The Rise of Beige Parenting: Suddenly Bright Colors and Fun Are Banned, Making It Sad

It all started when a mom couldn't help but notice that the products being marketed to her as a mother through catalogs, ads, and social media influencers were all overwhelmingly neutral - overwhelmingly beige. She joked about it on social media, and now her videos are viral.

Hayley DeRoche, a writer, librarian and a mother of 2 kids that tend to favor bright colors in their toys and outfits, labeled the neutral, muted aesthetic parenting as "Sad Beige Parenting," Yahoo Life reported.

"Sad beige is when your aesthetic is marketed in such a way that it views childhood as a somber experience and that dressing your children this way or creating this environment will create a calm environment full of little scholars who want nothing more than to just, like, listen to Mozart quietly in their beige room and play quietly with their one wooden toy. The marketing is really what the joke is about, because I have yet to see a child in real life act at any point like the children in these beige neutral ads," DeRoche declared.

What does it have to do with parenting?

The color palette is beige, oatmeal, flax, cream, fawn, nude, sand, or tan.

And, parents, especially the "momfluencers", are applying the muted palette to their children and everything connected to their children, from outfits to toys to bedroom furnitures and decors.

According to The Guardian, parents claim that the palette is calming and gender neutral, even if this claim disagrees with a research by KidsHealth Medical Experts that states that babies, whose eyesights are not yet fully developed, actually best respond to "high-contrast, black-and-white designs."

The claim also contradicts with what most parents, those that aren't influencers and are not into curating photos "for the Gram," share about their kids tending to favor bold patterns and vibrant colors.

More than parenting, it seems that it is all about the trend and marketing, of being aesthetic and minimalist, and having photos and videos that are Instagrammable or Instagram-worthy.

It seems to also be about parents imposing their "austere" and quite expensive tastes on their children while banning primary colors, shiny surfaces and fun in their kids' nursery.

Neuropsychologist Amanda Gummer told the Wall Street Journal that Sad Beige Parenting seems to be less than ideal. She further stated that she doesn't think that many kids would choose beige as their favorite color.

As this parenting rises, Gummer shared that a problem arises with it. Being motivated to have an "Instagrammable house" and not letting kids explore (in terms of play and the colors of their toys) makes her worry.

Read Also: The Rising Trend of Maternity Fashion

Warning for parents

Emily Writes, an author and mom of two, is quite frustrated with this seemingly "nonsense" trend.

She shared that when she had her baby 10 years ago, they weren't afraid of colors, and it was a fun journey. Her kids grew up more than okay.

Thus, she cannot seem to understand why "Instagram mums" are encouraging other mothers out there to spend hundreds of dollars on the latest wooden toy or tan baby rattle that are organic and good for the environment, and to avoid bright colored plastic toys at all cost.

Writes is blaming the "influencer culture and their status anxiety," and are warning parents not to be pressured and get into the trend. She said there is no faster way to say that they are rich than to dress their children in cream and place them on a white couch with all their wooden toys in sight.

DeRoche also commented that if a parent's whole life is a "showroom," then seeing the surge of posts about minimal parenting and rotating toys makes perfect sense.

She emphasized that this beige aesthetic meant to say that the parenting experience is clean and pure, which is a total lie. A parent's love for the children is pure, that is a fact. But parenting? There is no way it is clean, pure, and perfectly curated.

According to Writes, parenting can sometimes be exhausting, or overwhelming, or "over-it," and that is the norm of parenting. Parenting is all at the same time joyful and beautiful and also "shitty and tiring," and "funny and messy." Parenting isn't meant to be this perfect, beige curated life, and the sooner parents understand that and be removed from the "picture perfect" expectations from the social media, the happier and more meaningful parenting will be.