Lenore Skenazy - Free-Range Kids

Let's take a look at some of the safety products being marketed to parents, starting with baby knee pads.

Yes, knee pads. Exactly what you'd want your nine-month-old to wear if he were drafted into the NFL. Except that these pads are for crawling.

“Non-slip silica gel points … can protect the baby's knee from abrasions and prevent the baby from slipping while crawling.” Who doesn't want to prevent slipping and abrasions? Luckily for humanity, those safety features come standard in almost all infants: Dimpled, all-terrain knees covered with the tough, flexi-grip material known as “skin.” And yet there's a whole slew of baby knee pad companies plying their wares on Amazon.

What kind of fools do they take us for, that we'd be worried about this time-honored stage of babyhood? Yet look what a mom wrote on the One Step Ahead website, under the baby knee pads “product review.”

“Sometimes my daughter has problems going from carpeting to the wood and marble floors. It helps her with traction to keep from spinning out. Unfortunately, she did not like the feel on her legs and refused to wear them.”

Score one for the baby! But that mama—she really worries about her daughter “spinning out” like a Buick in a blizzard. Parents writing to other knee pad sites were just as sold.

And I would have left the whole topic right there but literally TODAY, even as I was scrolling through my e-mails to avoid my writing duties, I got THIS PITCH:

“Learning to successfully crawl and creep are critical milestones for motor development for babies and there's a new line of specially made clothing that gives your child the best advantage!

“Progressive Crawlers makes organic cotton pants for babies designed by a pediatric physical therapist. The pants have specially placed innovative grip patches …”

The thing that kills me about a product like this is that it suggests that it is normal to need and heed a “pediatric physical therapist” even if your child has no discernible disabilities. People talk about the “medicalization” of common human predicaments, like shyness, or loneliness. But in these products we see the “physical therapization” of childhood, as if no child is up to snuff—or at least that they will fall behind the kids with superior crawling abilities, perhaps forever.

Another dumbfounding safety product is the “Thudguard”—a helmet to protect your child while he's engaged in that extreme sport known as toddling.

“It's about time that someone has addressed the diffuse head injuries that are … on the rise for toddlers learning to walk,” wrote one doctor in an endorsement of the product.

Oh, really? On the rise? Because suddenly evolution made a U-turn and now children are careening into walls and tables like never before?

And even if babies do bump and bumble, are they really in danger of sustaining serious “head trauma,” as claims the ad for this helmet (that makes your child look like he just had brain surgery)? Let us consult again with calm, wise pediatrician/professor Dr. F. Sessions Cole of Washington University and the St. Louis Children's Hospital.

“We see 65,000 to 70,000 patients a year,” says Dr. Cole. “How many are associated with significant head trauma that resulted from instability as toddlers learned to walk?”

None.

It's enough to make you bang your head against the wall—and wouldn't that be ironic?

Scroll through Amazon's world of child safety products and you'll find unsurprising stuff like cabinet locks and electrical outlet covers. Ridiculous stuff like spoons that change color if your baby food is “white hot.” (Good if you're cooking rice cereal in a forge.) And then there's a whole display of special car mirrors that allow you to watch your baby in the backseat as you drive. I once saw a dad buying one of these in a store and asked, “What do you need that for?”

“To see if the baby's OK,” he said.

I suppose I knew he'd say that. But what we're talking about here is a parent checking up, while driving, on a child who is already strapped snugly into a federally approved car seat. A child strapped in there with a five-point belting system specifically to be “OK.” It's really hard to imagine how the child would not be OK, and besides, if he were fussy, you'd hear him. Then, at a stoplight, you could turn your head and look at him.

But now, with about ten different special child car mirrors to choose from, it starts to feel as if good parents do have to check on their car seat baby even more often. That means they have to take their eyes off the road. And that's really too bad, because car accidents are the NUMBER ONE PREVENTABLE CAUSE OF CHILDREN'S DEATHS in America. Naturally, we don't know how many are caused by parents taking their eyes off the road and peering into their baby rearview mirrors. But as parents are always saying, better safe than sorry.

Leave the mirror at the store, and the whole family will probably be better off. And you'll save enough money for ice cream for everyone, too. (There is nothing dangerous about ice cream. Nothing.) Here's one last example of a safety product that we don't need, and how it undermines our own good sense: the heat-sensitive bath mat.

This is a mat you put in the bottom of the tub. Turn the water on, and if the words TOO HOT! magically appear in a bubble near the bathmat duckie's head, you know that the water is, indeed, too hot! Because who can trust her own wrists anymore?

Oh, wait a sec. We all can. Dip a wrist in the water, and you yourself can tell if that water is warm, cold, or boiling hot. (Key word: yeow!) So why on earth is there not only this heat-sensitive bath mat for sale but also a competing baby bathwater temperature turtle you can put in your tub that will indicate too hot! too? (Not a real turtle, who would indicate that by turning into soup.)

Why? Same reason you can buy a blanket with a headboard built into it, in case you want to hold your baby but are worried about breaking his neck. Forget the fact that you have an arm built for that job.

Same reason you can buy a harness to hold up your kid like a marionette while she learns to walk. Forget the fact that you could hold her up yourself, or even let her fall. She's got a bottom built for that job.

In fact, forget the fact that three hundred thousand years of evolution have made human children pretty sturdy and parents pretty competent at raising them. We have entered an era that says you cannot trust yourself. Trust a product instead.

It's hard to pop outside this snow globe of fear and gaze down on it objectively, but for Susan Linn, a mother and stepmom, that happened when she went to Chile to adopt her baby.

“I live in Brookline, Massachusetts, where everybody wants to do the very best for their children,” says the Harvard psychologist. “So I was obsessing about crib bumpers and what are the best kind blah, blah, blah and then I got down there and she was in this teeny, tiny doll's crib and she was doing just fine.”

So what kind of bumpers did Linn eventually buy?

“We never got them. It just didn't make any sense. She had a wooden crib, and if she banged her head, it wasn't going to hurt.” Spoiler alert: She made it to adulthood. And in fact, now the safety advice is to never put a bumper, stuffed animal, blanket, pillow or piece of lint in the crib. So Linn was ahead of her time.

A lecturer at Harvard Medical School, Linn went on to found the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. Its goal is to get companies to quit marketing stuff to kids (good luck), while also trying to counter all the marketing aimed at parents. She's especially miffed by the marketing that tells parents their children need educational toys to get ahead.