Designer Clothes Help Parents Turn Their Toddlers Into Real-Life American Girl Dolls [Fashion]

As our economy slowly emerges from its torpor, affluent citizens are starting to become less abashed about spending exorbitant sums of money on anything from diamond-studded rollerblades, to cows fed with gold-plated blades of grass, to designer outfits for their toddlers. Marquee fashion designers like Oscar de la Renta and Gucci are turning their attention to the affluent toddler demographic, which is really just a way of saying that designers are targeting parents who want to dress their children up like little American Girl dolls and send them out into the world, exclaiming, "It's my very own miniature status symbol!"

According to CBS News, sales for luxury children's clothes still make up only a fraction (about 3 percent) of the $34 billion fashion industry, though that fraction is growing as economic conditions improve and the more affluent come out of their caves, sniffing around for places to spend lots of money. The research firm NPD Group reports that children's wear sales rose a total of 4 percent between May 2011 and May 2012, with the upscale children's clothing component rising nearly 7 percent. All of this, meanwhile, is happening amidst a 3 percent rise in the overall clothing market.

Designers are mostly targeting households with a total income of $350,000 or higher, appealing to parents who want their young children, in lieu of practicing math, perhaps, to sharpen their fashion sense because a kid falls behind real fast in the asshole arms race if he or she doesn't know at least twenty major designers by puberty. New York-based fashion consultant Robert Burke explains the trend in terms of the "mini-me phenomenon," adding that, for parents splurging on expensive clothes for themselves, "It [buying something for their kids] feels good. It's like one for me and one for you."

That kind of consumer palliative, however, can get to be pretty expensive, with boys shirts from Dolce & Gabbana running in the $190 range, and girls dresses starting at about $500. Stifle your gasps — I mean, you don't want your kid to look like some kind of poor, do you? Shuffling around the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a, gulp, J. Crew ensemble, smelling vaguely of syrup. And not maple syrup either, but corn syrup, like that Log Cabin of lies. Disgusting.

Anyway, parents spending serious coin on their kids' wardrobes (one New York mother planned on spending in excess of $10,000 on her 3-year-old daughter's fall wardrobe), don't care if their kids grow out of clothes in like three days or if they're instilling some nefarious streak of superficiality that will blossom (fester) in their kids until they're 22 and decide to rebel by doing Americorps for like, a month — these parents just want their kids to look good and receive positive reinforcement about looking good. "I really believe," says one fashion-forward mother about her 3-year-old's self-esteem, "when she dresses like this, she feels better about herself." That's probably true, considering that every time the 3-year-old girl gets stuffed into a Burberry jacket, her mother beams at her and says something she doesn't even realize is screwing with her daughter's value system, something like, "Mommy loves you when you dress pretty." Sad face.

Rich toddlers draw fashion designers' eyes [CBS News]

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Parents Eat More Saturated Fat Than People With No Kids, Says Study [Health]

A study from the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, one of the first to examine the eating habits of adults at different stages of parenthood, has found that the first seven years are the most difficult for parents to remain conscious of establishing nutritional boundaries and staples for themselves and their child. The reasons for this are pretty intuitive: every day is suddenly more chaotic, according to one mother interviewed. She had maintained a healthy diet and exercise plan before she had a child, but slipped after her daughter arrived, saying "Admittedly, I just wanted to hang out with [her.]"

Additionally, harried new parents are more likely to bring into the house what the study's author, Dr. Helena Laroche, refers to as "convenience foods," high in saturated fat. She says that her study's results clearly indicate that a little time needs to be taken to plan a healthy eating regimen. "Parenting is the great teachable moment when you can make sure the whole family eats well, because kids do want to eat what you eat," says Laroche.

For her part, the mother cited at the beginning downloaded an app that adds only nutritional staples to her grocery list in an attempt to avoid junk food and now shops at a farmer's market. But for parents to whom neither apps or farmers markets are readily available, it's somewhat more difficult to come by these easy solutions—something that may be worth its own study.

'New parent? Watch the saturated fat' [CNN]

Photo via Sergej Khakimullin/Shutterstock]

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Still On Your Parents' Insurance? Great! Just Don't Get Pregnant [Obamacare]

Under the Affordable Care Act, people up to age 26 are eligible to qualify as dependents on their parents' insurance policies. This is great news if you're one of the thousands of newly minted graduates wallowing in un- or underemployed post collegiate hell, but it's less awesome news for women who, in their prime reproductive years, might find themselves SOL if they get pregnant — parental insurance plans, as a general rule, do not cover abortion or maternity costs. Better double up on both the Ortho Tri Cyclen and condoms, ladies. If you get knocked up while you're still on your parents' plan, you're both literally and figuratively fucked.

Employer-sponsored insurance plans aren't allowed to discriminate against women by refusing to provide maternity coverage, thanks to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. But no such rules apply to dependents of insurance policy holders. Pre-Affordable Care Act, this unpleasant reality only hit families with a teen daughter who got pregnant. But now that more women are spending the better half of their twenties as "dependents," a lack of prenatal care coverage can be financially devastating for an entirely new swath of the population.

