Spend, Spend, Spend: The New Model for ParentingBy Helaine Olen, AlterNet. Posted August 8, 2007.
In spite of being racked with debt, Gen X parents are increasingly pouring their paychecks into luxury items for their children that seem seem frivolous to the point of ridiculousness.Move over, Bugaboo. There's a new high-priced stroller in town. Meet the new Maclaren. Souped up with leather seats and handle grips, its signature motif is a hand-stitched emblem made of nine-karat gold. It's price -- a mere $4,200. Interested parties ought to move fast: Maclaren has only manufactured twenty of these luxury perambulators, the better to promote their exclusivity and uniqueness.
While singularly ostentatious, a golden stroller is only a tiny piece of the $45 billion American children's luxury goods market, where parents routinely spend hundreds of dollars on kiddy goods that seem frivolous to the point of ridiculousness. A Coach leather diaper bag, $398. A sleekly designed baby bouncer, $200. A crib that looks more appropriate for a shoot in Archetectural Digest than for use by an actual infant, $1,700.
What gives? After all, Wal-Mart and Target sell some perfectly acceptable cribs for around $100 and baby bouncers and diaper bags retailing in the low two figures are easy enough to find. Well, it's simple really. In a brand obsessed society, parents are heading to the stores as a way of showing how much they love their children. But they forget that a society demonstrates the value of parents and their children not by how much equipment is available for them to purchase, but by how well they are taken care of when they need help. And by any standards the United States is falling down on the job.
Marketers point out that Generation X, the age group that makes up the bulk of new moms and dads, have always spent their way into popularity. But as they simultaneously approach parenthood and middle age (the oldest GenXers turn 42 this year) instead of wearing Candies and Vidal Sassoon Jeans to increase their social clout, they now purchase to cool for school baby gear, hoping for the same result. "During the formative years of today's parents, family, religion and government programs were very weak. They had no support systems," demographer Ann Fishman points out. "And as a result, we have these young parents who want a strong family, love their kids, want to give them everything but they don't know it doesn't mean stuff." ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/58982/
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