Baby goes buy buy: once a child arrives, parents must turn their focus from retrofitting the bathroom, dining out and fancy vacations to budgeting for diapers, formula and day care

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 5, 2002 | by Alexandra Rockey Fleming

As for car seats, a standard model costing $50 or so can be trumped by one manufactured by a European racing company, full of adjustments and super padding, for $350. It's a hard sell, and a successful one, Fields says. "The baby-products business preys on emotions. It says, `Don't you want the very best for your baby?'"

Jeffrey Feinstein, owner of the baby superstore Buy Buy Baby, sees the boom in products as a positive, not a negative. "Parents are excited about the new products out there," he says. Each of his stores contains about 20,000 products, he estimates. "Having a kid is very overwhelming. When you can walk into one store and there's so many items that can help you with a problem or help make the job of parenthood easier--one, you don't feel alone, and two, you're happy to have a selection of items to try and see which one works for you, because all babies are different and all parents have different preferences."

To avoid breaking the bank, new parents need to determine what products are masquerading as necessities and what products their babies really need, says Douglas, the parenting author. "Most of us learn how to live without baby-wipe warmers. What you want to do is get some advice from parents in the trenches--they can tell you what you really need and what is a total waste of money. Poll your friends, especially those who've had babies in the last couple of years, because they're using the latest and greatest products."

RELATED ARTICLE: Working Parents Cry Out for Help

"The time has come for society to recognize the significance of those who care for children when their parents are not available, and the importance of stability and quality in these relationships," the National Academy of Sciences stated in October 2000. A few months later, however, a Gallup Organization poll showed increasing support for the idea of at least one parent staying at home full time with children.

These positions reflect Americans' ongoing love-hate relationship with child care. In theory, most Americans don't want to turn their children over to professional child-care workers. In reality, around 13 million children younger than age 6 spend at least part of their week in nonparental care, according to federal data.

Child care reemerged as a top domestic policy issue with this year's reauthorization of the 1996 welfare law, which includes a $4.8 billion Child Care and Development Fund. As always, the main agenda for child-care advocates and their congressional allies is money--perhaps as much as $4 billion more a year for child care.

What continues to be missing, though, is a public outcry about the lack of government child-care funding. There's no groundswell of public sentiment for more federally supported child care, according to the Family Research Council. Instead, the signs point to a shift toward mothers caring for their own children at home:

* In 1998, the Census Bureau found that 59 percent of new mothers had returned to work or were seeking jobs within a year of their children's births. By 2000, the number of such mothers had dipped to 55 percent.