Summary: American Baby is not a magazine -- it's an advertisement. Don't expect anything edifying. Letters to the editor are entertaining.
Magazine as Cover-to-Cover Ad Insert
When my wife and I were expecting our first child, we quickly learned that there's a lot of necessary equipment that comes along with parenting. We also learned that there were a lot of supposedly "necessary" gadgets and geegaws that we really could do without. The point is that when you become a parent, you also become a target of a whole new category of marketing ploys. People will try and sell you the weirdest things, and they need an marketing outlet to do so.
American Baby is a prime example of just such a marketing outlet, masquerading as a magazine. Take a close look at the articles. Most of them begin by describing some problem or dilemma of parenting. The solution? Buy product X! Toy pages oh-so-helpfully provide toll-free numbers and web pages for convenient ordering. Look for reviews of products. Do you see any negative reviews recommending you not buy a product? Didn't think so.
The problem with an advertising-driven and product-sympathetic mag like this one is that you can't really trust the content. You can't necessarily trust what you read in an ad, and the same unfortunately goes for a magazine which acts like an ad. Which recommendations are really in your best interest? Which recommendations are in the best interest of the baby industry? Without trust, you just can't tell.
Entertaining Letters
This I gotta say for American Baby: the letters to the editor sure are entertaining. It seems that some parents with lots of time on their hands (where do they get that time?) enjoy jabbing each other with attacks and guilt trips.
You know what I mean: in response to an article about infant formula, Martha X writes in and condemns the magazine for mentioning formula, since breast is best and anyone who doesn't breastfeed should go straight to hell. Julie Y responds in the next month that Martha's letter made her cry, since she couldn't breastfeed her baby for medical reasons. Julie wonders aloud why they allow Nazis like Martha to become mothers in the first place. Charles Z writes in and asks where Martha X got her high horse from. After all, Charles skewers himself through the abdomen for his son three times a day and speaks alternate sentences to him in Greek and Latin, all while holding down 14 full-time jobs -- he can't understand why everyone can't be so committed to their babies.
In Sum...
In sum, American Baby is more a marketing ploy than a magazine. Its recommendations are commercially biased and therefore, in my opinion, untrustworthy. Ya gotta love those testy letters, though -- inadvertent fun.
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