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their eyes off the road and peering into their baby rearview mirrors. But as parents are always saying, better safe than sorry.

Leave the mirror at the store, and the whole family will probably be better off. And you'll save enough money for ice cream for everyone, too. (There is nothing dangerous about ice cream. Nothing.) Here's one last example of a safety product that we don't need, and how it undermines our own good sense: the heat-sensitive bath mat.

      This is a mat you put in the bottom of the tub. Turn the water on, and if the words TOO HOT! magically appear in a bubble near the bathmat duckie's head, you know that the water is, indeed, too hot! Because who can trust her own wrists anymore?

      Oh, wait a sec. We all can. Dip a wrist in the water, and you yourself can tell if that water is warm, cold, or boiling hot. (Key word: yeow!) So why on earth is there not only this heat-sensitive bath mat for sale but also a competing baby bathwater temperature turtle you can put in your tub that will indicate too hot! too? (Not a real turtle, who would indicate that by turning into soup.)

      Why? Same reason you can buy a blanket with a headboard built into it, in case you want to hold your baby but are worried about breaking his neck. Forget the fact that you have an arm built for that job.

      Same reason you can buy a harness to hold up your kid like a marionette while she learns to walk. Forget the fact that you could hold her up yourself, or even let her fall. She's got a bottom built for that job.

      In fact, forget the fact that three hundred thousand years of evolution have made human children pretty sturdy and parents pretty competent at raising them. We have entered an era that says you cannot trust yourself. Trust a product instead.

      It's hard to pop outside this snow globe of fear and gaze down on it objectively, but for Susan Linn, a mother and stepmom, that happened when she went to Chile to adopt her baby.

“I live in Brookline, Massachusetts, where everybody wants to do the very best for their children,” says the Harvard psychologist. “So I was obsessing about crib bumpers and what are the best kind blah, blah, blah and then I got down there and she was in this teeny, tiny doll's crib and she was doing just fine.”

      So what kind of bumpers did Linn eventually buy?

      “We never got them. It just didn't make any sense. She had a wooden crib, and if she banged her head, it wasn't going to hurt.” Spoiler alert: She made it to adulthood. And in fact, now the safety advice is to never put a bumper, stuffed animal, blanket, pillow or piece of lint in the crib. So Linn was ahead of her time.

      A lecturer at Harvard Medical School, Linn went on to found the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. Its goal is to get companies to quit marketing stuff to kids (good luck), while also trying to counter all the marketing aimed at parents. She's especially miffed by the marketing that tells parents their children need educational toys to get ahead.

      “The message that parents are getting from birth is that they need these things to be good parents,” says Linn. She adds: “They don't.”

      It was her organization that forced the Baby Einstein people to drop the word “educational” from their marketing materials, “Because there's no credible evidence that baby videos are, in fact, educational for babies,” says Linn. “What evidence exists suggests that they may actually be harmful. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time for children under two.”

      So forget the idea that a child learns best by watching TV—even if the soundtrack is by Mozart. When they're glued to a screen, no matter how PBS-approved, they are not doing the one thing that really has been proven to enrich them and stimulate their neurons: interacting with the world.

Linn's group also went after the Einstein line extension that included Baby Neptune, which promised to teach children all about water.

      “Within a baby's first year of life, new experiences can transform what might otherwise seem to be ordinary events into exciting opportunities for imaginative play,” claims the Baby Neptune blurb. “Baby Neptune exposes little ones to the wonders of water in their world—whether they're stomping in the rain, splashing in the bathtub, playing ‘catch me if you can’ with the tide on the beach… .”

      Stop! Oh please, stop! First of all, the idea that “within a baby's first year of life” a baby is already bored with “ordinary events” is ludicrous. How can babies be jaded about ordinary events? Nothing is ordinary to them yet! If it were, they wouldn't find their toes so endlessly fascinating. Or those black-and-white mobiles. Or their spit.

      Second, the blurb talks about “exciting opportunities for imaginative play.” But where, precisely, is the imaginative play in watching a show about water? If you want your kids to learn all the wonders of “stomping in the rain” and “splashing in the bathtub”—put them there! Water is not difficult to find. Let them feel it and taste it and enjoy it, not just stare at some other kids and fish frolicking!

      OK. I'll calm down. Point is: educational baby media products are brilliantly marketed and utterly unnecessary. But even if you don't buy into them, they reinforce the idea that babies need to start their “education” right away. Sometimes even in utero. (You've heard of those tapes, right, that you play to the fetus? Or at least aim at your belly button?)

Now if all these videos were just marketed truthfully: “Here's something for your kids to watch while you do some work and then start mindlessly browsing the Web. It won't make them any smarter, and it may make them cranky when you turn it off, but it's not the end of the world if they watch it, either”—that, at least, would be fair. It doesn't promise us too much; it doesn't damn us too much, either. But best of all, it wouldn't make us so confused about what is “best” for our children and what isn't. Otherwise, it's really hard to tell, because it seems that lately every possible toy or class or activity or event or show or utter piece of junk is peddled to us as “educational.” (Though once in a while someone may substitute “stimulates creativity.”) This is not only bamboozling; it also leads us to assume we're supposed to spend every second of the day pumping our kids full of brilliance. Another thing to worry about.

      This educational obsession can take an ordinary toy—like a little battery-operated light-up drum I saw the other day—and instead of labeling it, “Loud, annoying thing,” insist that it is actually a developmental showstopper: “Promotes hand–eye coordination!”

      That it does. Promotes finger-in-ear coordination, too.

      A package of foam rubber letters to play with in the tub said, “Inspires imagination”—as if now your kid is going to start composing Moby Dick above the soap dish.

      Meantime, an article in one of the parenting magazines, “Why Music Boosts Brainpower,” begs the question: If music didn't boost brainpower, would it be worthless? In the eyes of a society bent on producing wunderkinds, maybe so. (Another article said cuddling may boost babies’ IQs. That's good, because otherwise we certainly wouldn't bother cuddling the helpless blobs, right?)

      The music article went on to give all sorts of suggestions as to how to make your child more musical, while cheerily noting, “Raising a music lover is easy. If you start early and keep it fun, your child won't miss a beat.”

      God help those who don't start early. (Never mind that George Gershwin didn't even have a piano in his house until he was twelve—one of my favorite anecdotes. That's George “Rhapsody in Blue” Gershwin.)

So we sign our kids up for Gymboree or Kindermusik, or maybe we take them to the local class on “sound and movement” like I did with my older son—a class so boring that the other nannies and moms looked ready to cry. The kids already were. After one of the sessions, I bolted out with another mom, and we bonded by confessing, “God I hate going there!” But go we did, because we didn't want our children to end up nonmusical. (Even though mine did. And then we gave him private electric guitar lessons he didn't really like, either.)

      There is nothing wrong with exposing your children to all sorts

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