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  As it turns out, before too long I come back to my senses and land my swollen, aching feet down on Earth a little wiser and a hell of a lot poorer. In fact, all it takes is a good two weeks at home with a newborn Cella to realise about 80 per cent of the clothing items I’ve bought her are not going to work. Her baby Armani sandals look ridiculous and keep falling off, she hurls milky vomit all over her cashmere sweaters and everything that has bows or tulle ends up irritating her sensitive skin. By the end of the month, Cella is back in her Bonds onesies and seemingly happier for it, while I’m considering burning her bundles of clothes for warmth when we’re out on our arses in the street.

  I’m not saying I’ve given up my love of a good Country Road cardigan or Coco and Ginger dress – I still shop from time to time – but I’ve learned kids need wash-n-wear for a reason. Life’s too short for me to be worried about getting Vegemite on her silk dress and besides, there’s plenty of time for her to flip about fashion when she gets older.

  Do our kids really need designer clothing?

  Q&A with Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood

  Why the surge in designer gear for babies and toddlers these days? Did our parents not love us enough or something?

  The fewer children parents have – and we’re having fewer children than ever before – the more likely they are to indulge them. It’s all related to the Little Emperor and Little Princess syndrome. Also, parents who are impressed by designer labels think it shows how much they love their offspring if they buy them ‘high-status’ brands. But in a way, it’s turning the child into a sort of status symbol too.

  Who’s driving this trend and why?

  Marketers discovered long ago that parents are easy meat – they’ll spend money on their children even when they can’t afford to spend it on themselves. Once upmarket fashion brands realised there was money to be made, they started creating lines for children. There’s the influence of celebrity culture, too, that feeds a climate of conspicuous consumption. And celebrity-obsessed mums who can’t afford a Gucci frock can probably scrape together the cash for a mini version.

  Is there a particular psychology behind purchasing designer threads for a small child?

  I fear it’s the inevitable outcome of three decades of competitive consumerism. Adults who’ve been brought up in a ‘winners and losers’ society from an early age have absorbed the message that you are what you wear. There’s a chilling quote from a 12-year-old girl in a marketing manual called Brandchild. ‘I love brands. Brands not only tell me who I am – they protect me from others in my class.’ It’s a terrible thought – a child so lacking any sense of self that she has to buy an off-the-peg identity. Even worse, her classmates judge each other’s worth on the basis of the brands they wear. But it’s now widespread and, given the extent to which kids have been bombarded with the message that love equals stuff, it’s scarcely surprising. Responsible parents and teachers have to fight this syndrome.

  What are some of the dangers of growing up a ‘designer baby’?

  Research from the US suggests that children who’ve been indulged in this way tend to have inflated (and not very accurate) self-opinions and are significantly lacking in empathy. So I don’t think they’ll be very nice to know. And what happens if things go pear-shaped and their parents can no longer afford all the gear? Will their personalities implode? There’s also the probability that girls treated like little dolls as children will grow up to be superficial and obsessed with appearance. Abi Moore, who founded the website Pinkstinks (pinkstinks.org.uk) once said, ‘The princess culture starts in the cradle and it ends up with Paris Hilton.’ A frightening thought for any parent.

  Sue’s top five tips on retraining our attitudes towards designer threads

  1. For healthy development, children don’t need designer clothes – they need love.

  2. If you teach them to confuse love with material indulgence, you’re spoiling them. ‘Spoil’ is another word for ‘damage’.

  3. They also need to play (which psychologists now reckon is as important for healthy development as food and sleep), and if they’re wearing expensive gear they won’t play freely.

  4. Buy into the Little Emperor or the Little Princess dream, and you’ll create a little potentate. You’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of tantrums and pester power.

  5. You’re enhancing the chances of your child going in for binge-drinking or substance abuse as a teenager.

  Motherhood brings out my ugly side

  Interesting parenting fact #267: Cella is the most beautiful baby in the world. Okay, it’s not in any record books or anything like that, but it’s just so painfully obvious there’s no need, right? RIGHT?? Oh I’m sorry, what? You’re saying every other mum feels this way about their own babies too? Hmm.

