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September 22, 2005
Supersize Strollers
Ignite Sidewalk Drama
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
ONE recent evening during rush
hour on a Washington subway, Jose Rivas found himself cornered
by a giant stroller, with no clear path of escape. "She
saw us," Mr. Rivas, 33, said of the woman pushing the buggy.
"She looked at us. She was basically like: 'You better find
a way to get out. It's not my responsibility.' "
When he tried to step around
her to reach the door, her look became a glare. The confrontation
was like a battle, he said, and the weapon, a long, army-green-colored
stroller.
Christopher Peruzzi, 39, of Freehold,
N.J., has also had to dodge baby strollers - especially those
that are "double wide or triple long" - usually in
stores, and he doesn't like it either. "They're blocking
off products you want to get to," he said. "I find
this particularly annoying in Barnes & Noble and Walden Books.
I'm here to read. I'm not here for your kid to slam into me."
Pricey, supersize baby strollers
like the Bugaboo and the Silver Cross - nicknamed Hummers - have
been derided as symbols of yuppie extravagance. (They cost upward
of about $700.) But some critics now say that size is not the
only problem. What's worse, they say, is the way some parents
use them to bulldoze their way through public places.
"I liken it to the SUV experience,"
said Elizabeth Khalil, 28, a lawyer in Washington. "It's
just your mission to mow down everything in your sight because
you can."
Critics - many of them people
without children - rarely raise the issue with their friends
who are parents. But they voice their complaints in conversations
with one another and in online chat rooms. And many are beginning
to suspect that the new big strollers are the latest fissure
in a long-standing divide between parents and nonparents, a disagreement
that usually goes unspoken, over who has made the right choice
in life.
"These women have a child,
and they're like, 'Look at me,' " said Ophira Eisenberg,
33, a stand-up comedian from the West Village who refers to oversize
baby strollers as lawn mowers. "It's like this baby is more
important than anything, and everyone should be bowing down because
they created life."
Parents who use the supersize
strollers dismiss the notion that they are inconsiderate or think
of themselves as superior. "If anything I am particularly
self-conscious about the stroller in public places, that I'm
not bumping into people," said Chris Ford, a stay-at-home
father in Las Vegas and the owner of a red Bugaboo Frog. "A
stroller is something a parent uses all the time. It's one of
those things, like eyeglasses. You're always using them. You
don't want to cheap out on them."
Mr. Ford, who offers thoughts
about parenting on ModernDayDad.com,
said that owning a Bugaboo means that he never has to worry if
the stroller will be able to handle certain terrain - and it's
an eye-pleaser. "I like how it comes in solid colors. It's
not some sort of ugly plaid or ducks and bunnies," he said.
"I love its industrial design. I love how it's made of metal,
how strong it is."
"If you've got a problem,"
Mr. Ford said, "then you've got issues beyond my stroller."
Traci Anderson, 36, of Groton,
Conn., who is married and said she has decided not to have children,
agrees that the issue runs deeper than taste. Often, while trying
to pass someone with a large stroller, she has seen the parent
acknowledge her presence but make no attempt to move. And that,
she said, begs the question of whether they believe people with
children have a special claim to sidewalk space.
"My choices and what's important
to me shouldn't be seen as any less important in the grand scheme
of things," Ms. Anderson said.
More and more strollers, large
and small, are rolling into the pedestrian world. Sales in the
United States were $530 million last year and the market is only
expected to keep growing, according to the Juvenile Products
Manufacturers Association. (Sales of Bugaboo alone tripled from
2003 to 2004.)
Starting in the mid-1960's and
for decades, most strollers were the lightweight umbrella sort,
not including the Baby Jogger that arrived on the scene in the
mid-1980's. The S.U.V.-stroller frenzy ignited a few years ago,
after a Bugaboo Frog appeared on "Sex and the City."
That model went on to achieve a status not unlike an HermËs
Birkin bag. This month Bugaboo introduced two new stroller models
- the Gecko ($679) and the Cameleon ($879) - designed to traverse
bustling sidewalks, sandy beaches and rough, woodsy terrain.
