never put a bumper, stuffed animal, blanket, pillow or piece of lint in the crib. So Linn was ahead of her time.

A lecturer at Harvard Medical School, 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 screen, 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 group also went after the Einstein line extension that included Baby Neptune, which promised 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 a show about water? 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 kids and fish frolicking!

OK. 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 do some work 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.

This educational obsession can take an ordinary toy—like a little battery-operated light-up drum I saw the other day—and instead of labeling it, “Loud, annoying thing,” insist that it is actually a developmental showstopper: “Promotes hand–eye coordination!”

That it does. Promotes finger-in-ear coordination, too.

A package of foam rubber letters to play with in the tub said, “Inspires imagination”—as if now your kid is going to start composing Moby Dick above the soap dish.

Meantime, an article in one of the parenting magazines, “Why Music Boosts Brainpower,” begs the question: If music didn't boost brainpower, would it be worthless? In the eyes of a society bent on producing wunderkinds, maybe so. (Another article said cuddling may boost babies’ IQs. That's good, because otherwise we certainly wouldn't bother cuddling the helpless blobs, right?)

The music article went on to give all sorts of suggestions as to how to make your child more musical, while cheerily noting, “Raising a music lover is easy. If you start early and keep it fun, your child won't miss a beat.”

God help those who don't start early. (Never mind that George Gershwin didn't even have a piano in his house until he was twelve—one of my favorite anecdotes. That's George “Rhapsody in Blue” Gershwin.)

So we sign our kids up for Gymboree or Kindermusik, or maybe we take them to the local class on “sound and movement” like I did with my older son—a class so boring that the other nannies and moms looked ready to cry. The kids already were. After one of the sessions, I bolted out with another mom, and we bonded by confessing, “God I hate going there!” But go we did, because we didn't want our children to end up nonmusical. (Even though mine did. And then we gave him private electric guitar lessons he didn't really like, either.)

There is nothing wrong with exposing your children to all sorts of opportunities and toys, of course. But there's nothing wrong with scaling back a little, either, even on the educational and safety product front. I know the catalogs keep coming, and other parents show up with all the latest inventions, but now is the time to try resisting some of that “You need this thing to make your kid safe, smart, and happy” drumbeat. The one beaten on that oh-so-educational, battery-operated drum.

Enrichment is all around us. Danger is not. Keep those two straight and your family will be richer in every sense of the word.