More than a MamaRoo

My friend L. walked her youngest child around and around the soccer field on Saturday. Her back ached but she waddled along behind her daughter, careful not to step on her tiny, muddy feet. I watched the baby grin, her arms stretched over her head, as she clutched her mother’s hands. L. looked up every few minutes to yell “whoo hoo!” to her oldest son during his game, and to offer snack suggestions to her middle child who was rummaging through the diaper bag.

When I got home from our kids’ games that afternoon, I saw that an email had come in from my mom. “OMG” was the subject line, so of course I had to open it right away. Inside was a link to a product called the “MamaRoo,” a sort of 2001 Space Odyssey seat for babies. It looks bizarre, but I can forgive that. What I can’t abide is the seat’s inane promotional video. It pimps the casual-chic voice and vibe of Mac ads to say that engineers have cracked the code for that maternal je ne sais quoi babies love. What is it, you ask? Why, the bounce-n-sway!

“We’ve never seen a parent vibrate like a bouncy seat or move like a swing,” the promo begins. It shows a touching scene of a real mom holding her baby, their hands clasped, and their bodies swaying and bouncing. The mother nuzzles her daughter gently and whispers sweet nothings. They are an item. The company then proceeds to hang itself by cutting to its version of parental tenderness: a hard plastic recliner that’s half “baby’s first dental chair” and half rocket simulator. It glides from side to side with disturbing fluidity, begging the question: what’s the EMF on this thing?  And did I mention the ad never shows an infant in the seat? How many takes before they gave up on recreating the peaceful expression on the held-baby’s face? Is it because the seat sucks? Or because a headless woman keeps affixing “classical art balls” to the flaccid mobile and playing Barney on the MP3 player?

Of course not. It’s because babies like their loved ones more than they like machines.

Maybe the MamaRoo is a great product that provides much-needed relief to parents. Babies need to be held for most of the first year, except during brief periods in contraptions such as this one. Why not just say that this chair’s a deluxe parking spot? Instead, the MamaRoo ad blithely distills 4.4 million years of parent-child bonding to one gesture in order to make a buck. Or $199 of them plus shipping, to be exact. Who came up with this campaign anyway, douchebag dad-elect Pete Campbell?

I’ve never seen anything that comes close to the alchemy between parents and their babies. The MamaRoo may “move like you,” but does it feel, smell, sound, love, teach, and protect like you? Instead of diminishing what parents offer, let’s simply offer them a product that gives them a short break. Or better yet: let’s forgo this latest candidate for the baby-gear landfill and give new moms and dads what they really need: our arms to hold their babies, and our hands to walk them through the first year of becoming a family.