From earliest childhood, it's made clear to us that a major change in life is best tackled by a trip to the shops. New school years are dealt with by the purchase, in August, of pencil cases, lunchboxes and too-long trousers. Starting a new job? Head down the high street for something non-crease and professional-looking. Moving into your first flat? Hello, Ikea.
As we get older, we can come to view the shopping sprees that occur in advance of significant life events as an integral element of the events themselves. There's something reassuringly organised and adult about heading to the shops with a list of essentials before embarking on a new project – a sort of real-world expression of the Scouts' motto. If you're equipped, the thinking goes, you are by definition prepared, and given that there's no life event for which we feel more flailingly unprepared than the arrival of a first baby, logic dictates that the best form of preparation is a commensurately large shopping expedition.
All of which explains why new parents are uniquely susceptible to the blandishments of companies looking to part them from their money. You've never had a baby before, after all – and babies, much more than first flats or new schools, play on our emotions as well as our ignorance.
If someone implies that you are going to permanently endanger your child's health and wellbeing if you don't provide them with a Zaky Hand Pillow ("designed to imitate the look and feel of a parent's hand"), who are you to argue?
Fortunately, these days, we're not as alone in our ignorance as we used to be. When it comes to laying in stores for the baby's arrival, we're no longer obliged to rely on the advice of our own parents, which tends to fall into one of two unhelpful camps: "We put you to sleep in a bottom drawer and it never did you any harm"; or "what do you mean, you haven't bought a baby hairbrush?" If you're dithering over whether or not you should get a Moses basket as well as a cot, or how much you should spend on a pushchair, you can go online and beg for advice from those a little further down the road.
Over the years, and the course of many discussions, parents on Mumsnet have come up with a rough list of essentials for new parents, the thinking behind which is best summed up by the sentence "just because something exists, doesn't mean you're actually going to need it". And even if you need it, you don't have to buy a brand new one (with a couple of exceptions, such as car seats and cot mattresses).
With the benefit of experience, they have boiled the necessities down to a pretty short list: a safe sleeping place for your baby (though a drawer might be pushing it), nappies, a pram, a car seat and wipes or cotton wool for wiping extraneous substances off the new centre of your world. Maybe a sling or a bouncer if you're feeling flush – and, of course, bottles and sterilisers if you're bottle feeding. Everything else is an optional extra.
There's no question that marketing departments specifically set out to exploit the fact that new parents tend to be both emotionally labile and green as grass – but at the end of the day, when it comes to buying baby kit, we all have the choice to put down the baby-wipe warmer, leave the shop and put the money we've avoided spending in a savings account for our child to use one day to pay for a few hours of higher education, or put down a deposit on a garden shed. We have the choice to walk away. Where we don't have that choice, though, is in maternity wards.
For decades Bounty, a data-marketing company, has been buying access to NHS maternity wards, where its representatives (often paid on a commission-only basis) approach new mothers and ask them for their personal details. This data is then sold on to an unlimited number of companies which have a commercial interest in reaching new parents.
When you outline this situation to anyone who hasn't had cause to become familiar with NHS maternity services, there's usually some initial resistance to the possibility that this can be happening: surely we don't allow commercial sales reps to wander NHS wards at will?
Well, yes, we do; it's accepted practice in many NHS trusts and, in the case of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, we actually pay Bounty for the privilege, because child-benefit claim forms – along with samples of commercial products – are included in the packs given out at bedsides. The fact that these forms are freely available online and by telephone, and could be handed out by community midwives or birth registrars, seems to cut no ice with HMRC, which is estimated to have paid Bounty over half a million pounds in the past five years.
These commercial reps – whose income is dependent on how many sets of patient data they can harvest – have access to new mums who are frequently bed-bound and recovering from what is at best a demanding physical experience, at worst a deeply traumatic one.
Most of these women will be exhausted; many will be feeling the effects of strong medicines administered during and after the birth; large numbers have had major abdominal surgery in the previous 24 hours.
If an NHS trust proposed today that it was going to introduce Viagra sales reps into men's genitourinary wards, or reps for walking aids to orthopaedic wards, the very least you'd expect would be some stout resistance.
It is a measure of the strength of the association between "motherhood" and "buying stuff" that the presence of commercial representatives on maternity wards has been tolerated for so long.
You've just had a baby and 28 stitches in your nethers? Why on earth would you not want a snappy salesperson wandering up and asking for your email address, your address and postcode, and your date of birth, so that this valuable private data can be sold on to myriad companies? Hey, you get a tiny pot of Sudocrem in exchange.
Stories abound of Bounty representatives barging in on women who are attempting to establish breastfeeding, or simply trying to catch some sleep. Many women believe the reps to be healthcare assistants, and only realise that they have handed their data to an unrelated organisation when the mountains of spam start to build up.
Parents whose babies die can spend years trying to remove their details from the marketing lists of companies who have bought their data. When asked how they justify it, trust managers say that few people complain. Bounty's own statistics show that to be true. But, as the consumer organisation Which? noted this month, one-third of people who had a problem with the NHS within the last year didn't complain because they simply didn't know how, and the first few months of a baby's life tend to be a time when non-essential admin (such as wrestling with your health trust) goes by the board.
Galvanised by our members' irritation at the practice, and together with some redoubtable GPs and midwives, Mumsnet launched a campaign against the presence of sales reps on maternity wards last year, and in time we hope to see this pernicious practice end. (If you'd like to add your voice and take some action, visit our "Bounty mutiny" page.)
Most of us enjoy the opportunity for a spending spree and, of course, anyone who wants to drop some cash in exchange for non-essential fripperies should do just that, with the usual disclaimers about sensible financial management, consideration of your available floor space, and the desirability of recyclable packaging. But in their role as consumers, parents deserve the same rights to informed choice and good information as everyone else – and not to be subjected, by NHS mandate, to the hard sell at a hospital bedside.
Sarah Crown is editor of mumsnet.com
