Editor’s Note: Elena Sheppard is a culture writer who focuses on books, fashion, theater and history. Her first book, “The Eternal Forest: A Memoir of the Cuban Diaspora,” is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press. The views expressed here are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
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Last week, a story went viral after an employee at the popular and pricey children’s clothing company Kyte Baby lost her job. The employee, Marissa Hughes, had put in a request to work remotely while her newborn and premature, adopted son was in the NICU. Hughes says that Kyte Baby fired her after she put in the request, even though she had offered to work from the hospital. Kyte Baby told CNN that Hughes had qualified for two weeks of paid maternity leave and needed to sign a contract saying she’d return to her job for at least six months after those two weeks were up. Because of her son’s situation, Hughes did not feel she could make that commitment.
Courtesy Elena Sheppard
Elena Sheppard
Kyte Baby CEO and founder Ying Liu, a mother herself, publicly apologized twice on TikTok to Hughes. The first apology — stilted and clearly read from somewhere just off camera — was attacked in the comments (“I love the sincerity of an apology that’s being read from a piece of paper,” read one comment that has been liked more than 25,000 times so far). So, Liu came out with a second apology later the same day. “The comments were right, it was scripted,” she says in her second apology video. “It wasn’t sincere, and I’ve decided to go off script.” In the second video, she’s markedly less polished and more panicky (according to commenters) as she goes on to apologize to Hughes and the Kyte Baby community, saying, “We need to set the example because we are in the baby business.” The more than 15,000 comments on her apology show that customers haven’t forgiven. “I’m due in May and I took all your stuff off of my baby registry,” one commenter wrote. “RIP KYTEBABY,” wrote another. The anger is real.
That anger also reveals the depth of investment many parents make in the brands and fashions they choose for their young children. It’s not just about a sleep sack or a romper or a sippy cup — it’s an identity and a community. Not for the kids, for the parents. But the bottom line is we are focusing outrage on a company and a CEO’s albeit massive misstep, when the real focus of our rage should be the country that affords parents zero parental leave and allows workplace episodes like this to happen in the first place.
To an extent, the individual and group attachments to brands like this make sense. Becoming a parent is a brain scramble. Your identity shifts, your responsibilities grow, your world changes. In tandem with those more existential transformations is the reality that having a kid requires a whole lot of new purchases — clothes, a crib, a car seat, a stroller, diapering accoutrement. For many, myself among them, there is a real trust put into the brands that we choose for our children. In addition to selling items, those brands are also selling a promise that they’ll add a hint of control to this totally uncontrollable moment in our lives and that they will help us take care of our children along the way. Tucked into that promise is an assumption that they are pro-parent and pro-baby — a situation like what just occurred at Kyte Baby calls that trust into question.
I first learned about the Kyte Baby incident via a group chat I’m in comprised of parents whose children were born in 2022, the same year as my sons. Many of us had purchased Kyte Baby items for our kids in the past. Everyone was outraged. The situation itself, of course, highlights the perilous family leave situation in this country, and the lack of protections parents of young children face when it comes to parental leave or the need for flexible work conditions. But the broader context for the firing, as well as the backlash, also exposes the messy reality of how baby companies are able to successfully sell a polished version of infancy — and what that says about the parents doing the buying.
Items for sale on the Kyte Baby site right now include bamboo sleepers in “sage” and…