The World of LA Parenting: How Did California Child-Rearing Become So Ideologically Charged?
29th December 2015
Let us descend into the depths of SWPL-dom on the Left Coast….
The people in Bea’s baby yoga class are split down a social fault-line between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers. In a sensible society, parents would heed their doctor’s advice. Here, the hierarchy of perceived wisdom tends to be reversed: the one who knows best how a baby ought to be reared is the baby itself, followed by his or her parents, who’ve read at least three baby books and a bunch of persuasive unsourced articles that they found on the internet.
The paediatrician, meanwhile, is considered a corporate shill who just wants to poke needles in your child and pump it full of toxins, diphtheria and non-organic baby formula. A doctor’s recommendations must always be filtered through a Facebook forum for concerned local moms. And what do doctors know, anyway? Only what they’ve gleaned from a decade of medical training and their years of subsequent experience, backed up by the full weight of modern science.
If I were to ask my parents whether they raised me according to Attachment, Tiger or Parisian principles, they’d wonder what on earth I was on about. Middle-class child-rearing across most of the developed world has become increasingly demented: consumerist, competitive, ideologically charged. And LA’s “crunchy” moms and dads are pioneers, way out west at the crossroads of celebrity and new-age culture.