According to the Washington Post, in 2008, 2.8 million women between the ages of 15 and 25 got pregnant. Some opted to carry the pregnancy to term; others terminated or had a pregnancy that ended due to natural causes. But almost all of them required some sort of medical intervention. And having babies ain't cheap — the Post reports that each uncomplicated pregnancy, from conception to delivery, costs more than $10,000. And a woman who doesn't receive adequate prenatal care — say, a teenager whose parents' insurance doesn't cover it — is much more likely to deliver prematurely or experience complications, which can add several thousands more dollars to the bill. A whopping 70% of insurance plans don't cover prenatal care or childbirth for non-spousal dependents. And these women who seek assistance from Medicaid are often denied as well, since living under their parents' roof or on their insurance plan may mean that their household income is too high to qualify for government aid.

But do private insurance plans cover abortion services for minor dependents? I reached out to the National Women's Law Center about abortion coverage for the children of policy holders, and while the NWLC doesn't have hard and fast numbers, according to Guttmacher, most non-government employees currently enjoy abortion coverage as part of their employer-provided insurance coverage. Anecdotally (and you know how reliable anecdata is!), my former employer, a large financial institution, covered abortion for policyholders and their spouses, but not for dependent children. The same restriction holds true for the insurance policy at my current employer.

Monday morning quarterbacks (Monday morning OB/GYN's?) would be quick to point out that if a woman doesn't have the money to pay for childbirth out of pocket and is still on her parents' insurance, then maybe she shouldn't be having potentially babymaking sex in the first place. A fair point, if you believe that sex should be something that's only available for people who can pay for every possible outcome of sex every time they have it — although something tells me that if a young man broke his penis during intercourse and found that his parents' insurance plan wouldn't cover his dick repair, there'd be a lot less tongue clicking moralizing and "maybe think of that before you have sex, you little strumpet!"s.

This issue should be disconcerting for a few reasons: first, as a person who considers herself "pro-choice," I am pro women being able to make the right choice for themselves, be that childbirth or abortion. Coerced abortion and coerced pregnancy are both deeply upsetting. And insurance plans that refuse to provide either childbirth or abortion coverage (or that cover abortion services but not pregnancy-related costs) for plan dependents are essentially making women's choice for them — when presented with the option of spending between $300 and 1,500 on an out-of-pocket early term elective abortion or spending upwards of $10,000 on childbirth, the "choice" stops looking like a "choice" and starts looking a lot more like financial coercion. Unless you're incredibly privileged, getting pregnant while dependent essentially leads to a choice between abortion/financial independence or childbirth/financial ruin.

Young women who get pregnant already start out behind the 8 ball. Allowing insurance companies to issue policies that deny prenatal coverage to dependents only adds to the burden of young motherhood, cruelly turning one of the Affordable Care Act's most attractive provisions into something that's neither affordable nor caring.

[WaPo]

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You Have to Watch U.S. Gymnast Aly Raisman's Hilarious Parents React to Her Bar Routine [Video]

Here is the best video you will see from an entire weekend of Olympic sports: U.S. gymnast Aly Raisman's parents reacting to her bar routine during today's team qualifiers (Raisman scored a 14.166). Dear NBC: for training your cameras on this, everything is forgiven. This is what I look like when I watch Olympic sports. [Thanks to Deadspin's Timothy Burke for the video.]

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Terrible New Arizona Law Forces Horrified Parents to Watch their Babies Die [Roe V World]

It's tough to find a job in this sluggish economy, but now, thanks to a law about to take effect in the state of Arizona, there may soon be a need for something called a "fetal grief counselor" in the American Southwest. Thanks to anti-abortion lawmakers' efforts, starting Thursday, mothers of babies with fatal fetal birth defects will be forced to carry their pregnancies to term, give birth, and then watch their babies die. See? Republicans are job creators, after all.

Earlier this year, Arizona governor/ terrible person Jan Brewer signed into law a measure that would ban abortions in the state after 20 weeks' gestation with no exception for fetal abnormality — but unlike other 20 week bans, Arizona's law counts gestation from the first day of a woman's last missed period. It's the most extreme abortion ban in the nation, and it's especially heartless when you consider that many fatal fetal abnormalities can't be detected until after that point in a pregnancy, which means that if you're pregnant in Arizona, you're placing a pretty bold bet that your fetus won't have any defects it can't survive. And if it does end up completely non-viable? Tough fetus, ladies. You should have thought of that before you had sex!

In anticipation of the disastrous effects House Bill 2036 will have on Arizona families, groups like the MISS Foundation and Embrace are directing their already-stretched-thin resources toward Arizona, where they anticipate having to help families to prepare for what's known as a "fatal birth," or the birth of a stillborn child, or a child who cannot survive for long outside of the womb. In addition to preparing families for "fatal births," they work to plan funeral services for children who are often wanted and mourned, and provide counseling to the families left behind, including women who were forced by the state of Arizona to carry a nonviable pregnancy to term.

Of course, 20-week bans are mostly political theater acted out by anti-abortion rights lawmakers who want to sound like big men in front of their rabidly anti-choice constituents — almost all abortions performed in the US occur before 12 weeks' gestation, and, according to Think Progress, only about 100 post-20-week abortions take place in Arizona per year, so if lawmakers want to reduce the number of abortions occurring annually in the US, banning late term procedures isn't the way to do it. Although the procedure is far from common, for the 100 or so Arizona women that need it annually, a late term ban could be disastrous, forcing them to either give birth and watch their babies die or spend considerable time and money traveling out of state for the medical care they've decided is best for their families.

To borrow words from anti-abortion rights, pro-forced ultrasound Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett, women can just cover their eyes!

[Think Progress]

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