Gadget Inspector: Hands-On Parenting
Why is the Zaky, a fifty-dollar beanbag arm, flying off the shelves?
by Sam Apple
May 8, 2007
There are a lot of weird baby products. That was the lesson I took away from my trip to an industry trade show in Vegas. But even in a sea of urine-blocking sponges and monkeys that repeatedly ask to be taken to the potty, the Zaky stands out for its oddness.
The Zaky is a beanbag doll shaped like a forearm and hand that's designed to cuddle with your baby when flesh and blood are not available. To make it seem more like a human limb, parents can warm the Zaky in a dryer and scent it by wrapping it around their own necks for several hours.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Zaky is that it's a hit. At the online retailer Pregnancystore.com (which provided a sample Zaky to author), the Zaky is a best-seller, so popular the store has trouble keeping them in stock. It's hard to know why so many parents are buying the Zaky. The arm's comic value probably helps — the Zaky would probably sell even better repackaged as a novelty spanking device — but at $49.95, it makes for an expensive joke. And so presumably a lot of people believe the claim on the Zaky's website that the doll not only helps position babies but also "helps with pain management and sleep, provides a sense of protection, and assists with the physical and psychological development of the child."
The idea that a beanbag doll could contribute to psychological growth might seem a stretch, but to fully appreciate the claim, you have to go back much further than the Zaky itself. To really make sense of the Zaky — as well as a lot of other parenting products and trends — you have to go all the way back to 1929, the year a twenty-one-year-old Cambridge graduate named John Bowlby decided to put his medical studies on hold and spend six months volunteering at a progressive school for maladjusted children.
Bowlby had always had a strong scientific curiosity and the troubled students at the school presented him with an intellectual puzzle: What had gone wrong? What was different about these children that prevented them from functioning in society?
Bowlby suspected that some experience in infancy was as the root of abnormal psychology, and in that intuition he was hardly alone. At least since Plato, people have been guessing at how our infant years shape our grown-up selves. But which aspects of a baby's mental life were the most crucial to development was anyone's guess. Bowlby didn't claim to know, but when he discussed one subject, an affectionless adolescent thief, with school officials, he uncovered a clue: the boy had not had a stable mother figure in his early years.
If the idea that a baby losing a mother could lead to long-lasting psychological damage sounds almost obvious today, it's a testament to Bowlby's work. In 1929, only a small group of psychologists around the world were even interested in how a mother's love and care might affect a child's outcome. To really make sense of the Zaky, you have to go all the way back to 1929.The behaviorists, fixated on proper conditioning, were more likely to see an emotional mother as an impediment to healthy psychological development. And the Freudians, convinced of the centrality of the infant's fantasy life and oral fixation, had little use for clinical data on mothers and babies. When Bowlby later reviewed the Western medical literature on the relationship between maternal care and mental health, he found fewer than thirty papers from the '20s and '30s.
In 1946, Bowlby, by then a trained psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, published a paper on forty-four juvenile thieves whose cases he had studied while working at the London Child Guidance Clinic. Among the forty-four criminals, Bowlby noticed that a subset of fourteen had what Bowlby described as a "remarkable lack of affection or warmth of feeling for anyone." When Bowlby searched for a common thread in the backgrounds of these affectionless teens, he found what he thought he might: twelve of the fourteen had experienced a "prolonged separation" from their mothers or foster mothers. Here was a first bit of evidence of the phenomenon Bowlby had first glimpsed at age twenty-one. When young children didn't have a stable mother figure, it seemed to damage them psychologically for years to come.
©2007 Sam Apple and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Sam Apple's work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, and Slate.com, among many other publications. His first
book, Schlepping Through the Alps, was named a finalist for the PEN America award for a first work of nonfiction. In 2005 he received the
annual Faux Faulkner award. Apple's new book, American Parent, is on sale now. |
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