Post-Postmodern Parenting Pt. 2
Conspicuous Consumption in the Age of Hyperrealism
Introduction: Genies, SNOOs, Strollers, and Seats
As many truths as men
-Cloud Atlas
It’s lunch time at work. I’m flanked by four adults who have children as young as one and as old as ten. I’m listening mostly silently as anecdotal advice soars through the air in volleys, gets soaked up by each parent, and is reviewed through their own particular parental lens.
“The one thing you gotta get,” Parent 1, a father of a one-year-old girl says, “is a Diaper Genie.”
Before I have time to ask what a Diaper Genie is, Parent 2, a mother of a six-year-old boy objects: “Nah, just use your trash and take it out every day.”
I open my mouth, but I am again interrupted by Parent 3, a father of two boys aged eight and ten: “We had one but barely ended up using it.”
I’m having trouble thinking of what a Diaper Genie is. I imagine a Mr. Meeseeks-style device I can press to call up the Diaper Genie himself who will, on command and with optimism, change my child’s diapers. I wonder if Diaper Genies come with the same kind of unintended and unwanted caveats as the types of wish-granting services you find in stories like “The Monkey’s Paw” do. “Change the diaper!” I might say to the Diaper Genie who then snaps his fingers and technically fulfills the wish, but somewhere far away a mother screams as her baby’s fresh diaper is “changed” for my own child’s dirty one.
The conversation shifts to car seats. “Yeah,” begins Parent 1, “you’re gonna need at least three.”
“Three?” I ask. Genuinely, I hadn’t thought about needing more than one up until now. “Why three?”
Parent 3 answers: “Well in case there’s an emergency and somebody else has to pick her up.” I turn a bit red, confused because I had not yet considered this obvious problem.
This is when Parent 4, a father of a 3-month-old girl chimes in. “Look I just texted you a link to the only thing you need. Check that thing out. It’s like Optimus Prime.”
I gulp. The conversation turns to bassinets. To dressers. To mobiles. To carriers. To white-noise machines. To bottle sizes and breast pumps. To baby monitors. To cold versus hot milk. To freezing milk. To the price of formula. To outgrowing clothes. To outgrowing diapers. To sleep schedules. To books. To swaddling. To burping.
“Have you set up your registry yet?” Parent 2 asks and several sets of eyes turn to me.
“No,” I confess, “I don’t even know how one works.”
“Oh dude,” begins Parent 3, “You gotta set up a registry. People want to buy you stuff.”
“Yeah,” says Parent 1, “you need a few thousand dollars worth of things. Every little bit helps.”
“Yep,” agrees Parent 2, “people love buying stuff for babies.”
I don’t know what to say. Up until now the list of items I thought I needed consisted of a crib, diapers, maybe a stroller, and some clothes.
“How many outfits do you have?” asks Parent 2.
I, like a fool, reply: “How many do they need?” This is the first time I’ve ever thought about the fact that babies do indeed wear clothing.
The group is now getting concerned. They all shoot me a similar look, one that says something like “have you read anything about parenting?”
The Death of Wisdom
But where can wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?
-Job, 28:12
To parent in the 2020s is to be inundated with “advice” from all corners. That is to say, to announce you and your partner are expecting a child is to paint a target on yourself at which everybody you encounter — parents, siblings, grandparents, people at work who have kids especially — will launch advice. Most of the advice boils down to “Buy this,” or “Don’t buy that,” or “If you only buy one thing make sure it’s this.” Oh, and make no mistake, when talking about infants, the advice is always commercial. To bring a child into this age is to choose which type of goods you wish to conspicuously consume. Do you want to be an UPPAbaby parent? If so, are you more the VISTA, CRUZ, or RIDGE type? Are you a carrier-type parent? If so, world-facing or parent-facing? Do you love your kid enough to get the expensive swing? What about a SNOO? Everybody knows raising a child without a SNOO is basically abuse. Don’t forget the Diaper Genie.
Maybe you choose, like I hope we are able to do, to be minimalist parents and define yourself by conspicuously not consuming. This is still, of course, a choice that can only be described in terms of actual consumption. To buy the $200 IKEA crib is not to buy an IKEA crib but rather to not buy the $1,200 dollar Pottery Barn crib. In other words, what you don’t consume is as much a socio-political statement as what you do consume.
Of course I’m saying nothing new: American life is and has been so entrenched in its ouroboros-like cycle of destructive consumption that it doesn’t even know there’s an alternative (and, if we are to believe the current Left Wing, there actually might not be anymore). But when I speak to my colleagues and friends, I notice something strange. There seems to be a distinct lack of a wanting for something else. It seems Americans, at least the middle- and upper-middle-class ones I spend the most time with, have just accepted that to procreate is to amass considerable goods, that babies are a sort-of luxury product that require other luxury products to maintain.
