I don't think we needed the Snoo.

On consumption as control and parenting in the age of too much information

I can’t remember exactly when we started receiving parenting advice, but it was certainly before I started showing. There was one brunch with friends, before we even knew we were pregnant, in which we were besieged by parenting advice we had not asked for. Is there anyone who projects the air of a weary world traveler more than the parent of a child under the age of five?¹ They have backpacked from Panama City to Ushuaia and will tell you about the marvels of sleep-training as if they are describing the staggering beauty of the Bolivian salt flats. And yet, as they half-heartedly remind their toddler to be careful with the dog, that he might not like to have his tail pulled, they have the hollowed eyes of someone who could use a hot shower and a good night’s sleep in a four star hotel. They wear their exhaustion like a badge of honor, one that not only entitles them, but requires them, to impart their lessons learned to the bright-eyed parents-to-be. The implication of all of the advice is that having a kid is HARD and that, if you want to survive it, you have to BUY THIS (a Baby Brezza!) or DO THIS (forget about cloth diapers unless you’re a masochist!). Only then will you and your spouse not disintegrate into shells of your former selves.

For the sake of my dear friends, I have to acknowledge that I know the impulse to impart wisdom is not only benign, but intended to be helpful. At times I have solicited it. I also know that I am newly in the role of doing the same. Underneath the product recommendations and the app suggestions, I see an adult human—rendered vulnerable by exhaustion and overcommitment—who has found a way to maintain a modicum of control over his or her life and who is generously attempting to share their secret to sanity.

As alluded to above, it reveals something about my income bracket that much of the parenting advice I’ve received has come in the form of product recommendations. I can’t think of another realm of my life in which friends have been such fierce advocates of consumer products. Usually we trust each other to pick out our own cars and wineglasses according to our own needs and aesthetics; in these other contexts, we expect to have different consumer preferences than our friends. But maybe it’s because all babies seem more or less the same to the untrained eye, on the precipice of parenthood, another parent’s product recommendations carry unusual weight. And you may find yourself believing that you need the $1200 Uppababy Vista—the Range Rover of strollers. (It’s a nice stroller, but you do not, in fact, need it.)

The stroller isn’t the best example, because in certain zip codes, the stroller brand carries a weird kind of cache. Some people just want to be seen pushing a Range Rover. But even for the unseen purchases—like the bottles and the swaddles—there is a nervousness around not having the “right” kind of thing. I was not immune to this. I remember surveying friends in my final weeks of pregnancy about their babies’ preferred swaddles. (Spoiler alert: every baby has its own preference.) “What bottles are you using?” new moms ask one another. (Spoiler alert: every baby has its own preference.) To the terrified parent-to-be, the product recommendation offers an alluring promise: this will make your life easier; this will keep your kid safer, or help them sleep more, or help you sleep more. Once you believe that the product will make things easier, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing the converse: that the job of parenting will be impossible unless you have all of the right products. And the right products, we are often duped into believing, are those with the biggest price tags. How many times have I hovered my cursor over the (suspiciously) cheapest version of something (those Target Cloud Island products!), only to buy something a little more expensive that I assume is of higher quality, or a little more vetted (e.g., French newborn shampoo².)

Of course one’s ability to maintain control is wholly orthogonal to parenthood—and only decreases as your baby develops into a sentient being and adolescent and adult with her own desires and whims and destiny. The moment you consent (ideally) to the meeting of sperm and egg is the last moment you truly hold the reins. From then on, nature will decide what it wants to do with this zygote—whether it will lead to a viable pregnancy, whether it will lead to a child on the Autism spectrum, whether the child will be as athletic as your sperm donor, whether they will be a good sleeper or a picky eater etc. etc. etc.

This loss of control is understandably hard to swallow since parenting in the United States in the 21st century is no small feat. The United States is inhospitable to parents, which is a daily mindfuck when viewed against the fact that forced pregnancy is a reality in the richest country in the world. The federal government doesn’t offer universal healthcare or paid family leave or subsidized childcare or even FAMILY-FRIENDLY TSA SCREENING LINES AT THE AIRPORT.³ Your child’s behavioral and health needs are your own problem; even if you can afford childcare, you might not be able to find it! Your child’s school could be closed for months during a global health pandemic and you could still be expected to hold down a full-time job!

It thus makes a certain kind of sense that the Snoo, a $1600 “smart bassinet” that speeds up or slow down its rocking depending on a newborn’s level of agitation, was invented in the country that offers no paid family leave. Who can be up all night rocking an eight week old baby when they have work the next day? (A cruel American irony, however, is that the parents who can afford a Snoo are the same parents who most likely enjoy lengthier, employer-funded parental leaves. ) Many of our friends told us that we needed the Snoo, even though their baby had never actually been offered the opportunity to sleep in a “dumb” bassinet. I was skeptical. Though the promise of a device that would help us avoid newborn-induced sleep deprivation was tempting, I instinctually rejected the Snoo as excessive. Hasn’t man(woman)kind been soothing babies to sleep without the help of a robot for eons?

The $1600 Snoo, in its pristine minimalist millennial habitat.

