The Parenting Industrial Complex and its Attack on Mothers' Peace

I was recently joking with a few friends about diaper cream applicators, or, as I prefer to call them, butt spatulas. We were laughing because 1) they are objectively funny, and 2) our small crew held vastly different opinions on their value. One friend whose oldest child is a toddler (born in 2023) reported that this was one of her most-used baby items, a must-have! While myself and another friend with older children (born in 2017) couldn’t conceptualize ever using such a thing. (“That’s what fingers are for!”) In fact, I didn’t know butt spatulas existed until this particular friend’s baby shower in 2022.

You’re aware of the butt spatula if you’ve created or shopped from a baby registry in the last 5 years. But if you’ve been out of the baby shower game for a while, they’re likely novel to you. This is because this product didn’t start gaining major commercial traction until 2020. Now, the diaper cream applicator industry is trending up and to the right, with global annual earnings projected to reach $500 million in by 2030. In the short span of 3 years, a largely unknown product has rocketed to the rank of “essential” baby item.

I could probably write an entire essay on the hilarity of this product’s marketing, but this is not an article about butt spatulas. It’s about the parenting industrial complex: the $580 billion marketing machine aimed at selling products to mothers of young children. The problem is not that there are products to help us as we raise our children - many of them are enormously valuable. What is problematic is how they’re marketed to us, both in frequency and urgency.

I’m going to repeat this a few times because I really want you to hear (read?) me: it is not bad to own tools to aid your mothering. The problem is what constant advertising has led us to believe about the products and how this belief is slowly eroding our collective mothering confidence, wisdom, intuition, and character formation. Let me explain with a pop quiz.

What word or phrase almost always precedes “Baby Items” or “Postpartum Items” on an influencer’s recommendations list? How do they describe the products they’re recommending?

There are two correct answers: essential and must-have.

You may be thinking “So what? It’s just a marketing tool.” And you’re partially right, it is a marketing tool. But not just a marketing tool: it’s also a tiny attack on your confidence as a mother. When we see a word like “essential”, we’re wired to pay attention. We all long to be well-equipped to do this enormously important work. When it comes to having what we need to raise our children, we do not want to be found lacking! Already our understanding of and longing for the good life is being pricked by such language.

The issue is that, as far as I can tell, none of these lists include anything that is actually “essential” to a babies’ survival. If that were the case, these lists would be very short, including breast milk (or formula), stable housing, and a responsive, caring adult. But these items are not on the lists. Maybe because there aren’t commission links.

When we see a word like “essential”, we do well to ask “essential for what?” What the influencers seem to mean by “essential” is things I’m glad I had. So, they are “essential” to fulfilling that particular family’s preferences and comfort. This is fine to share (tools are not inherently bad to have!), but remember that these suggestions are subjective to the mother’s preferences, income, cultural norms, baby’s temperament, and about 1 trillion other variables that make it impossible for one mother to tell another what she will actually need or use.

Take the butt spatula for example. My friend was very glad to own one and used it often. I think they are absurd. Both of us would readily agree that the task for which the product is designed (applying diaper cream to a baby’s tiny tush) can be done with or without the tool. But guess what word butt spatula manufacturer uses to describe their product: ding, ding, ding! ESSENTIAL! (If you’re wondering “Essential to what?”, their website reports it’s essential to “reducing greasy diaper cream residue from parents’ fingers.”)

Let’s move onto the second issue I have with the parenting industrial complex, because it’s bigger than semantics, it’s spiritual, and it’s cutting mothers off at the knees. Repeated exposure to this kind of flippant, inflammatory language is damaging to the wisdom, peace, and confidence of mothers who spend time online, particularly new and first-time mothers.

Anytime a particular idea is repeated, the hearer’s agreement with the idea is strengthened until it becomes an internally held belief. The language used in many of these ads is intentionally aimed at what they know will motivate us to act: namely, concern for the wellbeing of our children and alleviation of the truly difficult areas of parenthood. Behind much of the marketing jargon is the idea that being a mother doesn’t have to be hard or scary, or worse, being a mother shouldn’t be hard or scary. This is the message beneath the message of many of the ads we see for baby and mother products.

