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Strollerderby
Fetal Learning Devices: Start the Rat Race Early
Pregnancy is a fairly vulnerable time in a woman’s life. You’re jacked to the gills on a potent cocktail of hormones, your body doesn’t look or behave the way it once did, and you’re probably spending a lot of time thinking about how to do your best for this little helpless being you’re gestating.
And I am sorry, but those people need to sit down, put their feet up and take a niccceeee deep breath, because they are seriously overwrought. The whole idea behind these ridiculous things like the Baby Plus is to give your baby a head start. On all the other fetuses, apparenlty. I think it’s just another way that some parents are turning the raising and educating of their children into a competition starting with prenatal Mozart and continuing with a preschool admissions process that looks more like college and on to kindergarten tutors over the summer. And this comptetiveness isn’t doing the kids any good, to say the least.
This article details the whole marketing scheme nicely, and includes this fabulous quote from an OB-GYN: “Do we really need our fetuses to be in a classroom, or is it enough for them just to be fetuses? Can’t we just appreciate that what nature is doing is so brilliant and so enormous that it’s enough? I do worry that this stress will rob people of the joy of being pregnant. And that’s a shame.”
Let fetuses be fetuses is a pretty good motto, I think. These parents need to really spend some time thinking about this: if their kid ends up going to a third-tier college, even, gasp, a “directional” state school (in my state Northern, Eastern, Central and Western are considered a tier or two below University of Michigan and State), will they love them less? Will they themselves feel like failures? If their child is happy and feels fulfilled in what they are doing, does any of this really matter? And if it they search their hearts and find that yes, it really really does matter, then it’s not their baby that has some work to do.
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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