Don’t drop him, dad: Prince William and Kate Middleton showing off their little one as they leave the hospital. (Reuters)
‘Now is the time simply to congratulate William and Kate on the birth of a very middle-class prince,” pronounced the Daily Mail. A middle-class prince?
Oddly, plenty of commentators seem to be harping on this notion. Citing Kate Middleton’s ordinary background, plus the fact that the couple apparently doesn’t plan to hire a nanny right away, royal observers have concluded that this baby will have “middle-class values.”
One cable-newsie said she didn’t think that Kate would buy really fancy outfits for the child because, as a middle-class mom, she’d know that babies make messes.
Actually, it’s true that baby George won’t have clothes or food or toys appreciably different from those provided to most middle-class kids on either side of the Atlantic. But it’s not because Kate and William are salt-of-the-earth types out to instill middle-class values in their bouncing baby boy.
It’s because these days we in the middle classes all treat our children like princes and princesses.
Take the royal baby pram — a $1,000 Bugaboo. You can gawk at the price, but you hardly need to visit Buckingham palace to find one. You can’t walk down 7th Avenue in Park Slope without tripping over one. Indeed, it’s hardly unusual for families of more modest income to spend a few hundred dollars on a stroller.
In other words, unlike in previous eras, the difference between what royalty give their kids and what the rest of us do is not orders of magnitude.
Take those royal baby clothes. Who knows where Kate and William will shop, but you don’t need to spend an arm and a leg to make sure that your baby’s skin never touches anything but the most soft and pure fabrics. Even Target sells an “organic muslin wrap” onesie. Clothing has grown so cheap relative to income that even the working classes can afford new outfits for their bundles of joy each week.
And the food. Don’t even get me started on the food. It is actually hard to buy non-organic baby food in the supermarket these days.
Sure, you can go online to Petite Palate and have Chocolate Chunk Mommy and Me Biscotti delivered to your door (or go a little healthier with the lentil stew — “a hearty meal of red, green and brown lentils simmered with vegetables and a bouquet garni”). But Stop & Shop carries plenty of Earth’s Best: Why not treat your infant to a little pureed chicken mango risotto tonight? It probably tastes better than the mush that most of the “middle class” ate when the prince’s grandmother was a child.
As Elizabeth Kolbert noted in a review of recent books on childhood in The New Yorker last year, “With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world.”
It’s not only that (despite the Great Recession) we in the West are living in an era of unprecedented wealth. There are other factors; for one, we have fewer kids than parents of the past, so we can spend more on each of them.
Actually, our children are treated like royalty in another way, too: We photograph every moment of their lives. One of my daughter’s friends refers to her grandfather as “The Papa-Razzi”; an afternoon at the pool will yield no fewer than a hundred photos.
While our own middle-class babies’ arrival and development may not garner as much media attention as Will and Kate’s son will, it’s not for lack of trying.