HerKind.com

I live in one of those neighbourhoods in Toronto where attempts toward gentrification happen every few years, slow down and then rev up. The main strip is a mix of old established markets and shops and new, hip joints. Houses on my street list for anywhere between $500,000 and over a million. I’ve only lived here a little over a year and back in Toronto for two, so there’s alot about the hows and whys of changing neighbourhoods that I’m just finding out. And make no mistake, it’s a very different Toronto than in 2000 when I left.

In my neighbourhood, a grocery run can sometimes take twice as long because of dodging oversized strollers (sometimes called SUV strollers), dogs, wagons full of kids and/or parcels and of course the old folks who established the neighbourhood decades ago, who are now mostly using canes and walkers to get around. They’re the ones I worry about as they watch their home change to unrecognizable right before their eyes.

The strollers – have you seen them? they’re massive! - get squeezed into even the tiniest stores and you can't easily manoeuvre around them. Parents seemingly have no awareness of this. At the small local video store on a weekend it’s all but impossible to get in, since it’s hijacked by entire families – including strollers, toddlers, and dogs. As I write this in my local free wireless resto that’s become my home office there is some sort of play group, meetup, stroller-heaven gathering taking place. One waitress I talk to says parents demand menu changes to suit their chilren. I’ve heard kids beg their parents to go to the local too-hip-for-school coffee bar (which admittedly does make the best latte in this area) and cry if the answer is no, though I’ve yet to discover what kid-friendly food or drink they serve.

That’s why this month’s Toronto Life cover screamed out to me from the newsstand. “Baby Invasion: They’re taking over our streets, our bars and sidewalks. The stroller mafia vs. the city,” by Katrina Onstad. It’s a comprehensive look at “hipster parents” (I call them bohemian yuppies) and how they are trying to hold onto their youth by ensuring their children live the exact same kind of lives they did in their glory days. And with every ultra-hip yet imbued heavily with irony luxury, including the gargantuan strollers and cute little onsies that say, iPood.

“For a particular type of middle-class over-educated person, choosing to live downtown in your 20s is a rejection of what's perceived (fairly or unfairly) as the cookie-cutter suburban existence - a declaration that you haven't succumbed to the banality of life. But it's hard to reconcile the nonconformist coolio lifestyle with the reality of having children, which is, of course, the most biologically predictable, socially conformist act of all. A primal nesting instinct takes over - the shopping and renovating and joining of on-line neighbourhood groups. Hipster parents prefer to pretend that the big nest of the city, the one they landed in in their 20s remains the same despite the addition of their kids.”

One of the articles participants says that forcing people to squeeze by her stroller is "payback" for not being offered seats on transit while she was pregnant. That's a mature attitude of a person charged with nurturing and rearing a new life!

Onstad ends the piece with a description of a baby/parent club night at Circa, part of a series of such events, where parents can drink and dance and kids can dance and play. That way, the parents can still live a version of their unencumbered lives. Onstad, a parent of two, and her partner however, really don't seem to enjoy the lifestyle of their peers.

By far the most prescient point of the piece is this:

"Over time, when neighbourhoods are infiltrated by families like [these], they become homogenized; the Beach wasn't always the land of golden retrievers and Subaru Outbacks. All across the south end of the city, houses that have been divided into apartments are being sold and converted back to single-family homes. What emerges in these family-driven downtown neighbourhoods, over a long period of time, is effectively the kind of mono-culture that happens instantly in the suburbs when a group of economically similar people buy into a development while it's being built."

I see evidence of this very thing where I live and I don't much enjoy it. Once a vibrant mostly Polish area of town with wonderful deli-style restaurants and markets, it is slowly but surely becoming far less diverse and interesting. Once Toronto loses its diversity it's lost everything as far as I'm concerned. It's what I missed the most when I was away and a good part of the reason I came back. Perhaps I should have done more research on the changing city!

Don’t think for a minute I haven’t thought of doing this type of story. The problem with that is I’m a middle-aged woman with no children. So, what would look from my point of view like sour grapes is much better handled by an established writer from that same generation with children of her own. That’s precisely why I recommend reading it.

Though our observations and insights are similar, Ms. Onstad says it better than I could mostly because a woman who is a mother can never be accused of not liking children. Me, I’m fair game. I love kids (the usual mandatory caveat) and am increasingly sad that I don’t have any, but this new competition for the biggest and best transpo is beyond me, as is the practice of hauling kids (who are old enough to walk) around in wagons. And I don’t understand the entitled attitude this new type of parent feels in a world that contains many more configurations of ways to live than ever before.

Despite the fact that there’s a perceived baby explosion out there, stats from the 2006 Census say that only 17.7% of Canadians are children under 14. As well, for the first time, there are more families without children (42.7 per cent) than with children (41.4 per cent).

If there is indeed a war on in Toronto neighbourhoods, and these stats may indicate that there is, the stroller is definitely the muscle.

There's a woman in my neighbourhood who looks like the grandmother of a couple of kids she ferries around in a double stoller, the bubble kind meant for running or biking with your children in tow. I can't help but wonder what she and other grandparents think of a parenting trend that has the strollers as its main aresenal.