Matthew Yglesias (March 12, 2007) - Alternamom At Last (Miscellaneous)

"...today I think I met my very first real-life Alternamom..."

your "very first?" Hello? Am I missing the point here? Not to be snide, but--how could anyone living in Manhattan, Cambridge and/or DC in the last ten years be just noticing the "hipster mom" phenomenon NOW? This "trend" was old news in 1999.

Tomorrow, I suppose, David Brooks and Michael Agger will introduce their readers to this new "hip-hop" music that kids seem to be so into these days, and Matthew will earnestly respond.

Posted by James Gary | March 12, 2007 11:13 AM

Maybe DC is the issue. I actually don't remember running into many hipster moms when I used to live in Matt's neighborhood. In Park Slope, on the other hand, you can't swing a baby without hitting ten of them. The local coffee shops have vestibules packed with strollers when they hold their daily -- yes, daily -- children's music singalongs. The sidewalks are thick with racially mismatched child/caretender pairings.

Read all about it: http://nymag.com/news/features/16529/

Posted by TF | March 12, 2007 11:23 AM

I hate to agree with David Brooks, but it bothers me as well to see parents instilling these attitudes and music on kids at an inappropriate age. I think kids should be listening to childrens music, or at most mellow folk or rock music. There will be plenty of time for them to acquire a taste for groups like The Ramones when they're older.

Posted by Jim W | March 12, 2007 11:24 AM

Looks like a golf cart. (The manual kinds, I mean.)

Posted by JP | March 12, 2007 11:25 AM

"Insofar as this social trend seems likely to result in more babies crying while I try to get my blog on, I have to say I agree with Brooks."

Amen to that. The last couple of months have seen a serious uptick in the number of kids getting wheeled into the Phila. coffee shop I work in by their moms, who pretty clearly still want to feel like they're hip. The place is cool precisely because it lets people bring their dogs. But toddlers are not dogs. They don't quickly sniff your butt and then sit quietly while you write. They run around and yell and spill things.

Posted by Scott E. | March 12, 2007 11:30 AM

Yeah, my wife and I took a look at the Xplorys a couple of months back when we were shopping. They're even goofier looking than the former "Popular with celebrities and the uber rich" stroller, the Bugaboo. Agree with the commenters above, though, the Alternamom is not a new concept, at least for my NYC neighborhood.

Posted by Al | March 12, 2007 11:41 AM

Given the price and especially if this is imported, an excise or luxury tax is called for.

Posted by Hedley Lamarr | March 12, 2007 11:44 AM

Confidential to TF--you smoked me right out. Park Slope is, in fact, exactly where I am.

Posted by James Gary | March 12, 2007 11:45 AM

Are you kidding me! $769 for a stroller? Where do people get the money for this crap?

Posted by SteveH | March 12, 2007 11:45 AM

I kind of want one. Could maybe use it to carry groceries?

You have to do this. It would be my favorite affection of all times, exceeding even the walking stick favored by Prime Minister Pete Nice.

Posted by delicious Pundit | March 12, 2007 11:46 AM

Jim W, to what extent can parents really instill attitudes and music in (or on) their children? If there's some technique for making my toddler like what I like, I haven't found it yet. And when these kids grow up enough to realize that their parents were making them listen to certain music only to flatter themselves, they'll rebel against the implied condescension.

As for the other vein of complaint here (get your toddlers out of my hip cafe), I have predictably little sympathy. If your cafe was vulnerable to invasion by hipster moms, you've got to question the authenticity of its hipness, and by extension your own.

Posted by Vance Maverick | March 12, 2007 11:46 AM

Also, if you're seeing disheveled looking father's stumbling around with three-day's growth of stubble, it might be because their EXHAUSTED. I have three young children, and I don't remember when I last had the energy and time to shave on the weekend.

Also, I have sympathy for parents bringing their children into coffee shops in general. They need to get the kids out of the house, and they have to be able to stop somewhere for a snack. Are you sure they are just trying to be hip? Not just trying to hold on to their sanity?

