Collateral Damage

FIRST, LET’S DISPENSE WITH any pretense of objectivity, I am a paranoid, first-time parent. As I write this, my son Greg is playing quietly and contentedly in his room. At one year old, he coos, takes tentative steps, laughs, screams like the devil’s on his tail when he wants to, beats his arm in time to music (at least as well as his father), and in general seems to thoroughly enjoy his life.That’s why I’m convinced he’s autistic.

Either that or it’s another neurological malady no one will notice until it’s far too late. Yesterday he was scratching at a bug bite, and I instantly knew it was lyme disease. Today he is crying more than usual, which means he is undoubtedly suffering from the first horrible arthritic symptoms of the disease.

I am not alone in this private hell. My wife has diagnosed nearly as many ailments as I have. Her biggest fear seems to be breathing stoppage. Not choking, just immediate, independent cessation, sort of like spontaneous human combustion of the lungs. This is what exposure to too many warnings about sudden infant death syndrome will do to you.

All of which makes us only slightly less rational than any of the other new parents we know. It also makes us the perfect marks for the Baby Industrial Complex (BIC), whose motto seems to be: If You Scare Them, They Will Spend. The BIC’s ad campaigns have refined this application of guilt and fear to a fine art. Their message: You are a bad parent. Your child is going to die a horrible death unless you buy our products.

For those who think I am exaggerating, allow me to quote from a recent Fisher-Price car-seat ad. Above the picture of a five- or six-year-old girl sleeping peacefully in a car(sans protective seat) is the following: “A patch of ice doesn’t care if she can count to 16. Dense fog doesn’t know she grew two inches last year. A busy intersection has never read the birthday card she made for you. Introducing the booster seat that will keep your child safer.”

Me, I was so terrified I wanted to buy two seats-the second to put on the couch in our Brighton living room, in case of an earthquake.

BUT OVEREXPOSURE may have inured me to the horrors coming from Madison Avenue. Although our kid is only a little over a year old, I’ve already been subjected to 21 months of “scare ‘em and snare ‘em.” It began during birthing class, when we were informed of the opportunity to cryogenically store our child’s umbilical cord. For a fee, of course. This, we were told, would allow access to its life-saving stem cells for use when Greg gets cancer, leukemia, or some other rare blood disease.

This claim was so scary that I actually called an expert. While I had hoped to get a jump on this trend-say, storing the umbilical cord while it was still attached to mom-what I got was a good debunking.

The theory behind cord storage is good, but the odds against ever needing it are long-like 1 in 20,000 long. According to Dr. Curtis Cetrulo, who is not a paranoid first-time parent, keeping individual umbilical cords for one person’s use is a tad on the pointless side. Cetrulo, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts University Medical School, told me I should consider donating the umbilical cord to an organization like the American Cord Blood Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester. That way it can help someone if, as is likely, I never need it; and if I did need stem cells, I could make use of someone else’s donation.

Well, the whole your-child-is-going-to-come-down-with-leukemia thing pretty much ruined the blissful period of denial that is a guy’s experience of the first pregnancy. But that wasn’t enough. The BIC went on to tell me that I am a lousy provider, intent on depriving or maiming my child. Why? Because I wanted to set up the nursery.

Being an American, I have been indoctrinated to believe new is better. Now the BIC adds a subtle twist to this message; The old stuff is going to kill the kid, It has powerful allies in the consumer and parent magazines, which are always warning me I might have missed a recall notice on the second hand toys and baby furniture we’d been given. I guess the rule of thumb here is to let large corporations do my thinking for me. Of course, they’re the ones whose products are being recalled in the first place.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission wants to put me at ease about this and reassure me that I need not throw out every toy or slightly used piece of furniture. Which is why its brochure open with these comforting words: Each year more children die in home accidents than from all childhood diseases combined. My wife tells me the brochure goes on to make useful suggestions about how to check the furniture, toys, etc. for dangers. I’ll take her word for it. I never made it past the opening. It actually is a very handy little pamphlet, filled with enough guideline and checklists that we now let the baby sleep in a hand-me-down crib and play with some slightly battered toys.

ALTHOUGH WE DID what the feds said–made sure Greg’s toys were lead–free, devoid of any small parts he could swallow, and had no sharp edges he could cut himself on-we didn’t realize we were up against dangers too small to see. I’m talking cooties.

Thankfully, I can sleep more soundly, albeit a bit poorer, thanks to the fine folks at Hasbro Toys, who have addressed the cooties-on-toys issue. The Rhode Island-based toymaker has begun manufacturing a bunch of its toys with an antibacterial plastic called Microban, with an active ingredient supposedly inhibiting the growth of all bacteria it comes in contact with. What could be a better way to protect your kids than through the very toys they play with? Yes, they would all have to be new; Hasbro toys and Microban playthings cost about 10 percent more than other toys, but hey . . . we’re talking about the kid’s safety here!

