Any baby born in the US, regardless of the status of its parents, is automatically an American citizen. Nearly 4 million citizens were born annually in the 1990s, the birth rate having peaked above that threshold in 1990 with a birth rate of 16.7 per 1,000 and total live births of 4,158,000. Despite the rise in numbers, the birth rate is half of what it was in 1910, and has dropped from 23.7 per 1,000 in 1960. While there are many American babies, they are spread among more people whose cultural expectations of parenting, consumption, care and development Americanize babies in diverse ways.

Many babies born after the Second World War, for example in the baby boom and subsequent generations, experienced the movement from family folklore in pregnancy and childcare to more scientific medical models, mediated by physicians and authorities, especially Dr Benjamin Spock, whose attitudes on discipline and freedom changed childcare. As nuclear families have fewer children and fewer nearby relatives, in fact, patterns of information flow about babies have embraced books, neighbors, mass media and institutions, including parenting classes. Nevertheless, this apparent commitment to “better babies” has not overcome vast disparities in information and prenatal care, as well as problematic incidences of teenage pregnancy and infant mortality within the US.

Given widespread controls on natality and family size, the arrival of new babies generally evokes celebration within most American cultures. Showers before birth or adoption, religious cere monies for the baby and parents (baptism or bris) and gifts, photos and exhibition all mark family and community participation in birth and babyhood as an event. Naming traditions vary from those who reinforce family continuity or cultural heritage to those who opt for names from television and pop culture. Yet, American news media also talk constantly of babies who are abandoned and abused as extreme cases that underscore a shared ideal of innocence and loving comfort.

As babies grow up, parenting includes a stress on individualism and freedom of movement and action. This leads to variations in discipline and personality across groups, which are sometimes mediated by shared daycare—one of the most expensive and difficult responsibilities of parenting in the US. Still, debates over issues like toilet training, corporal punishment and rules of behavior have also been part of discourses of baby and childcare since Dr Spock.

Babies are not only responsibilities and celebrations, they are also opportunities for marketing. As Paul Reiser writes in his wry Babyhood (1997:42) “we watched other couples with babies and concluded that we not only had a lot of things to learn but a lot of things to go out and buy.” Marketing includes advice books, toys and educational materials, fashion, healthcare paraphernalia as well as furniture. While all may be “for the baby,” additional motivations (implicit in advertising) include making the baby smarter, prettier and more successful, flaunting care and wealth and protecting the baby against an uncertain world.

Depictions of babies provide celebratory moments to many mass media—whether long-running television shows or movies from D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance to Father of the Bride II (1995). In 1992 the choice of fictional television newswoman Murphy Brown to have a child out of wedlock even entered American political debate as Vice-President Dan Quayle attacked her choice. The vulnerability of babies also suggests darker visions of America, whether in crime shows or on the news, asking how the responsibilities of the American dream are being met for a new generation.