Lest I come off sounding smug, I will confess that we quickly rented a Snoo when our daughter was about ten days old, when we realized that she would only sleep when actively rocked in our arms. A rental Snoo cost us $5 a day, a fraction of what we would have paid at the time to be guaranteed some sleep. To justify the luxury, I reminded myself that those parents soothing their babies to sleep without the help of robots have, for most of history in most societies, had the assistance of sisters and mothers and daughters (if not also low-wage or unpaid labor). We weren’t meant to be alone in our detached houses, rocking our babies to sleep by ourselves for weeks on end. But it turns out a robot crib is no substitute for body heat and a heartbeat, not even an aesthetically-beautiful $1600 one. Ultimately, my daughter slept far better in the warm arms of her adoring grandparents, who graciously took turns “on the night shift,” and in our bed than she did in the Snoo. I think we could have done without it. And yet, the Snoo makes a sort of sense. It is a perfect example of an expensive consumer product marketed to highly-educated, affluent millennials as a way to “hack” a previously undisputed aspect of the parenting experience—irregular newborn sleep and the ensuing torture of parental sleep deprivation. Can we really blame these new parents, who are more likely to live far from their extended families, for being willing to lay out some cash for help getting through the night, especially in the absence of any kind of meaningful social safety net?⁴

In the middle of writing this piece, I read

Sara Petersen

’s interview with

Kate Kennedy

⁵, where Kate made a similar observation:

“Like, the advice you're given is to keep the baby in your room the first six months, right? And [my pediatrician] was saying like, well, that is based off research done in Norway, where there's ample paid leave, and where parents don't have to go to work right away to support the baby. But I was waking up with every single newborn grunt, every little rustle of movement, and it just wasn’t realistic. So when people are buying sleep training courses, and sleep sacks, and sound machines and the Snoo (which is a $1600.00 smart bassinet), a lot of it is because we can’t exist on so little sleep and still support ourselves and our families AND feel mentally sane. I think that consumption is absolutely tied to some of the shortcomings in how our society supports mothers.”

My husband and I frequently observe how parenting in this moment in our little tranche of society is characterized by so much nervousness. The pressure to keep your grunting baby in your room for six months! The nervousness can be contagious, with everyone looking over their shoulder trying to make sure their kid is “meeting milestones.” How many babies actually need a sock that monitors their heart rate and oxygen levels? I am trying really intentionally to insulate myself from this culture of fear. I am a fretful person to begin with, and to be on the Internet as a new parent is to learn to fear things that never even occurred to you. The anxious rigidity of the millennial parent is the stuff of Instagram memes. “We didn’t know anything,” our parents and their peers say to us. “We just figured it out.” And we, their offspring, lived to procreate, even though we slept on our stomachs under blankets in crib-bumpered death traps without age-appropriate wake windows and baby-led weaning. We are walking evidence that there is another way. I held onto this on those nights when our baby wailed every time we tried to gently lay her back in the Snoo and we brought her into our bed instead, as instinct told me to do. This—the oldest trick in the book! especially if I stuck my boob in her mouth!— felt like cheating. It was against the Safe Sleep Rules. I was scared to sleep with my baby and spent hundreds of dollars on a Snoo to avoid it, and yet it was only in our bed that the baby would fall asleep immediately.

I’ve been thinking about how nervous consumption is driven by a lot of other societal shortcomings too, like the conservative agenda to dismantle the administrative state and capitalist profit-maximizing incentives. Not only do we need products to help us care for our children in a world where we are not compensated for carework, but an obsession with buying only the right products is arguably a wholly reasonable reaction to living in a country with regulatory fails up the wazoo, like lead poisoning in applesauce pouches and baby formula recalls (not to mention doors flying open on airplanes mid-flight and shootings at Super Bowl victory parades and Fourth of July parades and concerts and elementary schools and Walmarts). I’m not sure I really needed to spend the extra money on a “breathable” crib mattress, but why not, in a world where we are inundated daily with news of new kinds of threats to our children’s safety. It is crazy making. There are moments where I wish I could keep my daughter safely wrapped in my arms on my boob in the dimly lit nursery with the hush of white noise forever, if only that would keep her safe. But parenting is living with the constant looming heartbreak of knowing that is not possible. Naturally, it can feel like my only option is to ensure your child has the safest possible carseat and only consumes organic vegetables grown by Buddhist monks in Sonoma County and only plays with woodblock toys carved by the Amish. Unfortunately, my daughter currently prefers the same plastic Fisher Price stacking rings we all loved in the 80s to all of her unpainted wooden rattles. I surrender.

1. In writing this, I am thinking of no one in particular, and instead merely conjuring the exhaustion faceless amalgamation of every parent friend and colleague who has sought to describe to me the many joys and challenges of parenting!

2. P.S. - I love it. No cradle cap over here.

3. On our recent trip to Chile, we enjoyed family bag drop lines, family security lines, and family passport control lines, in addition to family boarding, because what kind of sadist country would make small children and babywearing parents functioning as human pack mules wait on lines for more than five minutes? The same sadist capitalist country where the wealthy can pay a private company to keep their scanned retinas on file so they can smugly cut everyone in the TSA pre-check line.

4. A recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that Americans with the highest education levels, as well as upper-income Americans, are the least likely to live near extended family. The study found that “[a]bout a third of adults with a postgraduate degree (32%) do not live near any extended family, compared with 14% of those with a high school education or less.” And “[a]dults with lower and middle incomes are more likely than upper-income adults to live near at least some extended family. In contrast, upper-income adults are the most likely to say they live near no extended family.”

5. In connection with the release of her new book, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In, which I can’t wait to read!!