What Do Our Strollers Say About Us?

By Peter C. Baker

As the birth of our first child approached, my wife asked me to pick a stroller. It took a while: there were so many to choose from, and the decision felt loaded. I wanted our son to be safe. I wanted him to be comfortable. I’d been increasingly preoccupied by the horrors of American car culture, and I wanted to keep walking as much as possible. We lived on the second floor of a walkup, so I wanted something light and easily collapsible—but not fundamentally flimsy. I didn't want to get duped into spending too much, and I didn't want to be a stubborn cheapskate. I wanted to identify, from the hundreds of strollers the market was offering us, the right one, proving that, as we became a family, I knew how to identify and satisfy our needs. Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, Babylist: I kept opening new browser tabs, hoping they would add up to one incontrovertible answer.

Over time, I’ve mostly forgotten the details of this search; without looking, I couldn't tell you the exact model that I picked, even though I use it almost every day. Reading Amanda Parrish Morgan's "Stroller," a slim work of memoiristic cultural criticism, sent me back to how stroller shopping felt: my embarrassed sense that I was pinning too much on a damn stroller, and also my inability to stop. For Morgan, strollers aren't just tools we use, or products we buy; they’re dense symbols, with no single or settled meaning, of our relationships to parenting. They tell us things: about what we want, what we can't have, what we fear. Some have cup holders, and some of those cup holders work, while some guarantee spillage. You can spend twenty dollars, or three thousand dollars, or anything in between.

In a 1923 address to the British Royal Society of the Arts, one Samuel Sewell chided his fellow-researchers for having failed to research the history of a device as common and useful as the ubiquitous perambulator, or pram. People around the world had been coming up with ways to wheel kids around for a long time; as early as the fourteenth century, Sewell claimed, a Japanese artist had painted "a Chinese child's chair on four wheels, drawn by rope." But no one had devoted real effort to excavating or documenting the practice of strollering, and the small literature on the subject was—and remains today—mostly focussed on the U.K. and U.S. In 1733, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire had what is sometimes identified as the first British pram built for their children; it was designed to be pulled around by a goat. But it was in the twentieth century that prams, buggies, and strollers exploded in popularity, on both sides of the pond, thanks to technological improvements that made them lighter and more affordable, and to the increasing desire of moms to spend time outside the home. In 1965, the British aeronautic engineer Owen Maclaren designed the first "umbrella"-style folding stroller; by 1976, the company was reportedly manufacturing about six hundred thousand a year.

"Stroller" engages with this history only briefly: a glimpse here, a glimpse there. Its real territory is the twenty-first century, with its hyperproliferation of strollers at every level of cost and luxury. The central strength of the book is not comprehensiveness but the way the stroller, and Morgan's experience of her own strollering years, become an omnidirectional magnet, pulling disparate material into friendly proximity. There are passages on the consumer commodification of caregiving tools; on the American idealization of the child- and stroller-friendliness of certain European countries; on debates over strollers versus baby carriers that attach to the parent's body; on parenting and writing; on the pram in the Mary Cassatt painting "Children in a Garden (The Nurse)"; on Sigourney Weaver chasing a runaway pram through traffic in "Ghostbusters II." Morgan is a serious runner, and we read about her running-with-stroller routines, plus how they interact with her breast-pumping routines. We learn about her self-conscious accumulation, accelerated by the birth of her second child, of a small stroller fleet: a jogger, a travel stroller, a double-jogger, and so on, each with its own purpose, and each quickly covered by a layer of filth she tries mightily not to care about, especially on an outing from her suburban Connecticut home to Tribeca, a neighborhood the New York Times dubbed "the land of the $800 stroller."