Posted by Jim W | March 12, 2007 11:53 AM

That Xplory doesn't look like it would hold much food. No, for your grocery shopping, you want a Graco SnugRider. Hip, I dunno, but it holds a week's worth of groceries, plus the baby.

Posted by J. Ellenberg | March 12, 2007 12:04 PM

Look, this David Brooks shit pisses me off.

He creates trends and issues where there are none.

There are hipsters so there are hipster parents. There are lumberjacks so there are lumberjack parents. There are billionaires so there are billionaire parents. There are baseball players so there are baseball player parents. There are evangelicals so there are evangelical parents.

None of these constitute trends in there own right. They just are. He needs to get over himself as his faux-sociological analysis.

Its just shocking that a 26 year old who bought "Oh, Inverted World" in 2003 might have a child now...and still listen to the Shins. This is the same self-absorbed Boomer crap that forced us to suffer through the Big Chill and the like.

Posted by Hank | March 12, 2007 12:12 PM

In Park Slope, on the other hand, you can't swing a baby without hitting ten of them.

Oh, you've done that too? That brings back such memories...

Are you kidding me! $769 for a stroller? Where do people get the money for this crap?

Remember, these are the people who are making places like the Slope less and less affordable for ordinary humans. Which ties into my perpetual rant about how no one can afford rent in New York anymore, because it's too crowded.

That Xplory doesn't look like it would hold much food.

Oh, I'm sure Mr. Yglesias shops at the nearest Whole Foods twice a day for maximum freshness. And how much space is taken up by diet water, organic carrot shreds, and fair-trade cubed yak steak, anyway? Regardless, it would all be worth it for the trenchant social commentary such a scene would exude.

Posted by mds | March 12, 2007 12:20 PM

Ironic parenting, like the sleep of reason, produces monsters.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | March 12, 2007 12:21 PM

That pram really doesn't look very stable. I would have thought a high centre of gravity was a bad thing when it comes to perambulator design.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | March 12, 2007 12:29 PM

The comments on 14U have caused me to go into convulsions of hipster hatred. Some us move to D.C. fleeing hipsters.

Posted by aeroman | March 12, 2007 12:36 PM

This is the stroller. "Popular with celebrities and the uber rich" according to the friend who tipped me off to its identity. I kind of want one.

Says the infant terrible.

Posted by Kriston | March 12, 2007 12:38 PM

So... $770 stroller bad, $150 earphones good?

The boundary between acceptable hipstering and unacceptable hipstering is thus somewhere in between?

Posted by JJO | March 12, 2007 12:41 PM

The summary line of Agger's review of the book:

most of his book recounts his struggle to find what America used to offer easily: a solid house, a living wage, a decent public school.

Grrrrr, I just have to rant. I call bullshit on the "used to offer easily." I am so sick of seeing this mythic crap. Lots of boomers went to public schools with 40 kids per class; if they were lucky, they went to parochial schools with 50 kids per class. Lots of boomers were not raised with their own bedrooms, they grew up without privacy in bunk beds, with a used car (throwing the kid in the back of the Pinto is the only thing he gets right), TV that they all had to share and may have not worked for months until the family could afford for the TV repairman to come.

My father's white-collar college-degree (first in the family) local government job paid less than many blue-collar jobs of the time and Mom stayed home because child care was called "babysitting" and they couldn't afford it except on special occasions. He ALWAYS had part time jobs on weekends, everything from manual day labor to try to strike it big selling real estate. And he was not atypical. There wasn't much on the order of credit cards and ATM's available, if you ran out before payday, you borrowed money from friends or your own children's piggy banks.

It's really like night and day the way kids are being raised today with smaller families. More so, I would say, then the difference between my parents' "greatest generation" and the boomers. The main difference between them and the boomers was that it was no longer expected that children do actual work, only "chores." and they were taught not to question their parent's authority rather than what Dr. Spock said.

It wasn't that easy to own a house, you had to get a 20% down payment from parents or relatives or by scrimping and saving, things like not eating meat. And it wasn't easy to rent with a family, either.

