What Ever Happened to the Playpen?How the kiddie enclosures fell out of favor.
Posted Friday, Aug. 7, 2009, at 11:20 AM ET
I can't honestly say I remember physically being in a playpen as a child—though I was—but I remember them as a fact of 1970s child life, a rubber-and-mesh piece of living room furniture as ubiquitous as mahogany-cabinet-enclosed Magnavox televisions (with family photos crowded out by a giant Betamax on top). But as the clock ticked toward my recent entry into fatherhood and I trawled various hip and modern baby-product sites, mentally equipping our nursery-to-be, I noticed that among all the titanium-framed Norwegian strollers and German educational toys (or was it vice-versa?), I didn't seem to see any playpens —whether rendered in sustainably sourced wenge wood or not. The word didn't really seem to surface very much among all the proper parenting discourse on the chat sites either. Which left me wondering: Do parents still use playpens? Or are they some relic of me-decade indulgence forsaken in an era of more enlightened child-rearing?
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StumbleUponNow, a simple visit to a site like Babies 'R' Us will confirm that, yes, playpens do still exist. But they seem to have been rebranded, for these devices are no longer called playpens. Instead, searching for the term on Babies 'R' Us will yield a range of "Pack n' Plays" (a trademark of the kid-product manufacturer Graco, and which purists insist is less a playpen in the traditional sense than a traveling crib), and various takes on the "playard" (a word that seems vaguely French but is actually a contraction of "Play Yard"). Rather tellingly, a Google search for playpen seems to yield as many entries for contraptions to corral pets as children.
I do not know exactly when the word began to fall from favor, nor the precise circumstances of its emergence. The Oxford English Dictionary cites as its earliest usage a Washington Post article from 1902: "In the play-room are to be found the latest chairs, which aid in teaching children to walk, play pens, where the younger ones are confined."
The word, on the face of it, is rather contradictory, combining play—a word with inherent jouissance—with a suffix that suggests confinement. Given that even pens for livestock have fallen under scrutiny—battery cages for chickens, for example, are critiqued because in them, hens "endure high levels of stress and frustration"—it's not surprising to find parental discomfort with a product that seems so, well, penitential. Of course, the word yard itself has prison overtones, and when examining a product like the "North States Superyard XT Gate Play Yard" it's not hard to get some serious Gitmo vibes. (Such misgivings about the playpen are exemplified in sculptor Robert Gober's X Playpen, a bifurcated enclosure that, as one critic put it, "emphasizes this domestic space's claustrotraumatic quality.")
Whatever its name, the concept of the playpen reveals yet another fault line in the politics of anxious parenting, as I found via a simple inquiry—whether the playpen was in or out of vogue—at Urbanbaby.com, a site that combines the neurotic firepower of Woody Allen's 1970s oeuvre with the conviviality-tinged-with-hostility of the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars. Reading through the various replies (including a few from parents-to-be who shared my curiosity), the opinions seemed to fall roughly into two camps: Against were those who said playpens are overly confining, that it is better to child-proof one's home instead, that playpens are "the first compromise to good parenting" (inevitably followed by television, etc.); on the other side were those who averred that playpens are safe and necessary spaces to park toddlers while getting things done, that it is folly to suggest that one's parental eyes can always be trained on the child, that far from restricting creativity playpens enhance a sense of independence, etc.
Even those who embraced the playpen, however, did so somewhat reluctantly ("a necessary evil," ran one headline), and when I reached for the parenting bookshelf, it seemed the anti-playpen voices began to dominate. In Your Baby and Child by Penelope Leach, I was told that "babies who spend hours confined in cribs or playpens, with few toys and minimal adult attention, are very slow in learning to reach out and get hold of things and that means they are also slow in discovering what can be done with things." In a book called Smart-Wiring Your Baby's Brain, we are advised to "minimize the time she is confined to a crib or a playpen during waking hours." Mavis Klein, in The Psychodynamic Counseling Primer, writes that "it has actually been shown that children of about seven or eight years of age who were, as infants, regularly confined in playpens, are less competent at reading and writing than those who were not so imprisoned"; while John Rosemond's New Parent Power! warns that "there is evidence suggesting that children who spend lots of time confined in cribs or playpens suffered delayed speed and are less coordinated."
As these books tend to be short on footnotes, I couldn't actually track down any such study. And what a study it would have to be: large-scale, "longitudinal," intensely observational, randomized. Otherwise, how would we really know how much time children had spent in playpens (self-reports tend to be biased), what sort of households the children lived in, not to mention what might have occurred in the years between the time spent in playpens and the time of the reading and writing tests at age 7 or 8? Which left me wondering: Is the fear of playpens all hype? Just a hysterical outcropping of our anxious style of modern parenting?
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Much parenting advice seems designed to produce guilt in new parents rather than helping them to practically raise a child. If you read the right magazines you'll find that serving your baby anything other than breast milk and then home pureed organic home grown vegetables is neglect. You'll find that allow a child to glimpse a television before the onset of puberty is going to stunt their brain. That any responsible parent will home school their children. Sleeping with your children is tantamount to drowning them in the tub.
The playpen feeds right into this. The idea that you would park your toddler in a padded pen to play with toys for half an hour while you get the dishes or the laundry done is spun as some sort of neglect. The reality is that as a parent you don't need to, and indeed can't, subsume your entire life into the service of your child. You can't spend every waking moment with your child without going insane yourself.
If you go to Babies R Us you will find a wealth of products which help hold the baby in one safe spot for a while including cribs, bassinets, strollers, swings, walkers, and playpens.
-- fletc3her
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Whenever I hear a parent of a baby or toddler whine about how they cannot even use the toilet or shower because their kid will be unsupervised, I wonder why they have ignored this obvious solution. I suppose they do not want to look like "bad parents" by having this item in their homes. Of course the playpen should not be overused, but it seems highly unlikely that spending half an hour a day confined could cause a child harm. Personally, I did not have one for my daughter because we couldn't afford it, but I would have loved to be able to park her somewhere safe when I had to.
-- AnaMen
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