For the past eight years, without realising it, I have been using a “fingertip amputation and laceration hazard”, not just for one of my children, but for all four. Every day I’ve strapped them into these dangerous contraptions and bounced them down the stairs.
Now I realise I am lucky that my children are not all digitally challenged. Maclaren has modified more than one million “strollers” in America after 12 children lost their fingertips. They got their hands caught when their parents were folding up their four-wheelers (presumably not with them in it). The buggies are not being recalled in Britain, maybe because our children have sharper reflexes and Felix and Freya haven’t yet lost their pinkies.
But it’s not the supposed danger I mind about — after all, according to RoSPA, more than 30,000 children a year crush their fingers in doors and we still use them in schools. It’s everything else.
Buggies are the most infuriating item on the list of “crucial” baby kit. First is the expense. You are made to feel guilty if you don’t buy the 3D travel system with the lockable front swivel wheels, the “cosy toe” sleeping bags, the buggyboard and the furry baby pink hood. Gwyneth Paltrow’s cost more than £1,000.
After all that expense, parents can’t bear to part with them. Seven-year- olds are still pushed around London by mothers desperate to whisk them from clarinet to karate on time. Fathers rarely complain: it’s the only piece of equipment that comes with knobs and makes them feel useful.
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Children must dislike them even more. Most buggies put them at crutch level — all they can see is a forests of thighs marching towards them, and if they are in a double-decker buggy they spend hours staring at their sibling’s bottom. At crossings, buggies are the right height to ensure that babies get the maximum fumes and parents can’t hear them unless they wail. The average toddler spends two hours a day facing away from their parents according to the National Literacy Trust. No wonder children can barely talk any more.
Other people’s pushchairs are worse. They ram you from behind, tip over, filled with shopping, on the escalator and block up the luggage racks on trains.
We finally weaned ourselves off our buggy when our youngest was nearly 2. Amazingly he can walk, so we can cross muddy fields, and he doesn’t need to rush from aerobics to acrobatics because he gets his exercise from meandering along the road. If he’s exhausted he goes on our shoulders — far less painful than lugging a pram up the stairs every day. The only time I miss the buggy is to carry duty free at the airport.