It’s estimated that we see 1-3 ads per minute spent on Instagram. Let’s say a woman spends 30 minutes on Instagram per day (a low estimate). She’d see 30-90 ads in that span chosen by a profit-driven algorithm. That adds up to a potential 630 ads per week, 2520 per month, and 7,560 in the first 3 months of her baby’s life. Marketing research shows that consumers buy products based on a few basic human desires: namely safety, security, belonging and pleasure, so companies market products accordingly. What population is more concerned with safety and security than new mothers? Companies capitalize on this vulnerability and tell her 90 times a day that what she most longs for (the flourishing of her baby) can be purchased from their storefront.

According to this line of thinking, the perfect mother is the mother with all the right stuff. We know it isn’t true, but our collective buy-in to believing in the “essential” nature of all of these “essential” products is creating an enormous barrier to mothers developing an intuition or their own working knowledge of parenting their individual children. And the parenting industrial complex would like it to stay this way. The mother-and-baby-products industry boasts an annual net worth of $580 billion. They have a vested interest in our self-doubt.

If we’re told enough times that suffering or fear can be avoided by owning a particular product, that the life we deeply desire is available if we purchase various items, we’ll start to believe it, and we will “add to cart”. We are at great risk of believing that the quality of our motherhood depends on what we purchase; that our children’s flourishing depends on what we own. This leads to the inevitable, gradual outsourcing of maternal peace and confidence to for-profit companies.

The butt spatula is at the lowest wrung of the dilemma: most of us would be just fine with using the tool God gave us (fingers) instead. But what about products that provide a deeper service, such as constantly reading your sleeping child’s vital signs? What about when the marketing does literally sell us peace of mind, which does feel essential to a flourishing life. Take this marketing copy from one popular baby product:

Let’s reverse engineer this one together. The product they are selling tracks literal essentials (health, safety, sleep). But that’s not what they’re selling us. What they’re selling is clarity and calm their products can offer the parent by giving them constant awareness of information that they ultimately cannot control. This kind of language preys upon a mother’s deepest fears and stokes her deepest desires, promising to ward off one and fulfill the other once and for all: no more fear, only life; “no more death or sorrow or crying or pain for those things are gone forever”…is this starting to sound familiar?

The parenting industrial complex want us to believe that their products can bring heaven to earth; that their products will secure the good life for our families in perpetuity. But they can't, of course they can’t. Mothers and babies are going to struggle no matter how many tools they own. Any endeavor of this relational magnitude is certain to hold challenges, even heartbreak. Tools cannot protect your child, or you, from the inevitable sorrows that will bruise every human heart and body. They will still feel lonely and afraid. Questions will be left unanswered. Hearts will still be broken. But, according to Aristotle and Saint Paul, this does not mean the good life is out of reach. In fact, they argue the opposite is true.

I’ve been learning about Aristotle’s Virtue Theory, which contends that the good life is achieved by growing in virtue, or character. Guess what does not build character: buying things for our babies in hopes that they make us less worried. Guess what does: praying and doing hard things.

This maps right onto Saint Paul’s word to the Romans: “We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.”

The life we’re looking for, the life we’re longing for, is available to us right now, for free, in Christ. It is not a life free of struggle or fear, but a life in which our sufferings produce in us “the fruit of righteousness” and deepen our friendship with God. The “calm and clarity” we so desire is actually the “peace that surpasses understanding” which, by definition, permeates deeper than any and all worrisome circumstances. The good life is not a clickable link, it is Christ crucified and resurrected.

Here’s my encouragement to you: settle in your mind that motherhood will be hard and scary, with or without all the products. Be on guard against any narrative that your maternal peace lies behind a purchase. That is a lie and you know it. So let mothering be scary and hard today, not for hard’s sake, but for the sake of your character. Doing hard things changes us, it makes us the versions of ourselves we want to parent our children - a mother who is at peace because she knows that God is real and alive and actively involved in the flourishing of her family.

By all means, buy the butt spatula if you want it. Use it! Thank God for it! But also thank God for the things that scare you to death, because as we face them, the Spirit meets us and reveals with such tenderness that our weakness is the stage for God’s glorious abundance and care. hands he gave you, and the arms to hold your baby, and the voice to shush and sing lullabies, and the ears to listen to their breath - still steady beside you - and the eyes to watch the rise and fall of their belly, and the mind that’s learning all the time how to do this beautiful, impossible, glorious thing that no tool could ever, ever replace.

Grace and peace to you, friends.