Thursday, October 17, 2019

Essential California


Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Thursday, Oct. 17, and I’m writing from Los Angeles.

My colleague Sonja Sharp just published a wonderful dispatch from Oakland about the rise of the Bay Area’s hottest dance partya wildly popular daytime “rave” for children under 4. Baby Rave, as it’s known, is never advertised, but the monthly parties sell out in minutes. Think crazy lights, music and a crowd of 150-plus revelers (many of them with pacifiers in their mouths, and not in the club kid sense) in a commercial building in North Oakland.

It’s a wild story, with all the fun details that you would expect from something that could easily read as a parody of life in a 21st century American city. But as much as I came in wanting to make fun of the baby rave, I was caught off guard when I got to this part of the story:

“Many of the parents in attendance that Sunday were tech-sector workers, but others were artists, academics and Oakland public school teachers,” Sonja writes.

“While a few were ex-ravers, the majority were simply searching for something to do between breakfast and nap time. Amid skyrocketing rents and dizzying displacement, kids — and kids’ activities — are disappearing from the Bay Area. At local libraries, toddler story time competes for space with tenants rights workshops, adult coloring clubs and ‘yoga for success.’ Infant language classes and postpartum boot camps have replaced traditional playgroups for new parents with only a few weeks of leave after childbirth.”

At $7, the baby rave is relatively affordable — especially compared with the admission prices at many Bay Area museums that offer children’s programming. And in a pressure-cooker environment where it’s not unheard of to hear “STEM” and “toddlers” in the same sentence, a monthly hang with no educational component and nothing to accomplish but fun and camaraderie certainly has its charms. I spoke to Sonja about how she came to find herself at a morning baby rave, and what kind of a release it offers from the larger pressures of millennial parenting, particularly in a place like the Bay Area. Here’s what she had to say.

How did you hear about the Baby Rave?

I’m from the Bay Area and most of my family’s there. I was going up to see my sister and I texted some friends I knew from Berkeley. One of them, who has a kid about my son’s age, texted back and said, “What are you doing Sunday morning? Do you want to come to a baby rave?” I said, “What’s a baby rave?” And he’s like, “It’s a rave. For babies.” So, I said, yeah, absolutely. But I also have to write about it.

I’m also a millennial mom. I have an almost 4-year-old and I think one of the things that came through reporting this and editing it — particularly because my editor is also a mother, but of a different generation — is how little our peers who are not parents, and parents who are not of our generation, understand about the pressures of parenthood in major metropolitan areas where so many of us live for work on this generation, in particular.

Tell me more about that.

Have you looked at how much a two-bedroom apartment costs to rent in any of the big markets? Look, I am 33. My husband is 36. We both went to Berkeley and paid in-state tuition. Which is the thing that everybody says you’re supposed to do, right? Go to an excellent public school and pay in-state.

When my husband started in 2001, his fees were around $3,500 a year. By the time I graduated in 2008, the fees had doubled for the exact same degree. … Many of us are delaying a lot of life things because of that — because that pressure comes with everything else becoming more expensive, too.

Yes, the unemployment level is very low, but all of us know about the tenuousness of the jobs that are available. If you want to have a good job that you can actually make a life with, you have to live in a major metro area, and the price of living in a major metro has just gone up and up and up. Everybody knows that. But they don’t necessarily think of it as also happening in the context of a moment when student loans have ballooned so much and childcare costs have [skyrocketed.].

And because you have such a tiny amount of time with your child, that time is filled with anxiety. I should also add — caveat of caveats — that these are the pressures on professional parents. And obviously, the pressures are so much more intense on families who are being gentrified out of these neighborhoods.

But STEM for 6-month-olds doesn’t come out of a vacuum. It comes out of a very deep cultural anxiety about how our children are going to survive. 

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