Toy store story

Every Thursday morning a sea of strollers covers the entrance to Campusville Toys.  At the back of the shop, the East Coast’s answer to Rolf Harris strums his guitar and sings, egged on by around thirty under-4s. 

Rolf is not a bad performer but, in truth, his uncanny resemblance to a chimpanzee must be a boost to his kiddie X-factor. He takes up his guitar and monkey mayhem ensues.  Pre-crawlers flap arms and down lego pieces and other floor debris, while the more mobile little chimps swing from the rafters.  They snatch toys, pull things off shelves, and bounce around, jostling for position at the front when a favourite tune comes on. Enthusiastic nannies, moms and the odd dad sing along mouthing the words with tremendous gusto.  Probably, like me, they’ve come just as much for themselves as their kids - a little adult contact goes a long way in breaking up long hours spent caring for a young child.  For an hour or so after the event beleaguered shop assistants tiptoe around us stragglers hoovering, sorting and running an inventory of the damage. I wonder sometimes if all this can be worth it for the store, we didn’t even pay to get in after all. But of course it is - the tills have taken more in a couple of hours than the rest of the week combined.

In small town America, it seems that just about every high street big enough to have a post office also has an enticing independent or small-chain toy store. Hosting weekly parent and baby sing-alongs, story-times and coffee hours is pretty standard - a lot see it as their bread and butter. Events typically attract dozens of local families, thus etching out the place of toy-stores as meeting places for young families and community hubs.

We’ve looked to publicly funded Sure Start Children’s Centres and libraries for this kind of thing in the UK in recent years. In the face of radical plans by the new Coalition Government to pay back the deficit and reduce spending, both are now facing significant cuts and potential closures. So, might our toy shops go the American way?  

On one level, its a no brainer.  State provided services shrink enabling small businesses to grow into the spaces they once occupied.  Profits get boosted and children and parents are able to access equivalent services to the ones they used before. The shopkeeper’s community knowledge and desire to get people through the door might even lead to events which are better attuned to the needs and desires of local families.  Its the perfect allegory for David Cameron’s “Big Society” master-plan.

Yet in cultural terms, UK retailers have a distance to travel to take up their spot in the Big Society.  In contrast to the US service culture, some still seem to see their customers as the enemy.  At our local London toy shop, patrons are greeted by a sign on the door that shouts “KNOCK BEFORE ENTRY.  NO TOUCHING.  CHILDREN ONE AT A TIME”.  Once you’re through the door, if you don’t accept immediate assistance, you’ll feel the shop assistant’s eyes burning holes in the back of your head. Its a stoney stare that says in no uncertain terms: your-brat-breaks-anything-and-you-both-get-booted... Thanks very much.

A more serious question, however, is whether families can really draw value from playing along with what is essentially a private business’s marketing strategy.  I don’t think the answer is straight forward.  There are obviously a lot of good things going on at Campusville Toys’s sing-a-long, just the same as they would in a Children’s Centre or library (exposure to language, child social interactions, adult networks being established, etc).  But a toy store is not a Children’s Centre.  It is not designed with child development in mind, and that’s not the priority of the people who run it.  Some of the toys are educational, but a lot are simply designed to be eye-catching.  The sheer amount of toys around is enough to bring on a bout of ADHD in the most focused child - which would explain the rafter swinging.  And the frenzied grabbing at stuff off shelves is not just an unfortunate side-effect from the retailers point of view.  It is the very purpose of the event.  The more children grab, the more their parents buy. 

As services are cut back in the UK, its worth looking at the way things are done in the States where commercial and civic society play a larger role (this is something I intend to do more of in this blog). But as always, its important to drill beneath the surface to see what’s really going on. A dose of toy-lust? A little frivolous spending? A momentary shortening of a child’s attention span?  On the face of it, these trade-offs don’t sound too major.  But writ large they could lead to an undesirable creeping commercialisation of public life.  

New York, New York

Hello from a sunny Union Square, Manhattan. We’ve come here for a couple of days as Mr TD has a conference on. Its the first time I’ve visited New York as a mum and I’ve found the city surprisingly family friendly. There’s an astonishing amount of stuff on for kids, crossing the road with a pram has proved far easier than doing so without one and a number of locals have even found time to stop and coo at Little Teadrinker. They are also positively brimming with parenting advice. So far this morning I’ve had: “Your baby needs to get oudda da sun”, “You awda cover her feet”, “Dat’s bread ain’t sowft enough for her”... Its at least reassuring to know that, despite American aversion to nanny statism, Hilary Clinton’s favourite African proverb has some currency round here: “It takes a village city to raise a child”.