  It’s an average day like any other and I’m holding my six-month-old daughter up in the air and kissing her all over her chubby, drooly baby cheeks. My depression has left me some months ago, and I’m in love, love, love. ‘Are you the most beautiful baby in the world? Yes! Yes you are, my darling!’ I coo in that slightly deranged, high-pitched baby voice all mothers are capable of. Cella gurgles appreciatively, basking happily in my adulation and my heart skips a beat.

  Lee walks into the room and I pounce on him. ‘Hooonnneeey? Do you think Cella’s really as gorgeous as we think she is, or is she more of a pretty, yet entirely average-looking baby?’ I ask quickly. He doesn’t even bother responding, he’s far too busy swinging Cella around and blowing raspberries on her belly. ‘Because she could have a face like a dropped pie and we wouldn’t be able to tell because we’re biologically programmed to think she’s physically superior to every other human who’s ever walked.’ (I know this sounds harsh but let’s be honest – it’s a rare parent who can come out and say, ‘You know . . . I could have done better.’) This stops Lee in his tracks and he puts Cella down in her rocker before turning his attention to me. ‘Babe, she DOES NOT have a face like a dropped pie – what the hell is wrong with you for even suggesting that?’ He was probably the wrong person to ask. Truth be told, ever since Cella was born, not only does Lee suddenly believe in God again, but remains convinced the only thing God has been working on for the past couple of years is our daughter because she’s so insanely perfect. In short, he’s worse than I am. ‘You’re still thinking about whether or not we should sign her up with that baby modelling agency, aren’t you?’ Damn it! That man can read me like a book.

  I know it sounds like crazy talk to want to sign your six-month-old with a modelling agency, but in my defence I’d like to say it’s not like I harvested a baby just to make money out of her. With my Turkish heritage and Lee’s dark, hairy Irish background we just kind of assumed that our children would end up looking half-man, half-monkey. So when Cella popped out with her fair hair and blue eyes, you could say it was a big surprise and if I hadn’t seen them pull her out of me with my own eyes, I’d swear she was someone else’s. I’d heard of a friend of a friend whose baby was raking in the cash by starring in nappy campaigns and I thought, Why not give it a go? And besides, I tell myself, it’s not like she’d be experiencing anything that’s out of line with her day-to-day life. She would literally just have to lie there on a bunny rug and be a baby. What could possibly go wrong?

  ‘Ooh, I don’t know about that,’ says my friend Nina, as we stroll through the park the following day with our little ones on wheels. ‘Do you really think you can handle all those wanky people poking and prodding her and saying she’s not good enough? What if I said to you right now, “I don’t think Cella is a particularly pretty baby,”? How do you feel?’ she asks. ‘Um, I sorta feel like I want to drag a piece of glass across your throat just so I can watch you slowly bleed to death,’ I reply, matter-of-fact. Nina, who has known me and my way with words for many years, doesn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Exactly! So imagine how you’re going to feel every time Cella doesn’t get a job and you know she’s been rejected for one reason or another – i
s that feeling really worth a few thousand dollars?’ The words hurt, I can’t deny it, and I know what she’s saying because we both work in the magazine industry and understand what the casting process can do to models. As the kind of person who wants to pick up a shard of glass at the slightest criticism of her child, should I really be entering the highly competitive modelling arena? But then I look down at Cella gurgling in her pram and my heart sings. Seriously, people. Who could reject her?

  One week later, Lee and I are in the car, driving Cella to her appointment with one of Australia’s top child modelling agencies. Cella is dressed head to toe in blue to ‘bring out her eye colour’ while I sit next to her, holding a towel under her chin so she doesn’t decorate her finery with any milky vomit. As she has barely any hair, I’ve practically staple-gunned a hairclip to her scalp. Cella, for her part, doesn’t seem to realise her life is about to change.

