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Stealth merchandising
Why is the venerable Scholastic book club company peddling cheesy toys in classrooms?
By Shoshana Marchand
[02/29/00]

Hooked on tutoring
After-school programs bleed Mom and Dad while dissing Junior's teachers.
By Catherine Davis
[02/29/00]

Babes in Willy Loman-land
Why does my kid have to sell stuff door-to-door for her school?
By Bob Whitby
[02/29/00]

What kind of mother are you?
Marketing mavens dissect moms for eager advertisers.
By Lisa Moskowitz
[02/28/00]

Shrinks and con men
An unholy alliance of psychologists and advertisers targets kiddie consumers.
By Arthur Allen
[02/28/00]

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The hook of the book is usually a phrase as catchy as a song lyric: tough love, smart love, parenting with love and logic, attachment parenting.

Also Today Fear with a shot of vanity With a heady cocktail of safety and style, marketers capitalize on the insecurity and ignorance of new parents. By Pia Hinckle   The family for sale We take a week to examine the ravenous commercial forces that prey on us each day.

Books of tips may be the most genuinely useful, mostly because they function as security blankets as much as books. The "What to Expect" series is hugely popular in part because there's no pressure to digest complex ideas about human behavior or figure out when and where to apply Rule No. 7. There's not even any pressure to read the entire thing, which suggests that parents feel so shaky about their abilities that simply buying a popular book and having it on the shelf makes us feel better.

A literary agent who wishes to remain anonymous says that the parenting book industry is no different from the diet industry. "When the parenting technique or credo promoted by one book fails, you just go out and buy another one. If the all-protein diet doesn't work, try the grapefruit diet." If "1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12" -- which calls for counting to three, then sending shrieking Madeleine to her room for a timeout -- doesn't work, try "Time In: When Time-Out Doesn't Work."

Learning from our own experience, which is the only way anything is truly learned, is messy and time-consuming, and flies in the face of the American notion of efficiency. If there is some witty, photogenic Ph.D. who has dedicated his life to discovering the best way to parent, why shouldn't we take his advice? He has a publicist, moving anecdotes and a guest spot on "Oprah." All we have is the flimsy knowledge that when we give our daughter "the look," she stops crying and hangs up her coat.

Giving "the look" works. Or does it? We only have our little girl here, in this moment, at this age. She may be our first, our only. We can't help worrying that giving the look may also turn her into a woman who will only love men who make foolish choices.

Why are modern parents so susceptible to all this hogwash and hype? The readership for these manuals has always been the middle class; historically the lower classes have never looked to books for answers, and the upper classes have had nannies and nurses to do their child rearing for them.

As Barbara Ehrenreich notes in "Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class," middle-class parents have always been anxious about parenting (which, incidentally, became a verb only around 1960) in part because the middle class tends to have particularly ambitious aspirations for its children. "It is one thing to have children, and another thing ... to have children who will be disciplined enough to devote the first 20 or 30 years of their lives to scaling the educational obstacles to a middle-class career."

"Parents today are more insecure than their parents were, and with good reason," adds Benson Schaeffer, a clinical psychologist who specializes in children and adolescents. "Growing up has never been so competitive.

"A lot of parental anxiety is not around problems, but about opportunities for enrichment," he says. "They're trying to raise not just a well-adjusted kid but also one who has the goods to get into Harvard."

Add to this desire a parallel and conflicting feeling that children shouldn't just be fine-tuned achieving machines but also spontaneous and creative -- the baby boomer signature values. Mix with that a feeling of dread that we might just be raising the kid who shows up at high school and guns down his or her classmates, and you've got a recipe for ongoing anxiety and confusion.

The people who position and market parenting books know this recipe well.

Next page | The marketing of baby doctors and child psychologists as celebrities