It wasn't easy to get a decent education if your kid had problems. There was no such thing as special ed. There was stuff like the "uneducable" label, dropping out & "learning a trade," reform school, and if you were a parent that cared, flashcard drills at night. Give me a break, the 50's were not a magical time for the lower middle class & middle class in this country. It was a time of raising lots of kids in small nuclear families where the country somehow managed to cope, that's all. Without the G.I. bill & FHA, which were not offered "easily," it would have been chaos. Actually listen to some of JFK's campaign speeches, you'll see.

Posted by artappraiser | March 12, 2007 12:52 PM

"So... $770 stroller bad, $150 earphones good?

The boundary between acceptable hipstering and unacceptable hipstering is thus somewhere in between?"

Classic. Brooks is a knucklehead, coming and going. Don't get sucked in, just because he's speaking to your own personal myopia at the moment.

Posted by anonymous | March 12, 2007 1:09 PM

"So... $770 stroller bad, $150 earphones good?

The boundary between acceptable hipstering and unacceptable hipstering is thus somewhere in between?"

I said the stroller was good, too, and that I wanted to buy one even though I don't have a baby. You need to understand that I was actually born and raised in lower Manhattan by an earlier generation of faux-cool alternaparents -- I have no shame.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | March 12, 2007 1:33 PM

Hey, all of you...stay out of New Mexico..I'm warning you!

Posted by judson | March 12, 2007 1:44 PM

I agree with Brooks.

Four words that should never, ever appear in the same sentance. Even in jest. Brooks is a cancer on the New YorkTimes editorial page.

Actaully, strike that. Brooks is a cancer

Posted by AJ | March 12, 2007 1:52 PM

Hipster parents are to be expected---people do have kids, after all, and I'm all for people becoming parents and even homeowners without turning into Stepford drones, However, the Etymotics 6i headphones constitute an absolute, unalloyed good, greater than perhaps any other invention known to humankind. And they're awesome on the subway too.

Posted by That Fuzzy Bastard | March 12, 2007 2:01 PM

Since when was Park Slope hip?

I'm not sure I get Brooks' point. I'm 35, live in NYC and still go to see live music etc. and do a slightly older-guy version of the stuff I did when I was 25. When I have a kid, am I supposed to buy a sensible sweater, listen to boomer adult rock and move to Connecticut? This whole "trend" seems to be people having kids and being into sort of the same type of stuff they were into before they had kids.

Posted by Justin | March 12, 2007 2:04 PM

Oh, Brooks is definitely a buffoon. My only point with the headphone thing (and I suspected -- and realize more fully now -- that Matt was aiming at this point too) was that it's all in the eye of the beholder. I begrudge no one their strollers or headphones ... though I've found in-ear phones hideously uncomfortable).

Posted by JJO | March 12, 2007 2:07 PM

Are they the ones we used to call milf's? Apparently I didn't get the memo re old name: milf; new name: alternamom, but then again I'm not a butt-plug inserted msm marketer, I mean nyt joornalist.

Posted by bleat my little lame coiner bleat | March 12, 2007 2:25 PM

"Are they the ones we used to call milf's?"

Um, no.

Posted by Stacy's Mom | March 12, 2007 3:55 PM

At the not so mild insistence of the parents of two of my godchildren I had to fork over the equivalent of $200 for an original Stokke Tripp Trapp high-chair, twice! Parents are shameless, only the best for the little buggers.

Posted by novakant | March 12, 2007 4:01 PM

Listen sonny, I lived at 15th in U in 1988, when the crack was always fresh and you could fall asleep to the sound of 9 milimeters. We knew from hip then.

Anyway, as one who used to take my kid in the stroller to the Jolt 'n' Bolt and the Java House, I eagerly look forward to the day when you are hauling your blearly eyed unshaven self and your hell spawn to the local cafe in your desparate quest for caffeine and the feeling that you might still be a creature fit for a meager social life. Have some sympathy for we breeders and thankful that our kids in their Nine Inch Nails snugglies will someday be paying your social security benefits and the cost of this foolish war.

Oh, and get off my lawn!

Vance Maverick,

You can get your kids to listen to music you thought was cool, but only if they inherently like it as well. My 14 year old loves the Smiths, New Order and Joy Division, the Jam, Style Council, the Cure and the Clash, but hates anyone with a really difficult voice to listen to -- Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen. I have been unable to change this thus far. He's also a little anglophile who hates anything with a hint of twang to it.