There is something strange about these times, though. Postmodern irony seems to be out of favor, but, at least in terms of consumption, it doesn’t seem like we’ve replaced it with anything better. If traditional Postmodernism can be criticized with the pithy, “Irony is the song of the bird who has come to love its cage,” then Post-Postmodernism is what happens when the bird stops singing and starts making the cage as comfortable as possible. This is perhaps why I’m finding parenting advice so frustrating. I’m looking for help escaping the cage, and my friends are either giving me advice about decorating it, or, worse, trying to get me to buy a bigger one.
Images all the Way Down
It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
-Infinite Jest
Jean Baudrillard described the concept of hyperreality, a phenomenon in which real things get replaced by representations of them. Viewed through this lens, there is no such thing as parenting: there are only representations of parenting; there are no parents: there are only representations of parents; we do not choose to consume: we choose only what we would like people to know what we’ve chosen to consume. That is, we project not ourselves, but rather an image of ourselves. This hyperreal space parents in the 2020s inhabit is disturbing because it’s so pervasive that it’s invisible. The entire parenting paradigm is overflowing with ads and images that all point to the same question: what kind of parent to you want to be seen as? In other words, you must choose your parenting brand.
No matter what you choose, though, you cannot choose to opt out. There are markets for the carefree, go-play-in-the-mud type of parent just as there are markets for the keep-an-AirTag-in-your-child’s-backpack type of parent. You can Ferberize your child or co-sleep. You can helicopter or free-range. You can choose your sagacious mommy author (ours is Emily Oster, the doyenne of baby research). You cannot, however, choose not to play the game. And the game, like everything, requires money.
Enter the registry, that list of items you’d like to own that you send to friends and family in hopes they will purchase you things on it. The baby registry is a thoroughly modern form of gift giving: a distilled version of exchange that has streamlined the process of choosing a gift for somebody by removing the necessity of thought.
But the baby registry is more interesting than just a market response to the fact that babies need items. It is, in and of itself, a hyperreality. First, and most obviously, the registry, being a list of goods, projects an image of the parents. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever considered a registry or shopped on one. But here’s where things get meta: the registry also leaves space for the purchasers to project a hyperreal image of their own. In other words, it says one thing about the parents that they want a SNOO, but another thing entirely about the friend or family member who chose, from the long lists of items, to actually purchase the SNOO. So in the end, the registry gives everybody involved an opportunity to choose an image of an image to represent a murky representation of themselves. It is, it seems, images all the way down.
So there’s a lot to consider when constructing a registry. What kind of parent do I want to be seen as? What kind of consumer? What kind of friend do I want to give my friends am opportunity to be? Maybe most importantly, what items do I actually need?
Good luck finding a thorough answer to that last one.
Ask Google what items you need for your first baby and be amazed. Pampers.com lists over 70 items in their listicle titled “Newborn Baby Checklist — The Must-Haves and More.” Todaysparent.com has a similar list. Thebump.com actually includes a literal checklist you can print out. It has about 40 items, more depending on if you count “2–4 pacifiers,” for example, as one item or four. Parents.com is the least helpful because its list of “Baby Must-Haves (and Don’t-Needs) for Your Registry” includes entries such as “diaper essentials” and “feeding gear” as if I’m looking at this website and already know what the essentials are.
Amazon takes baby prep a bit further by actually giving you a progress bar for your registry and offering discounts the higher your completion percentage is. We have about 15 items on there and are, apparently, 11% done.
Well done to the retail giants for figuring out how to gamify procreation. There’s a cliché about pregnancy that runs “you’ll never feel ready.” What it’s supposed to mean is that there are so many unknowns in life that for every thing you plan for 10 more things surprise you. What it means now, to me in 2023, is that I’ve hit 100% on my Amazon registry checklist.
Conclusions
So this is what the New World hath finally wrought?
-A Raisin in the Sun
Maybe I’m overthinking. Maybe advertisers have not succeeded in some dark mission of equating, and thus replacing, emotional preparedness with material acquisition. Maybe a baby registry is just a baby registry. Maybe sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Probably the best thing to do throughout all of this is to remember that it’s human you’re creating then raising. The philosophies of our time might be confusing and often contradictory— “Hey! Does anybody want to buy some of my anti-capitalist stickers?!— but the reality remains the same: there is a child on the other end of all this abstraction, a child who depends on you for life, for sustenance, for shelter, for comfort, for, basically, everything. The truth is that your child does not depend on you for a SNOO or a Diaper Genie. The other thing to keep in mind is that one person— or one group of people’s— subjective experience raising children may have absolutely no corollary to your own.
As for all the Postmodern hyperreality stuff? Yeah, it’s all true, but so what? Academics and intellectuals (with the notable exception maybe of far-left-fan-favorite Slavoj Žižek) so often stop at the mere acknowledgement of a problem. Yes, I’m surrounded by a cage of money, status, and capital. Yes, irony is often my only defense against same. Yes, I need to set up a baby registry. Yes, my child will one day live in a similar cage. But, if it’s turtles all the way down, if it’s images all the way down, it’s also cages all the way down. Escape from one hyperreality is escape from a frying pan— we all know what comes next.
And anyway, until my wife decides that, “Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra says,” has anything to do with what color to paint the nursery, I may as well start getting comfortable in my cage full of SNOOs.
