When Chattering son number one came down to the planet, I purchased a $30, 12-inch-square blanket deliberately manufactured to be a beloved “bankie” like Linus had in the cartoon strip “Peanuts.”

The famous object relations theorist D.W. Winnicott
called these transitional items “not me” objects. He said they provide many children with early experiences in sensing and differentiating self from parent and outside world.

My prefab silky blanket square didn’t take, unfortunately. I even slept with the darned thing to get it to smell like me, and still my son preferred to hold my earlobe at feeding and snuggling times. There was no getting away from him! Remarkably, my second son was a parent’s-ear-lobe holder too. Go figure.

So yesterday, when my sister, a therapist, excitedly phoned to tell me about “Taggies,” a baby blanket square product festooned with those silky clothing tags babies love to hold and smell, I was skeptical. Why? Oh, there’s nothing wrong with these cute accessories. They make good baby-shower-conversation topics. And the company has gone on to design stuffed toys with silky tags all over them, so that children can have transitional animal toys too.

It’s just so typical of our striving American marketplace to identify a perceived “need” in the busy lives of consumers, and then assault them with it. Want your child to be securely attached? Buy a Taggie! Yeah, when in fact, what children decide to attach themselves to involves a far more mystical, organic process. They find their transitional object on their own, gravitate toward and cling to it independently.

You can’t just hand it to them, and say “Here, use this.”

But what do I know? Taggies are selling off the baby boutique shelves. It could mean our children are never going to smoke or bite their nails, so that’s good news. How secure they’ll be in the world!

This is not as pressing a topic as last night’s State of the Union address, but do you see what I’m saying? Bear with me, next blog item gets more serious.