Sadly, my enthusiasm for the city appears to shared by ever smaller proportions of those living here. Two million New Yorkers have left the State over the past decade and census data shows that New York leads the nation with net out-migration of 20 to 35 year olds. In other words, many are going at about the time they start to think about becoming parents.

What’s driving the exodus? The picture those I've spoken to paint feels familiar enough to me as a Londoner. People with kids leave Manhattan, and then New York looking for more space. They leave because childcare is expensive and they’re nervous about the public school system. And they leave because they want to be able to afford to spend less time with their nose to the grind stone, and more with their children.

A quick look at home economics suggests that the pressures on New York families could well be more accute than for their counterparts in London. The University of Washington, who calculate the New York “Self-Sufficiency Standard” every year, find that to get by with a basic standard of living a Brooklyn family with two adults, a school-aged child, and a preschooler, for example, needs to earn $68,288 a year ($5,691 a month).  That works out as $16.17 (£10.13) per hour for each adult and is more than what half the workers in the city earn.  The Greater London Authority’s London Living Wage, which is the London equivalent, is by contrast pegged at a mere £7.85 ($12.53) per hour. And of course, Londoners on low wages are likely to be able to access a far greater range of benefits and tax breaks. In the US, financial support for a family of this size doesn't generally kick in until they have an income of less than around $22k - less than one-third of the Self-Sufficiency Standard.

In the aftermath of "The Great Recession", prospects for turning this round don't look heartening. Job creation is a major New York Mid-term election issue, but from a glance at the campaign literature low wages and the high cost of living don’t even figure. Lets hope the political masters turn their attention to the issue before the rush out of New York becomes a stampeed...

I like to be in America

It looks as if this week’s storm in a teacup may be blowing over. Obama’s call for tolerance following the mad Pastor’s Koran burning threat has not even featured on Fox News’ politics site and CNN have done a brilliant job reassuring us that the American melting pot is a happy love-in with a story about two guys on a road trip “Ali and Tariq were embraced nearly everywhere they went, from a Confederate souvenir shop in Georgia to the streets of Las Vegas, Nevada, to the hills of North Dakota” ...

Here in Campusville the locals certainly do their bit to reach out across cultural boundaries, making us feel very welcome despite our eccentric Anglo-ways. Advice and invitations abound from fellow parents, whether its Pamela in the playground, Janey in the bookshop and Christie in the coffee shop. The grocery store’s exotic international aisle even has a UK shelf baring marmite, Tetley teabags, baked beans and Ready Brek (don’t it make you proud).

In return, we’ve done our best to get on and fit in. I’ve got face ache and exhaustion from my efforts to be smilier, earlier and cleaner than comes naturally. And when our new friends tell us proudly that there’s a sing-along at the toy-store, a new-mom meet-up in Starbucks or baby yoga at the expensive gym in the next town I resist the temptation to boast about England's Children's Centres. Would the moms and dads here be envious if they knew? You don’t miss what you never had I guess. And thanks to their confident networking abilities and strong spending power, America’s ‘big society’ seems to be thriving all by itself in this middle class town.

Blueberry jam storm

Its been two days of blistering heat since we stepped off the plane, and now we’re preparing for a hurricane... Earl is on his way.  While this part of the Eastern Seaboard is not predicted to meet the eye of the storm, the weather men are saying the city could take some thrashing tonight.  The Mayor has declared a state of emergency and Liz our landlady, who while not landladying is being a leading academic authority on the art of writing a steamy novel, is coming round to help us secure the rickety windows of our clapboard house and clear the portch.


Meanwhile the Moms of Campusville have other things on their minds.  How do I know? There's nothing more that these people love than connectivity, so being a newby is no obstacle to getting the inside track. 1500 local moms have now collectivised through Yahoo messaging group which exchanges as many messages a month with numbers fast growing.  Exchanges are lively and cover everything from public breastfeeding rights to dealing with dads who give too many desserts.  Yet Campusville.com moms have not had time to worry about the storm. The preoccupation of the day has been a dramatic collision between Percy, friend of Thomas (the Tank Engine), and a parcel he is carrying which culminated in blueberry jam, with a distinctly bloody appearance, being spilt on the tracks. Should our children be exposed to this level of violence the moms wonder? There is concern that the “dynamics between the engines are surely sometimes less than kind”. Should I take this as the first bit of evidence that far from their liberal reputation East Coast moms are protective beyond belief?  Or that behind the facade lies an old fashioned, conservative soul, which only bares itself when it comes to deeply personal matters such as parenting? Perhaps I'm reading too much into it.  Perhaps the heat, or the blueberry jam, has just gone to their heads. Time will tell...