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Monday, February 8, 2010

Early childhood education: Dumb product division. The Educated Reporter

The Educated Reporter

Early childhood education: Dumb product division.

Does anybody ever read a press release? Is that even a remotely effective way to get your message out to journalists? Do PR people think about whether the recipients of their releases would really, truly be interested in them? Did the person who sent me a release about this have any idea I would only publicize it in order to mock it? (Oh, any press is good press, I know.)
The one lesson I have learned from new motherhood is that 65 percent of the products you think you need are absolutely dispensable, if not totally worthless. From now on I plan to give my newly expecting friends one of those Must Buy Baby checklists, relentlessly annotated: Borrow, Borrow, Don’t Need, Don’t Need, Borrow, See if You Need it Later and Then Borrow, Don’t Need, and so on. A prenatal iPod waistband would go into the Please Don’t Tell Me You Just Bought That category. When you are eight months pregnant, do you really need your belly to be even wider? Can’t you just turn the stereo on?

Here at Educated Reporter we are big on the misuse of research, so the website’s implication (backed with many quotes from experts that may or may not have anything to do with this product) that not buying the Lullabelly shortchanges your child’s