The drawback to this unfettered use of antibiotics is that whatever bugs that are not killed off go on to become drug-resistant uber-germs. What to do, I wondered. My mother, who managed to keep three children alive during the plague-ridden Dark Ages before the BIC Enlightenment looked at me and said, ‘Well, you could try washing.”

How do I show that off to my friends, Ma?

So by this point–if I had followed the BIC machinations–I would have protected my child from leukemia, and brought him to a nice, safe home, filled with germ-fighting toys and earthquake-proof furniture. But that is only the first challenge. Now I have to protect him. from the entire freaking outside world. Luckily, I do not have to do so by myself. No, this is where the BIC goes into hyperdrive.

The first threat it’s mobilizing to protect me from is The Mysterious Stranger. Someone is going to kidnap my child! Well, actually it’s more likely to be a Not-So-Mysterious Former Spouse, but the BIC doesn’t like to bring that up. To protect my child, and scare the bejesus out of parents and kids alike, there are fingerprint kits, pictures on milk cartons, and now something called DNA Safe, which for a mere $35 will process my child’s DNA and store it at a lab somewhere in California. Its pitch is that while photographs get out of date and fingerprints smudge, DNA identification is perfectly reliable. Yup, just ask O.J. The person I spoke to at the company declined to give her name or say if any kidnapee had actually been found this way. Now, one of The Mysterious Strangers that your child is in danger of meeting up with could be a homicidal nanny (assuming that you can afford one and/or that you hope to be denied a high-level federal appointment someday). To guard against nefarious activities, there are a whole bunch of video monitoring systems you can have installed around the house.

You can even arrange for the images to be fed to you over the Internet, so you can watch kid and nanny in real time. If this sounds appealing, I suggest you quit the job and stay home with the kid, because nothing less will do.

Assuming I am able to get my child away from the clutches of the evil nanny without his being infected by the Ebola virus lurking on his Winnie-the-Pooh bear, I might actually want to leave the house with him. To do that I have to deal with one of the most lethal substances known to babykind; sunlight.

Actually, this is a real concern for my son who is part German, Irish, Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, and English. He is descended from so many fair-skinned groups that he pretty much has a vampire’s tolerance for the sun. But never fear, for just $29.95 I can buy a Sunskins Coverall which looks like something the technicians at Chernobyl wear and promises to give “up to 99 percent protection against UV rays.” Or, for the same thirty bucks I could get him three shirts and three pairs of pants, which will do exactly the same thing. (Is the one percent of sunlight that makes it through stronger and meaner than all the light that didn’t?)

HAVING ALREADY Discussed the threats posed by cars and car seats (and don’t get me wrong, I am a BIG fan of car seats), let’s turn our attention to that other major threat to your child. I speak, of course, of shopping carts.

According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in 1995 there were 36,476 injuries involving shopping carts that required an emergency room visit. Of those, almost 60 percent involved a child under the age of four. In short, that means about 22,000 kids went to the emergency room after they fell out of shopping carts. A truly scary number, until you realize that there were more than 19 million kids under the age of 5 in the United States that year. So the odds are about 1 in 900 against such an injury. And some simple steps, like using carriage straps and/or teaching your toddler not to stand up in the cart can push the odds even further in your favor. Or, for $19.95 you can get a 2-in-l Safety Sitter Guard that will hold your child in the seat. It even comes with a padded cover bar to “prevent infants from gumming the germ-laden front bar.? Or they could just make shopping carts out of Microban.(Maybe they should make one of those restraints in an adult size; that same year shopping cart-related injuries sent nearly 6,000 people between 25 and 64 to the emergency room.)

To deal with my wife’s fear of sudden breathing stoppage, there is an entire arsenal of gadgets on the market. From a $300 mattress that promises to increase the airflow around Junior to the CPR Prompt Rescue and Practice Aid, which for $99.95 “provides rescue assistance by guiding you through every step of life-saving techniques,” assuming that (a) you can find it, and (b) you have the right batteries.

Much less expensive is a small device that lets you test what items around the house could fit into your child’s windpipe. It costs about three bucks and is slightly smaller than a film canister, which means you can carry it with you anywhere. I found this very useful for checking on objects through-out the world, which are awaiting to attack my child. I say found because I haven’t used it since my wife caught me trying it on the dog’s nose. “Hey,” I said, “looks can be deceiving!”

So, as you can tell, I have now been inoculated against this whole Something-Bad-Is-Going-To-Happen-To-The-Baby thing. Which is why I let him drink whatever he wants, provided it’s either made from 100 percent certified organic fruit or has been through the Brita water-filter thingy a couple of times.