My Love-Hate Relationship With Lovevery

“Now she can go to college,” I joked to a friend of mine when I finally managed to procure for my 5-month-old daughter a Lovevery Play Gym. More expensive than another other baby gym on the market, Lovevery’s promised to offer my baby important play for each of her developmental milestones and then transform into a tent for toddlerhood. I’d picked it up from a neighbor’s porch, where it sat in an old shopping bag, paying $30 for it, $100 less than the retail price.

I hadn’t thought I’d be a “now she can go to college” type of parent. While pregnant, I’d read the first few chapters of Simplicity Parenting and planned to take Kim John Payne’s advice: fewer toys for my daughter and less cognitive overload for her and for me. One of my own favorite childhood toys had been a metal bowl from the kitchen that I filled with a “soup” of water, grass, and rocks from the backyard. Weren’t babies famous for being entertained by unplugged telephones, wooden spoons, and pots and pans?

Then came the Lovevery ads, crowding into my Facebook feed. One featured a parent confessing they didn’t know how to play with their baby until Lovevery products helped give them the confidence — not just to play but to nurture their baby’s developing brain. (Lovevery couldn’t confirm the text of this ad, but I remember it.) I wept.

In the Lovevery world, play is “purposeful,” and every toy is an opportunity to build an essential skill. The baby gym is one of the few Lovevery toys you can buy individually; the rest are available only in kits through a subscription service. I think now that I was meant to see the play-mat ad first: It is an entry point for parents into the Lovevery world.

It is not surprising that I cried when I saw the ad for the baby gym. I had been through a high-risk pregnancy and a difficult, early birth, and was caring for my tiny preemie alone as a single mother by choice. In my teens and 20s, I had cared for other people’s babies, but with my own, I endlessly worried about whether she was OK and how to know if she was getting what she needed. She couldn’t tell me, at least not in a language I could understand.

And while friends, doulas, and neighbors came by fairly often and reassured me, I was mostly on my own. I thought I knew how to play with a baby, but maybe I didn’t. Maybe I needed this play mat. I certainly wanted it very badly. That would be one of her few toys, I reasoned. It had so many parts and pieces, it was sure to last for years and be everything she needed.

Once I got the baby gym, I realized it was not going to be an all-purpose super toy, but by then I had started seeing ads for the play kits, which promised to ensure my child’s healthy development by sending around six to eight toys and a book every two to three months for $480 per year. These toys, Lovevery told me, would come at the exact right time, just as she was ready for a new set of developmental milestones. This was important — so important that Lovevery does not allow you to select which play kit you start with but has you enter your child’s birth date so they can send you the right kit.

My introduction to Lovevery coincided with a difficult time. After struggling with my health postpartum, I was laid off days before I was set to return to work. All my plans for how I would parent (that choice part of single mom by choice) seemed to be slipping through my fingers. I live in a mixed-income neighborhood in a high-cost-of-living city, where well-off tech employees own million dollar homes a few blocks away from strips of apartment buildings. When I was a new parent, I did a lot of comparing: between my rented apartment and my peers’ beautiful homes, between what I could give her as just one person and what my friends’ babies seemed to get from having two. Between her mostly hand-me-down toys and the sturdy, sustainable, wooden Lovevery toys that some other new parents seemed to afford with ease.

I racked up hours looking at the website, longing to give my daughter the play kits, trying to find a way to justify their price ($80 to $120 a pop) or to mitigate the expense (maybe I could skip every other order?). I knew how my daughter would relish hiding the bunnies in a green felt pouch in the Babbler playkit, how she would delight in lifting circular puzzle pieces to reveal photographs of children in the Circle of Friends puzzle.

We did manage to get Lovevery toys a few ways. I bought my first play kit — The Explorer — from a neighbor who was selling it for $35. A friend sent me a few things from play kits for 1-year-olds. And, after agonizing for months about which one to buy her, I purchased The Thinker, brand new. I chose it not because she was the right age for it (I had to manipulate the website by forward-dating her date of birth to get them to send it to me), but because she had spent the entirety of a friend’s son’s birthday party clutching the Montessori doll that came with it.

Lovevery toys are beautifully crafted. They are sturdy and durable, and they look nice on your living room floor. They are built with the age of the child who will play with it in mind. The tiny book full of animal pictures from The Thinker has made car rides bearable, and the “opposite balls” (one heavy, one light) have made baths more fun. It also gave this laid-off mom the added satisfaction of giving my child something that most of the neighborhood kids have access to.

My daughter was 18 months old when I bought her the 11- to 12-month-old kit, and there was one toy that she was clearly too old for: the Pincer Grip Puzzle. Reading the description, I realized that I had failed to notice whether my daughter developed her pincer grip. I resolved to check next time she picked up something small. Despite the fact that babies have learned to grip small items in their thumb and forefinger throughout history, or at least until 2019, I still managed to feel guilty. I’d completely missed a milestone.

And this is the crux of what I hate about Lovevery.

While the company is selling you toys, it is also selling you the idea that as parents you need to pay close attention: Has your child developed hand strength? Learned color matching (“an early math skill”)? Developed empathy? Each toy description doesn’t just tell you what a toy does but what it does for your child. It reinforces this through inventing its own language. It doesn’t sell toys but “play things.” It’s not a toy company but a “child-development company.” In answer to the frequently asked question “Why can’t I buy just one item from a Play Kit?” the website claims “our researchers ran a survey” where they “discovered a mismatch between what the parents thought their child wanted to play with and the materials that actually engaged their child the most.” They are not just asking you to trust them but to stop trusting yourself.

Lovevery is right — it is not just a toy company. It is part of a swath of services marketed to new parents to help us understand the things that none of us were trained for: how to get your child to sleep, how to introduce solid foods, and, with Lovevery, how to play. American parents — or the ones who can afford it — will continue to buy these services because we are tired, confused, and insecure.

These subscriptions and learning kits and videos are meant to plug the gaps that were once filled by community elders, kinship groups, and friends. People who, generations ago, would have been around to teach us how to get through a difficult diaper time or pass on community values. But the services we buy often add new worries: Will my child be traumatized by crying at night? Will she be a picky eater because I introduced solids wrong? Will she be bored or overwhelmed by her toys?

When I became a parent, I thought it would be easy to make simple choices for my daughter and not get sucked into endless dilemmas about how, precisely, to raise her. But once I was in it, I found it hard not to think that what my child needs is what everyone around me was giving their children.

It is doubly hard to choose to opt out when you can’t do it anyway, for financial reasons. The reality is that as a single parent, I can’t afford, with time or money, to give my child everything that she might want. That’s something that I suspect I will worry about for much of her childhood. For now though, she is holding puzzle piece between her thumb and forefinger as well as any toddler, even though she received the Lovevery Pincer Puzzle six months too late.

Megan Alpert is a writer living in Seattle. She's author of The Animal at Your Side and has written for Foreign Policy, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. You can subscribe to her newsletter at www.meganalpert.com/about