  The first thing we notice about the agency when we arrive is that the walls are full of framed pictures of the most AMAZING looking kids I’ve ever seen in my life. Hawaiian babies in boardies, Eurasian girls aplenty and gorgeous half-African toddlers with afros modelling designer threads. I gulp hard. And suddenly I’m worried Cella’s half-Turkish, half-English heritage is not nearly exotic enough. On the coffee table sit three or four look books chock full of babies, toddlers and older children who’ve come before Cella and fronted campaigns for everyone from Bonds and Huggies to Target and KFC. Thumbing through the pages, I feel a pang of something I can’t quite put my finger on. Is it anger? Jealousy? I’m not quite sure. But just as I’m shaking the negative thoughts from my head, a robust woman comes walking into the room. ‘Okay!’ she says in a booming voice as she glances at her clipboard. ‘And who do we have here?’ I quickly stand up and wave Cella around like a pom pom (no need to call DoCS – I don’t mean vigorously, but kinda like a sad cheerleader whose team has just lost an important game). ‘This is Cella,’ I say brightly and Cella automatically clings to me as if to say, ‘Get me the fuck away from this woman, Mummy.’

  Clipboard Lady sits down next to me, talking a million miles a minute. ‘Well, first things first, I suppose,’ she says as she puts on her reading glasses. ‘As I mentioned to you on the phone, we charge $550 to represent your child for 12 months, blah blah blah . . .’ She’s still talking but I don’t hear a word she’s saying because I’m grimacing at the cost. ‘And please note that we cannot guarantee your baby will work but we’ll certainly do our best to put her out there for all suitable jobs,’ she continues. ‘AND, we’ll also throw in two FREE photos of her from our studio shoot that you can take home, Mum and Dad.’

  Over the next 20 minutes, we go over Cella’s sleeping and eating habits and the woman asks me what her general temperament is like. ‘Because modelling isn’t just about looks but having the right temperament, you see,’ she says. I am struck dumb for a moment. Temperament? Cella is bat-shit crazy with sleeplessness and generally quite miserable most of the time. Still, I don’t say any of this because not only do I not want to screw up her chances of getting on their books, but really, how much damage could she do at six months anyway? Refuse to crawl down the runway for less than $10,000 a day? ‘Oh, she’s great!’ I smile through gritted teeth and I catch Lee giving me a surprised look, which I studiously ignore.

  Clipboard Lady turns to Cella and begins looking her over like she’s something that recently grew in a Petri dish. After 30 seconds or so, she looks away satisfied and says, ‘I think Cella will get plenty of work, and I can already tell she’s very good with people.’ At that, Lee bursts out laughing, spraying his coffee all over my knees. As we’re leaving after our ‘free’ photo shoot, Lee asks, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Nope, not at all, but I try to keep the tempo upbeat. ‘Oh yeah! Cella’s far cuter than most of the kids I saw in there,’ I say in an over-animated tone. ‘Let’s just give it a year and see how it goes.’ And after all, it will just be a bit of fun, I tell myself. Besides, it’s not like I’m one of those competitive stage mums we all laugh about on pay TV or anything, right?

  Like fuck I’m not.

  Two days later we’re tearing down the freeway, heading towards some godforsaken industrial wasteland for Cella’s first-ever casting. A large multinational is looking for the new face for their nappy brand and they’re offering big bucks for the right baby to be on all their packaging as well as star in their TV commercial and print ads. Exciting! Catching a glance at my sleeping baby all dressed up in her party clothes, I smile and let myself daydream about how to invest the cash I’m already convinced she’s going to earn from this job. Nip and tuck here, maybe some new boobs? Kidding! I plan to pop it away in savings for her until she’s 25 (old enough to know better than to blow it on useless things). Just then Cella wakes and starts wailing as the most pungent stench fills the car. ‘No Cella!’ I scream silently as I bang the steering wheel. ‘Why did you have to poo now?’ I pull off the freeway and stop on a side street to inspect the damage. Much to my dismay, Cella has done the most explosive poo known to humankind and the bottom part of her outfit is literally drenched in shit. In other news, her face is now all red and puffy from crying – hardly the sort of kid you’d want to see on a nappy box, more the kind you’d see on a safe-sex information brochure. Fuck! Trying to stay calm as we race against the clock, I quickly wipe her down and change her into a back-up outfit. By the time we arrive, Cella is overtired and unhappy and I’m feeling flustered and anxious.

