Zeno's Bar & Grill

In a refreshing article, the NY Times (Here Comes the Baby, And an Itch to Overbuy by Hillary Chura) tells parents to lighten up…on the shopping. To paraphrase: you don’t need to bust into the 401(k) to raise a happy, healthy kid.

This flies in the face of a lot of conventional wisdom floating around right now. High end baby and child magazines like the recently launched Bundle (whose tag line is actually “Oh baby, you were born to shop!”) or Cookie are largely, if not entirely based on the concept that parents need to buy stuff. Expensive stuff. And lots of it.

Take for example the $400+ diaper bag by Paulina Quintana featured in the premiere issue of Bundle (shown above). It’s a diaper bag, for goodness sake. It’s to hold diapers. And not necessarily clean ones all the time. If you want to sell a gorgeous, expensive handbag then, okay, go for it. Just don’t make the rest of us feel guilty for schlepping our diapers in an L.L. Bean boat tote. Yep. Don’t get us started.

Back to the NY Times article. Ponder this quote, which comes at the end, from a pediatrician, Dr. Deborah James: “In the effort to do the very best for their children right from the start, [parents] are not only being taken advantage of but being set up for disappointment. If things don’t turn out perfectly, they will blame themselves for not providing the right educational toy, book, video or music for their infant.”

It’s just not healthy. Picture a generation of parents agonizing over whether the reason that their teenager hates them is because they should have gone with the Quintana instead of the Petunia Picklebottom.

--Melanie & Kelly