I wrote a song when my daughter was young called “It’s So Hard To Be a Baby.” I was being sarcastic. Today’s affluent parents think their babies need spa time, reports ABC News.
No wonder babies cry: Long, hard days filled with the stress of sleeping, eating and answering nature’s call can wear down even the most mild-mannered of infants — so even babies need time to relax every now and again.
Baby spas are an $11 billion a year industry.
“We offer over 25 different services, ranging from baby massage, baby yoga, baby sign language, brain awakening through classical music [and] baby chakra chi,” said Jonathan Baker, the owner of Skin Spa Baby in Encino, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. “It’s aligning the baby’s chakras through warm towels. We play a trance-type of music. We take warm towels. We place them on the chakras and we bring them to a calmness.”At the Play 2 Grow spa in Atlanta, mothers rub canola oil into their babies’ skin, while a string quartet’s music plays under a canopy of tiny blinking lights.
You’d think Mom could do the soft music and oil rubbing at home for a lot less.
Of course, the spas claim they’re developing physical and cognitive skills while they align Baby’s chakra.
Play 2 Grow offers a variety of sensory activates, like rolling around in warm spaghetti, dry rice or a bunch of loofahs. The sessions, which run around $20 a pop, also include sessions specifically structured to improve babies’ balance, like a workout that involves rolling around on an exercise ball.
Let’s hope the babies develop better cognitive skills than their mothers.
An $11 billion industry out of “a couple of hundred” baby spas? That means that on average they must be doing a couple of million dollars per spa per year.
Seems like a pretty big industry, and pretty big individual business, to have snuck up on us.
It’s amazing how people stupid enough to spend money on things like this can make enough money to spend it on things like this.
I agree with Mark, if I had money to spend on something like that, I would spend it on my wife first, me second and perhaps my sister third (but we would never get that far).
What also impresses me is the ability of such a niche market to make $11 billion a year. Whoever is doing their marketing is a genius on any level.