What is fun (or possibly sickening to some) is when your kid turns you on to things that you genuinely like -- Bloc Party, Arctic Monkeys, Killers and Interpol -- so that it's not perpetually 1982 on your ipod.

Music can be a great bond with your kid, although I wonder if it deprives them of the need to feel a sense of rebellion.

Posted by Klein's Tiny Left Nut | March 12, 2007 5:24 PM

That's 15th and U -- Christ I'm getting old.

Posted by Klein's Tiny Left Nut | March 12, 2007 5:25 PM

I don't know about a $700 stroller, but a cheapo stroller is good for nothing but wheeling the baby across the parking lot from the car to the Walmart. If you walk on the order of 3 miles or more per day, you want one with wheels big enough (and of good enough quality) that the bearings don't immediately fill with grit, begin squeaking, and you have to push the shit out of it just to get the wheels to turn. $300 or doesn't seem at all unreasonable for a stroller, if walking is how you get around most of the time.

Posted by kth | March 12, 2007 5:32 PM

The most alternaparents probably live in East Hollywood. At the Mustard Seed Cafe one Sunday (I was visiting my sister who is an aspiring scriptwriter - don't ask), the chicly raggedly dressed parents had dressed their under-6 children similarly, in outfits that either cost somewhere in three figures or had been assembled from thrift shops.

Someone has been actually imitating the Weetzie Bat series (by Francesca Lia Block).

Posted by sara | March 12, 2007 6:01 PM

Matt, you come off in this post as the type of person who goes around giving the stink eye to anyone who dares wander across his path with a child. It's a bitter and ugly person who hates children. Don't be that guy. They invariably have difficulty attracting women. Chicks dig guys who like kids.

Posted by Just Karl | March 12, 2007 6:59 PM

you need to understand that I was actually born and raised in lower Manhattan by an earlier generation of faux-cool alternaparents -- I have no shame.

You lose any and all lower Manhattan street cred you might have had by having gone to high school on the Upper East Side.

Which, I guess, proves your point even further.

Posted by Constantine | March 12, 2007 7:14 PM

> The most alternaparents probably live in East Hollywood.

I dunno, or at least I dunno if it's the same dynamic - I spend a lot of time in Psychobabble, and I can't remember seeing a single infant. Maybe one six-year-old, but from overhearing his mom it sounded like they were just stopping in on their way back from Childrens Hospital.

Posted by Senescent | March 12, 2007 9:32 PM

gee, when I lived in Washington (in Georgetown, though, where my wife had a fellowship) I pushed my baby boy around in a junky $35 Graco POS, but we had fun. He liked bouncing along the cobblestones on 32nd. When he was a bit older, during a visit to NYC, I pushed him from Washington Square to midtown, and he said "Hi!!" to nearly everyone we passed, even though there was a bit of a rain. Most everyone said "Hi!" right back, even though his cheapo stroller didn't put him at eye level with the adults. A sweet memory.

Posted by DB | March 12, 2007 11:10 PM

It used to be that in New York you could see real strollers. Sigh. Etys rule tho. http://www.jimsformalwear.com/images/product/260_stroller.jpg

Posted by yoyo | March 12, 2007 11:15 PM

"The most alternaparents probably live in East Hollywood. At the Mustard Seed Cafe..."

Dude, that's Los Feliz, not East Hollywood. And there are certainly more alternaparents in Silverlake, Echo Park and Eagle Rock. Count the number of of shops where you can by a Ramones or a Bob Marley onesie.

For what it's worth I took my now-13 year old to hundreds of soccer, baseball and basketball practices and games and now he couldn't care less about sports. Then he discovered Nirvana (on my iTunes list) and it was all rock and roll all the time, old and new. He corrects me when I mess up the lyrics to the songs I grew up listening to. And now I drive him to band practice, which, frankly, I like more than soccer.

Posted by Terry | March 13, 2007 1:40 AM

Music: I liked the Russian Romantics when I was 3, so I make sure all the little kids in my life have plenty of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

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Alternamom At Last

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