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Back in the days before "parent" was a verb, most of
the scenes of our early lives were striped by the vertical bars
of playpens. Credit or blame our ceaseless guilt for the notion
that modern children need more room to explore and confront their
worlds. The playpen that Dr. Spock recommended four decades ago
for "fun by the hour" Penelope Leach icily rejects: "Even
a baby who willingly goes into it cannot learn all that he should
if he is constantly confined."
Apart from the fact that playpens are now called play yards (presumably
to avoid the penal connotation), one outcome of this freedom has
been the baby-safety industry, which exists at the intersection
of childhood and dread. There, in a world where potential business
success is unavoidably linked to potential human disaster, inventors
spend their days contemplating the by-products of liberation: pinched
fingers, poked eyes, electric shocks, falling dressers, and unchecked
oral impulses. Hence, the ubiquity of cabinet locks, stairway gates,
and outlet covers, as well as items of more debatable indispensability:
bathtub water thermometers, spoons that turn white if a baby’s
food is too hot, video nursery monitors, and those beige elasticized
cushiony things which make coffee tables look as if they were wearing
giant chef’s hats.
All this is part of a grand strategy to make the world safe for
infancy. But children open things. They eat things. They wander
moonily out of playgrounds. They fall down stairs in seconds, while
their parents stand two breathless feet away. So what seems to be
next for the juvenile inustry is to find ever more attractive forms
of confinement for a generation of children whose parents don’t
believe in confinement.
Bouncers, high chairs, infant seats, swings, and walkers have been
huge sellers of late, multiplying in kind and number, proliferating
in bells and whistles. But Richars Shandelman, the president of
the Philadelphia-based child-safety company Safe & Sound, is
going beyond the strap-‘em-in products. He’s come up with
a whole new take on confinement: making it invisible.
What Shandelman has invented is a child leash for the twenty-first
century. He calls is a "child-wandering device," and,
if all goes well in the testing, it should be marketed in a year
under the brand name ChildLink. Talk about building a better mousetrap.
ChildLink is a set of beeper-size transceivers that you clip to
yourself and your toddler. Then you punch in your desired radius
and peacefully cruise a department store. If your child exceeds
the range of the device, Shandelman says, "it will alarm."
Shandelman, himself a very nineties father of two, is seriously
committed to the art of "positive parenting." ("’No’
becomes ineffective after a while," he says.) The sight of
a child on an actual leash appalls him. "It’s barbaric,"
he says. And thus he arrived at the leashless leash for the non-confining
confiners. In a sense, it neatly unties Spock and Leach. With ChildLink,
Shandelman says, "I can keep close tabs on my child without
binding him from learning and exploring."
Shandelman imagines his electronic tether being purchased by parents
for the great, Gothic outdoors – and also by museums, amusement
parks, and other child stomping grounds. He sees ChildLink not only
as security against abduction but also as protection wherever a
child’s urge to explore overtakes a parent’s ability to
cope. "If you have kids," he says somewhat wearily, "you
know it’s not even a reality to hold their hands sometimes."
Shandelman, who has been in the childproofing business for five
years, helped develop a reconnaissance antenna in the early eighties
for a branch of the government that he’s still not at liberty
to name. And he holds several patents on those antitheft devices
which beep if you try to shoplift. Getting the bugs out of ChildLink
will require months of testing, but technologically, Shandelman
says, it is not very different from that other method of civilized
confinement the ankle bracelet for house arrest. Philosophically,
he says, "it’s really just a device to give you some peace
of mind."
Lisa Grunwald is a free-lance writer for The New Yorker Magazine.
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