My nail salon has been taken over by a gaggle of 7-year-olds.
It was only a matter of time, of course. The phenomenon of little girls getting their nails done professionally has been around for years now. A writer at the parenting Web site Barista Kids reports finding eight nail salons just in the posh suburb of Montclair, NJ, all offering children’s feet “a soak, scrub, cut, file and polish — often with designs.” Shops like Beehives and Buzzcuts in Manhattan or Seriously Spoiled in Dix Hills cater only to children.
Still, something about seeing four second-graders relaxing in pedicure chairs as grown women massaged their feet put me over the edge.
It’s not the money. There are plenty of more expensive things we give our daughters — from clothes to dolls to iPads — that don’t bother me nearly as much as kiddie foot-pampering.
Jennifer Graham, a mother of 10- and 18-year-old daughters who lives outside of Boston, says that it’s really the pedicure itself that’s the problem. “I’m uncomfortable about having grown women (even worse, men) massage my own feet!” She’s stopped getting pedicures. “The whole businessseems revolting.Between the I-queen, you-servant feel of it all and the ghastly specter of fungi hovering over it all,” it was more than she could take.
Most women get over any guilt over the inegalitarian-seeming scene by tipping well. (And, hey, how long have men been sitting on thrones in Grand Central to get their shoes polished?)
But kids? Well, we’ve reached a brave new world. Christine Whelan, who grew up with the Manhattan prep school set but now lives in Pittsburgh, says, “My mother got her first manicure in her mid 30s. I was in my early 20s. If I can keep my daughter unpolished until she’s 10, I’d be amazed.”
Laura Vanderkam, the author of “All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending,” says she didn’t go to a spa until she was “on a corporate junket as a grownup.” She wonders, “When you’re getting spa services at age 7, what is there left to look forward to?”
Whelan says she understands the desire of mothers to keep their kids entertained while they get their nails done, but the idea of hosting a pedicure birthday party for 7-year-olds seems like “unearned decadence.”
Maybe it’s the “unearned” part that bothers us. We harried mothers and professional women have made peace with the idea of having people rub our dirty feet by deciding that we have “earned” this kind of treatment.
But what have our children done? Not much. And spoiling our children doesn’t help them in the long run.
Whelan’s “Generation WTF” is a book of advice for the so-called millennial generation. She says, “Today’s 20-somethings feel bait-and-switched after growing up in affluence and having the rug pulled out from under them in tough economic times. We should be learning the lesson that if we expect young adults to be frugal, resilient people, we have to teach them that from the start.”
But we also have to teach them that we hire people to do menial tasks for us because we’ve worked to earn the money to be able to do just that. And the people who do those tasks are trying to earn a living, too.
Middle- and upper-class parents compound the problem. We hire people to do things for our children — then avoid explaining why.
At a kiddie music class the other day, the teacher welcomed the children, the “mommies,” the “daddies” and “the friends.” We have to call them friends instead of nannies, because we wouldn’t want to have to tell our kids we pay someone to care for them.
And so our children will grow up thinking they deserve to have their toes tended to because they’re so darned cute.