Changing diapers, thinking about ethnographic research

This past July, my wife and I journeyed to China to adopt an 11-month-old baby girl. It was an exhilarating, exhausting trip - which is just how I would describe the weeks and months since our return.

Prior to getting our new addition and becoming parents for the first time, we spent a few days as tourists, briefly taking in the sights of Beijing before flying to Chongqing to begin a four-day cruise up the Yangtze to see the Three Gorges Dam. Next came Wuhan, where we spent a week in a hotel after receiving our daughter, and then flew to Guangzhou, site of a U.S. consulate, to spend another several days finalizing the adoption before flying back home.

As prepared as we were for all that was about to happen (my wife is the queen of preparedness and had not only organized the entire adoption process but also had made sure we brought along every possible bit of baby care paraphernalia with us), I don’t think we foresaw the difficulties of learning to be parents while living out of suitcases in a series of hotel rooms - especially when your new child isn’t happy to be your new child.

On the day that we, along with 38 other adoptive families, crowded into a hotel conference room in Wuhan to meet our babies for the first time, our daughter grieved the loudest and the longest. Some kids handle being separated from their foster family or orphanage caregivers well, some don’t. Our Jia in the latter category. She had been with a foster family, which is a good thing as it usually means she received more one-on-one care and attention. But it also means that strong bonds are formed, making the pain and grieving of losing the foster parents more acute.

As often happens in adoption, our daughter instantly bonded with just one of the parents, which happened to be me. She was, in adoption lingo, a barnacle baby. For the first several days, I could not put her down without causing a storm of tears and wailing. My wife assisted as much as she could with the childcare duties but Jia’s protestations meant I was thrust into the role of primary caregiver.

Things have improved markedly since those first difficult weeks. Beautiful Jia seems happy to be with both of us, has a great sense of humor (it is possible for a 14-month-old to have a sense of humor, isn’t it?) and is already regularly outsmarting her parents.

Team of ethnographers

Throughout these early months of fatherhood, I have had many troublesome encounters with baby-related products, and, being the research nerd that I am, I have repeatedly wished the makers of these products had a team of ethnographers following me and observing my difficulties. (Thankfully, in most cases we’ve been able to find other, more satisfactory products after fumbling with the ones detailed below.)

My first beef is with the makers of baby clothes. My early impression is that they all must think that parents dress toddlers when they are asleep. How else to explain the presence of the tiny, difficult-to-grasp buttons - many of which seem completely superfluous?

I do accept some of the blame. As a rookie parent, you need to think ahead when you dress your kid in the morning. For example, when we dressed Jia at 4:30 a.m. on the day we were to begin the 16-hour journey back home (a five-hour flight from Guangzhou to Tokyo and then an 11-hour flight to Minneapolis), we probably shouldn’t have put her in pajamas that had about five million snaps to fasten.

Each time I rose from my plane seat, begged the pardon of the poor soul sitting on the aisle and brought a crying Jia to the plane’s bathroom for a diaper change, I cursed our clothing choice and also the outfit’s maker. Fumbling with each successive closure, I wondered if they ever tried to dress a squirming baby, on a narrow changing table in a cramped airplane bathroom, while the plane was buffeted by what one of the flight attendants called the worst turbulence he has experienced in 30 years of flying.

Granted, that’s a pretty extreme example. But even on a stationary changing table in the comfort of a baby’s room, forcing parents to wrestle with all those snaps on a baby’s outfit seems pretty cruel.

Diaper firms, you’re next. Again, diapering isn’t always so difficult. But when your kid’s not cooperating and you’re wishing you had a third hand, you wonder why the diaper company couldn’t design the little adhesive tabs to be easier to pull up and easier to see against the same-colored surface they are first affixed to.

Hey, wipes makers, bring a camera over to our place and watch our frustration mount as we try to clean a baby tushy while having to reach back into your moronic single-sheet-feeding tub to grab multiple wipes. Can’t you layer them, Kleenex-style, so when we pull one out, another is there for the taking?

Baby food companies, your ethnographic team would see that we’ve finally figured out how to stop being sprayed when we open your little vacuum-packed tubs of pureed goodness. After the first dozen times we were splorted by sweet potatoes or prunes while peeling the lids off the pressurized packages, we learned to use a paring knife to pierce the seal first and relieve the pressure. Not a big deal, really, in terms of effort, but an annoyance nevertheless.

See us struggle

Were my wife and I in a focus group for baby products, I’m sure a skilled moderator would help us relate and recall each of these instances for the benefit of the folks in the back room. But I think ethnographic research - which would let them see us struggle firsthand with their products, watch our workarounds and hear our borderline NC-17-rated expressions of frustration via the miracle of video - might have a bit more impact. There is great value in listening to people describe their problems with a product, but there is also nothing like witnessing those problems as they happen to drive home how annoying they are for the consumer and also to see the ways consumers find to deal with the situations that vex them. That’s where new product ideas and new selling points come from.

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