There are advantages that go
beyond maneuverability, status and smart looks. Ali Wing, the
mother of a 2-year-old boy and the founder and chief executive
of giggle, a baby retailer, said the wheels on big strollers
last longer than those on smaller buggies, and many parents like
the way some of them allow the baby to face the walker. Ms. Wing
also said that umbrella strollers are not as cushiony and protective.
And the younger a baby is, the more emphasis parents place on
comfort and safety.
In July a $600-plus Mountain
Buggy Urban Double Stroller helped shield a 7-month-old baby
as a Manhattan building collapsed around her, setting off a flurry
of posts in parenting chat rooms about the potential value of
utility strollers.
Yet size is no guarantee of a
stroller's safety, said E. Marla Felcher, an adjunct lecturer
at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the author
of "It's No Accident: How Corporations Sell Dangerous Baby
Products." "There are no mandatory safety standards
for strollers," she said. "There is no way for any
parent to know if one stroller is safer than another."
"What they know," said
Ms. Felcher, who described herself as childless by choice and
who admitted that the new big strollers annoy her, too, "is,
'I'm a parent that can afford to spend $700 on this.' "
Not having children "doesn't mean I hate kids," she
said. "But I do hate the parents who somehow have decided
that they are superior to everyone else because they have kids."
It might help, Ms. Felcher and
others said, if parents and nonparents could talk about their
feelings toward one another. "It's the last taboo in this
culture," Ms. Felcher said. "You just can't talk about
it."
Ms. Anderson agreed, "We're
a bit afraid of expressing our opinions for fear of being labeled
as people who hate children or who do not support women."
Stroller dramas play themselves
out every day: on sidewalks, in supermarkets, in museums. At
a Disney theme park, a member of an online forum wrote, "I
got rammed so hard on the back of my heels in Adventureland,
that they actually bled." The writer, who used the moniker
Tigertail777, described the offending stroller as a "huge
plastic molded S.U.V." Later the same day, according to
that account, another stroller knocked Tigertail777 in the shins
near the Haunted Mansion.
But on the same chat room - MiceChat.com - several
parents said they try to be considerate of others in the theme
parks. "I have bumped into folks that all of a sudden change
directions or stop all of a sudden in front of me (for no apparent
reason)," wrote one parent known as DznyVan, "but I
always apologize (even if it was their fault)."
Todd Levin, a writer and comedian,
said he saw an especially illustrative stroller encounter two
years ago at Kennedy Airport. It happened after the mother accidentally
bumped the nonmother with a stroller that Mr. Levin, 34, said
looked like a "massive SUV."
"Could you please not bump
me with your stroller," the woman said, according to a play-by-play
account Mr. Levin wrote on his Web site, Tremble.com. "I have a cat in my bag."
"Excuse me," the mother
replied. "If I knew you had a cat in your bag, I wouldn't
have bumped you!" Then she turned to the other travelers
nearby, widening her eyes in exasperation.
An argument ensued, but Mr. Levin
concluded that it was less about the collision than about who
had made the better life choice, the mother or the cat owner.
"The Biological mom was much, much worse, in my opinion,
if only for her very clear sense of superiority," Mr. Levin
wrote. "With each swipe she took at the Feline Mom she seemed
to be making a transparently veiled assertion that having babies
is what makes us better people. Having babies means winning."
Mr. Levin is far
from the only person writing about stroller wars on the Internet.
"Clogging up the paths of shoppers everywhere, these plastic
monstrosities often contain piles of shopping bags, purses, grocery
bags, extra sandals, sunscreen, diapers and no baby whatsoever,"
wrote Nathan Alexander of Los Angeles on his Web site, Commercialsihate.com. "The Baby Bulldozer
is a total nuisance. There's no way around it, over it, or through
it, and the oncoming parent inevitably steers it directly toward
your feet."
Mr. Alexander told
his girlfriend, "If I have a baby, I'm carrying it in a
backpack."
"My parents," said
Mr. Rivas, who had the stroller standoff on the Washington Metro,
"they would make us walk."
But what if the roles were reversed?
What if Mr. Rivas was the parent with the stroller, making his
way home during rush hour on a steamy summer evening? He chuckled,
then conceded, "My opinion might change if I had kids."
Copyright 2005 The New
York Tmes Company
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