Barbie to Baby Einstein: Get Over It

By Po Bronson

Who would win in a fight, Baby Einstein or Barbie? Baby Einstein isn't a character. He's just a brand. So that imaginary fight wouldn't be a fistfight. It'd be a fight for mind share and market share. It'd be a fight for dollars.

Every day, in Targets and Wal-Marts across the country, those two brands go at it. Which one do you give your kid? It depends on how old your child is, obviously, but as any good supermom will tell you, Baby Einstein is the choice of parents who want their daughter to speak Swahili by seventh grade and go to Harvard. They leave Barbies for people who, they imagine, just want their daughter to have a smile on her face and go to a great state college.

So who's winning? It's not close. Barbie crushes Baby Einstein. Last year the Baby Einstein brand sold $200 million worth of products. The Barbie brand's sales were 15 times as high. A giant $3 billion.

I bring that up because I sense the media are ignoring the true American family and instead are putting the dramas of affluent families on Page One. It would be O.K. if they delivered those portraits with a sardonic wink, so that we might laugh at the foibles of the well-off. But there is no wink. In the eyes of the media, we all buy Baby Einstein.

Here's how the typical American family is being portrayed. Most kids are coddled by helicopter parents who overprotect their child. All moms have misgivings over their choice to work at fabulous jobs. Every child is pushed with too much homework, and every teenager is spoiled with too many luxuries. Teens have to apply to 12 colleges because they're competing against all the other overachieving youngsters. Once they graduate, you would think all young adults move home to mooch, unwilling to grow up and get a job.

The latest example of that is the enormous coverage of parents who are crazily obsessed with giving their children a head start. By middle school, the kids are world weary and anxiety ridden. Those domineering parents are the subject of books such as Alissa Quart's Hothouse Kids, Alexandra Robbins' The Overachievers and Madeline Levine's The Price of Privilege. Or last year's media sensation, Judith Warner's Perfect Madness, about mothers on the brink of insanity as they seek to create perfect childhoods for their tots. The affluence of those parents is never copped to; instead, these fears enter into the media bubble and get supercharged into widespread panic by the multiplying coverage.

I don't deny that some people have this problem of coddling, pushing and overachieving--but it's not the public menace it's supposed to be. The media need a reality check. American high school students think their parents are doing less to help them in school, not more (in such things as attending PTA meetings and helping out with homework). Nor is every teenager spoiled or lazy; nearly a third of 16-year-olds have jobs while in school, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly a third of them volunteer, about one hour a week. Meanwhile, the odds of getting into college are far better than the panic portrays. Only 2% of students apply to 12 or more colleges, and only 150 of the nation's 3,500 colleges are so selective that they turn down more than half their applicants. Forty-four percent of colleges accept every single applicant. Some graduates do move home after college, but in the 1980s, more 18-to-34-year-olds lived at home than do today, according to census data. Constant distortions like these have unintended consequences. A survey of young Latinos showed many hadn't applied to college at all because they had heard colleges are too selective and too expensive.

The newest entrant in the supermom-lit category is Searching for Mary Poppins: Women Write About the Intense Relationship Between Mothers and Nannies. This book has its place, but it's a small place. Only 1 in 20 kids in the U.S. will ever be cared for by a nanny. Nevertheless, the book's editors, Susan Davis and Gina Hyams, write that "employing a nanny is beyond a necessity" for a middle-class American family.

Over the past three years, I interviewed 700 families across the U.S., asking them what they'd had to deal with. Extremely few mentioned the kinds of problems diagnosed by supermom lit. Rather, they had old-fashioned problems like infidelity, mental illness, teen drug use, poverty, racial prejudice, custody battles, emotional frigidity and marital boredom. The kinds of problems people actually deal with are not covered by anyone but Oprah and Dr. Phil, which certainly explains why they're the cultural phenomena they are. Most families in the U.S. aren't doing too much for their children. They're doing everything they can, and it's just barely enough.

Thirty years ago, as bright young women got great educations and then crashed the workforce rather than just getting married, they were a bellwether of society's changing face. But now that so many drive a Lexus and push an $800 baby stroller, I'm not sure they are still a significant bellwether. They're trendy, but the trend they represent misses the typical American family by a mile.

Po Bronson is the author of "Why Do I Love These People?" Understanding, Surviving, and Creating Your Own Family