In Morgan's judgment, contemporary strollers—especially the fancier ones, with their higher price tags, design-conscious aesthetics, and elaborate add-on options—sit right in the unfortunate intersection of natural parental anxiety, consumerism run amok, and the outsized weight we place on the choices of individual parents. We don't have robust paid leave or affordable child care. In most of the country, streets and transit systems treat children as an afterthought. As a new parent, there's very little you can do about any of this: you can't duck out during nap time and fix the national relationship to reproduction. You can, though, fret over getting the best stroller you can afford, the one that optimizes your interactions with a hostile-feeling world. A 2018 meditation in the Guardian identified a cluster of plausible factors behind the "rise of the bougie buggy": the increasing age (and therefore increasing level of disposable income) of new parents; the mainstreaming of an interest in design and in the idea of the look of basic household objects as an expression of identity; an uptick in men taking on child-care responsibilities and not wanting to be seen pushing traditionally "feminine" strollers; the growing ranks of working mothers, on the hunt for products to help them juggle work and parenting; and, of course, canny marketing. When Bugaboo, a Dutch company that was a prominent player in the high-end stroller boom, expanded to America, an early coup was getting one of its strollers, the Frog, placed in an episode of "Sex and the City"; afterward, the Frog became something of a celebrity status symbol, with long waiting lists for eager American buyers.

Identifying strollers as a consumerist fetish object for anxious parents is undoubtedly correct, and also a bit easy, the culture-criticism equivalent of shooting a shotgun into a goldfish bowl. What makes "Stroller" interesting is Morgan's honest acknowledgment that her primary feeling toward her strollers isn't actually late-capitalist dissatisfaction but something like affection. Prior to parenting, Morgan was a dedicated long-distance runner; strollers enabled her to keep training. During the years of her life covered by the book, her husband worked full time, and she took on more of the daily child-care responsibility; strollers let her pack her kids on the train in Connecticut and spend the day adventuring in New York City. Of course, these outings were not without their obstacles: train stations without elevators, elevators soaked in urine, and so on. But still: "In the best of cases," Morgan writes, "these stroller days felt like I’d managed to make a nest for my children, steady on a branch while still, through some magic, showing them the world." Her own stroller years are almost over, and the closing pages of "Stroller" evoke the experience of looking at newly obsolete pieces of parenting gear in the garage or basement, feeling time and memory leak out as they transmogrify back into mere plastic and rubber.

I can relate. Like Morgan, I see consumerism as a blight on our national psyche, and the state of social support for families and children as a pathetic failure. Like Morgan, I love strollering. Sure, in a better world, there would probably only be a dozen or so to pick from, and everyone could trust they were all equally safe and durable. Strollering would be easier, thanks to more and better sidewalks; more and better crosswalks; less threat of injury and death from cars cruising down the street. (These improvements, it bears noting, would also make the world more pleasant for wheelchair users, and for all pedestrians.) In this better world, there might be less demand for built-up S.U.V.-ish strollers, because streets would feel more friendly to simpler models, which would in turn fit more easily on public transit.

And yet: I love our stroller. I love how, when I’m pushing it, my son and I are, in a way completely unique to these moments, simultaneously together and apart, free to oscillate lazily between taking in the same things—the same trees, the same storefronts, the same people—and letting our separate, private thoughts wander. I love that, unlike when we’re in the car, we’re in little danger of killing or hurting anyone, and I’m not enduring the cortisol spikes of narrowly averted collisions. I love sharing nods of recognition with the other Stroller Dads. I love the mildly befuddled looks we Stroller Dads get from men of a certain age, looks I take to mean: So men do that now? Huh. Sometimes, on our longer walks, we pass by an assisted-living center, and walk past people in their eighties and nineties being pushed in wheelchairs, and we feel, each in our own way, the mysteries of life rolling past us on the sidewalk.

The train station closest to our house has no elevator, and the steps are steep and uneven; without another adult to help, it's basically unusable with a stroller—umbrella, all-terrain, or otherwise—in tow. Ditto for the next stop up the line. And the one after that. Winter is coming, which will mean once again seeing enormous public resources spent keeping the roads clear for cars, and very little spent keeping the sidewalks clear for humble pedestrians. From behind a stroller, I sometimes can't help thinking about how much further we could be going. In the meantime, we’re still on the move. ♦