Buying for baby: How middle-class mothers negotiate risk with second-hand goods

Focusing on the mother as consumer as well as carer, this chapter considers mothers’ co-consuming practices related to used/second-hand baby goods purchased at nearly new sales. Citing second-hand consumption as an intimate and risky practice, the material negotiations and risk reduction strategies practiced by middle-class mothers as they engage in consuming second-hand baby items are discussed

Mother, consumer, trader: Gendering the commodification of second-hand economies since the recession

In Western contexts, ‘hand-me-down’ and sharing economies of children’s clothes, toys and equipment remain one of the most normalised cultures of second-hand consumption. This article explores the strategies used by mothers to realise the most economic value from these economies in current austere times with the increased possibilities offered by the democratisation of informal buying and selling spaces. Drawing on an ethnographic study of mothers participating in nearly new sales in the United Kingdom, the article outlines the myriad moralities influencing mothers’ everyday consumption, use and disposal of children’s goods. It argues that providing material goods for children is a thrifty skill with mothers thinking past point-of-purchase to the resale potential of second-hand items. This strategy of trading used children’s goods as a practice to circulate resources in the family and keep up with the commodification of childhood

The role of the non-human in relations of care: baby things

In this paper we argue that the non-human plays a vital role within networks of care. We do this through a consideration of the forms of work done by baby things in the giving and receiving of young-child care. We extend existing understandings of human-nonhuman relations by arguing that beyond the work of warming babies’ bodies and providing comfort, baby things function within care assemblages as both a means and a metric of parental care. Within the consumption literature, the work of home provisioning (typically undertaken by mothers) has been cast as an expression of love for others. We build on this by exploring the forms of participation and “caring capacities” of matter itself – objects such as blankets, soft-toys and pacifiers- in the caring-for of babies and young children. We attend to the flows and stoppages of baby things across networks of early childhood caregiving to consider what these patterns of movement suggest about how such artefacts participate within relations of care, and how they are used as a means to reflect on the care practices of others. Analysis is based on 30 interviews with mothers and ethnographic and survey work at 14 children’s clothing exchanges in different parts of England and Scotland. Drawing on scholarship from the New Materialism as well as Mary Douglas’s conceptual work on dirt and cleanliness,1 we advance conceptual work within and beyond Cultural Geography by arguing that analytical attention to the role of the more than human leads to richer and more nuanced understandings of how care relations work

Pneumococcal carriage following PCV13 delivered as one primary and one booster dose (1 + 1) compared to two primary doses and a booster (2 + 1) in UK infants

In January 2020 the UK changed from a 2 + 1 schedule for 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) to a 1 + 1 schedule (doses at 3 and 12 months) based on a randomized immunogenicity trial comparing the two schedules. Carriage prevalence measured at the time of booster and 6 months later in 191 of the 213 study infants was 57 % (109/191) and 60 % (114/190) respectively. There were eight episodes of vaccine-type (VT) or vaccine-related 6C carriage in the 2 + 1 and six in the 1 + 1 group; ≥4-fold rises in serotype-specific IgG in 71 children with paired post-booster and follow up blood samples at 21–33 months of age were found in 20 % (7/35) of the 2 + 1 and 15 % (6/41) of the 1 + 1 group. VTs identified in carriage and inferred from serology were similar comprising 3, 19A and 19F. Dropping a priming dose from the 2 + 1 PCV 13 schedule did not increase VT carriage in the study cohort. Ongoing population level carriage studies will be important to confirm this

Carbon footprinting in the fashion industry: continental clothing’s approach

Case study on Continental Clothing's 100% organic, low carbon cotton t-shirt range 'Earth Positive'

Eco babies: reducing a parent’s ecological footprint with second-hand consumer goods

Consumption together with a growing global population greatly threatens the environmental security of our planet. This paper argues for direct reuse of products as the most sustainable form of consumption, over and above recycling and the use of greener technology. A parent or carer is responsible not just for their own ecological footprint but also that of their dependent, as they make consumption decisions on behalf of the child. One in five parents have acquired a greater number of second-hand items for their child/ren since the onset of the 2009 financial crisis therefore, consciously or unconsciously, parents are engaging in sustainable consumption practices. This empirical study contributes to the small volume of literature on second-hand consumption to investigate the extent to which mothers engage in second-hand consumption practices and the environmental impact this has. 30 mothers were recruited for in-depth interviews. Whilst primary motives were almost universally found to be financial, participants showed a strong ethical desire to reuse items which, by their very nature, had not reached the end of their useful life before being made redundant by the famil