The Best Thing for Your Child Is Cheap and Easy

In June of last year, as my daughter was starting to dabble with the concept of walking, I spotted a plastic activity walker sitting on the street a block from our house. I took it home, wiped it down with disinfectant, and placed it in front of her; immediately taken with the beeps and boops the object makes, she delighted in being propped up to stand with it, eventually graduating to getting herself up and moving with it on her own. That is until, at the prompting of our pediatrician, who mentioned that sometimes children get reliant on them, my partner and I took it away, and she swiftly started walking entirely unassisted, a moment as simply joyous as we get in this life.

Until I saw the walker, it had not dawned on me to buy her one. I’m not a minimalist—I love stuff and have a difficult time parting with it—but I do try to be thoughtful about what I buy. As soon as I became pregnant, however, I felt the pressure of what stuff I would purchase for her begin to surround me. A well-meaning friend sent me her deeply researched registry, which immediately overwhelmed me. I imagined her sitting alone, texting and scouring the web for answers about which car seat to buy. I opened her very nice email once and immediately shut it. She wasn’t alone in this instinct; the number of friends who volunteered the knowledge they had gathered in this arena surprised me—this was something I wanted to spend as little time on as possible, and yet all these smart people had spent energy shopping for things that had about as short a shelf life as something can have. I immediately passed the task of putting together our brief registry to my partner, with minimal input from me and with the stated goal of as little waste—in all meaning of that word—as possible.

Like many would-be parents, I was developing the beginnings of a belief system: She will largely get whatever is cheapest and easiest—and as little of it as possible—but that does not mean bought from Amazon for $11 and delivered to my door the same day. That means hand-me-down onesies, an Ikea bed via Facebook Marketplace, samples of products that make sense to try out for my job here at Dwell, books and toys from family and friends, and the occasional special item I just have to have for her. Her first belongings would not be "the best" thing that I had spent minutes or hours or days researching. The stroller would be the best because of how little of my precious time and money I had spent on it. (We went with the one our friends already had an attachment to and passed down to us.)

I came to realize that the registries I had been sent, and the people who asked for mine, were soft, if literal and perhaps accidental, cries for help.

Call it the Wirecutterization of bourgeois society. Everywhere I looked, there was an obsession with finding the perfect thing, the thing that was going to save our and our child’s lives during this monumental change, us caring for a living thing and her being born. At a friend’s birthday party, I listened to a dad I’d previously thought of as fairly sane (well, he had been a tech reporter) expound at length about what a scam the Snoo, an infamous (among parents) baby bassinet that rocks, was, speaking with the certainty of a parent and reviewer, as if every baby weren’t a new, unique human, with a specific set of wants and needs. This proclivity exists across all product types, but this new life stage seemed to raise the stakes. At that moment, I realized it wasn’t about the Snoo; it was about what the Snoo offered—support. In a country where a fixation on the nuclear family unit has meant increased isolation for all involved, childcare options are limited and expensive, and sleep is a highly valued commodity, buying the perfect bassinet doesn’t just mean getting a piece of furniture that you actually like looking at, or you can afford: It means buying your way to sanity and out of a condition of our society. I came to realize that the registries I had been sent, and the people who asked for mine, were soft, if literal and perhaps accidental, cries for help.

I did love decorating my daughter’s room. Weeks before she was born, my partner found me sobbing on the floor in front of our linen closet, my nesting hormones driving my already home-obsessed personality to organize it immediately, with an intensity I felt I could not control. A significant part of a freak-out I had about possibly having to be induced early was due to the fact that it would disrupt a trip I’d organized to pick up a dresser I’d used growing up, even though everyone in my life reminded me the baby would sleep in my room when I returned from the hospital and we didn’t immediately need a place to put her tiny clothes.

Yes, like most things with parenting, that wasn’t about her; it was about me. I needed the dresser to be there, ready and waiting, because I didn’t know what would face me on the other side, where I would require something to hold clothes for a child that didn’t exist yet. Buying things is for us; as is often pointed out, most babies would happily play with random household objects if they don’t know a well-designed toy exists, or even if they do. But the Svenskt Tenn lampshade I bought her on my first work trip away from her has the same hold on me as the RH crib—complete with teeth marks—our neighbors passed down from their daughter. It is the hodgepodge of all that I envision her world, and mine, to be—that is, until she is old enough to manifest it herself.

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