  I can hear the studio long before I can see it, the wind carrying the wails of babies and the frustrated yells of their mothers across the car park for everyone to hear. Cella looks at me anxiously, trying to gauge whether the situation I’m taking her into is safe. ‘It’s okay, little one, we’ve just come to get some photos done,’ I gently whisper in her hear before I kiss her red, wet cheeks. The studio is wall–to-wall chockers with babies of every kind. And beside every single munchkin sits a rather exhausted, frustrated and anxious-looking mummy (or in a few cases, a daddy or nanny). When we step gingerly into the room I immediately sense 20 sets of eyes zeroing in on Cella as the mums try to suss out whether she’s any kind of competition (and subsequently, whether she should be kneecapped, I’m guessing). For the most part I feel like we’ve got it in the bag until I notice a couple of ridiculously gorgeous babies to the side and my heart sinks to the bottom of my stomach.

  Meanwhile, the competition between the mums is also hotting up. Sitting opposite one another in dead silence, we have plenty of time to size each other up and make judgments based on what we see. We don’t just judge each other’s baby’s physical appearance, either – we’re also clocking prams, nappy bags, clothing and bodies, all the while making it seem like we haven’t even noticed there’s anyone else in the room. None of the mums look directly at each other, no one dares speak and the tension in the room is palpable.

  One baby girl, a particular stunner, is called into the audition room and much to my horror, I find myself sending bad vibes that something goes terribly wrong and she is not chosen. It must have worked because after two minutes’ silence I hear the mum begging with her daughter to laugh, her voice getting higher every time she asks as she grows more and more frustrated. I then hear her say to the casting director, ‘I’m so sorry, can we try this again? She doesn’t normally do this at home.’ And then I hear the baby screaming and it’s all over. The door opens and the mum slinks out defeated. All around me, mums try hard not to smile at the baby’s perceived failure as they take a sudden interest in adjusting their Bugaboos or rummaging through their handbags. ‘Man, this business is brutal!’ I whisper to one of the mums sitting next to me but she just looks at me strangely then averts her eyes. Right, I’ve clearly broken a cardinal sin of the audition process. You are not to talk to the competition.

  The door opens again and a young woman with Coke-bottle glasses sticks her head out. ‘Cella McGurren!’ Ooh, here we go! Excited, I scoop up our belongings and purposefully strut into
a fairly sterile room where a video camera is set up. Coke-glasses hands me a board with Cella’s name and birthday written on it and asks me to stand in front of the camera while holding the board under her chin. Easy enough, you may think, but the minute we get into position Cella starts bawling for reasons I cannot understand, and doesn’t stop. Oh crap! A sense of dread comes over me as I try to soothe her for her close-up. ‘Can you get her to laugh please, Mum?’ asks the humourless man behind the camera who clearly does not have any children of his own. ‘Shh, shh, shh,’ I whisper in Cella’s ear, all the while imagining the smug mums in the waiting room smiling to themselves over Cella’s cries. It gets us nowhere. We try for a few more minutes but Cella doesn’t stop crying and we are soon shown the door – NEXT! I drive home in a glum fog, both upset at Cella’s behaviour at the audition, but also disappointed in my own. Cella just giggles to herself in the back seat as she plays with her toes, the trauma of the studio behind her. Suffice it to say, she does not get the gig and the rejection feels like 100 cold daggers stabbing through my heart.

  It turns out Cella’s face doesn’t resemble a dropped pie after all (phew!) because soon the phone is ringing constantly with audition requests. We are called in for castings for everything from Bonds commercials and toy catalogues to washing powder ads. And every single time I get all excited and dress her up to the nines – only for her to start screaming as soon as we arrive at the casting and not stop until we’re safely back in the car. She refuses to smile for the camera, crawl or sit on demand, and one audition goes so badly that security actually ask us to leave because she’s ‘upsetting the other babies’. Things don’t get much better with the other mothers, either. At each casting, we size each other up with mistrust and sit in stony silence as we will each other’s babies to fail miserably. Lee gets a taste of this one day when he takes Cella to one audition and comes back traumatised. ‘How on Earth do you do it?’ he asks as he pours himself a drink and plops down on the sofa. ‘What? Cella’s screaming?’ I ask. ‘NO!’ he yells. ‘The other mums – and just how awful you are to one another.’ He stares into the bottom of his glass as though he wants to drown himself in it. ‘Oh,’ I say softly, ‘when you’re a mum, you get used to it pretty quickly.’ And it’s true.