Attachment Parenting - Overparenting

Babble has an interesting article on the whole idea of attachment parenting going a bit over the top. The author, Katie Allison Granju, describes the status symbols, like designer strollers, that parents buy, to mask their child rearing insecurities.

But as hard as we are on ourselves, we are even harder on our parenting peers. In its study of parenting attitudes, Public Agenda found that six in ten of us rate other parents only "fair" or "poor" in raising their children. And these days, one big way we try to out-do these "fair" and "poor" parents is to buy better stuff. Our parental anxieties now include the belief that without the hippest, newest parenting swag, successful child rearing is no longer possible.

In fact, we no longer choose a stroller, but a parenting identity. Are you a trendy BugabooAre we bungling the very thing we seek to perfect? Frog kind of mom or perhaps a Mclaren traditionalist? God forbid you show up at the playground with a straight-from-Baby-Superstore Graco. How tacky! One mother I spoke to for this article sheepishly confided to me that she had gotten a new credit card for the sole purpose of paying for her $1,000 Stokke Xplory stroller, saying it made her feel like there was at least one thing she was assured she would do "better than anyone else at playgroup" for her son.

Peggy O'Mara, publisher of Mothering magazine and a keen observer of American parents for the past two decades, says she believes the commercialization of parenting masks our insecurities.

"I think people think they need a lot of baby gear because so many people use their children as social collateral, and judge one another by what they have for them," says O'Mara.