Angela Mollard: Your children are not dress-up dolls

“WHAT,” I ask my daughter, “is your favourite memory from childhood?”

I suspect she’ll say the trip to Paris when she was 10.

Or the Harry Potter studios where she drank butterbeer. Or maybe the swimming pool birthday cake I fashioned from sponge, chocolate fingers and some toxic-looking blue jelly.

“My favourite memory,” she responds without pause, “was that afternoon we stopped on the way home from kindy and played with the autumn leaves in the park.”

I remember. The sky purpling with the threat of a storm. Wading through knee deep leaves. Burying each other in a glorious mass of orange and gold. A rare moment when I was all hers and not distracted by her baby sister.

“What were you wearing?” I ask.

She looks at me like I’m mad. “What was I wearing? Why does that matter?”

It doesn’t. Or I’ve always thought it doesn’t. But a few weeks ago I went to meet a friend at the Life InStyle trade show. It’s an event where fashion and homeware brands showcase their products for the coming season. I was looking for a new lampshade but, of course, came home with a leather skirt.

But more alarming than my impromptu shopping sesh was stumbling into another pavilion hosting a separate “Kids InStyle” trade show. In a warehouse the size of a soccer pitch more than a 100 retailers were spruiking what, apparently, are the “must-have” accessories for a modern childhood.

It seems the bees of 2015 are nobody without a rose gold cot (also available in silver), a mini trench coat (in plum or olive), drink bottles boasting more technology than NASA and, for boys, what looked suspiciously like a smoking jacket with requisite brocade.

There was also embossed stationery even though I suspect “thank you” letters are as obsolete as hand-me-downs.

Granted, I take a rather rustic approach to parenting. I was roundly laughed at on national television for suggesting a hose and a watermelon are the only necessary props for a kids’ birthday party.

What’s more, I think North West not only the most ludicrously named, but also the most ridiculously dressed toddler on the planet.

Leather pants for a one-year old?

Oh it’s only a bit of fun, I hear you say.

We all work hard so it’s nice to be able to treat our kids. I disagree. The commodification of childhood and the increasingly troubling triumph of style over substance is robbing our kids of their birthright — namely time and fun.

I’ve done it. Opted for the cafe over the park because a flat white appeals far more than the mind-numbing pushing of a swing. Dressed them in sparkly tights and cute hats because it makes for a charming picture on Instagram. Colour-coded the books on their bedroom shelves because it’ll look like I’m winning at parenting.

Celebrities give us both a blueprint for this sort of indulgence but also some justification that we’re not as insanely doting and decadent as them. What lunacy, we think, when Beyoncé gives Blue Ivy an Arabian stallion for her second birthday. Or when the Beckhams allow Romeo to model for Burberry, and buy Harper a $1.2 million dollar painting called “Daddy’s Girl” to hang in her bedroom. Witness last week the lunatic birthday party thrown by Bernie Ecclestone’s daughter Tamara for one-year-old Sophia. The highlights? An enormous princess palace constructed from pink and white balloons and a real life zebra which doubtless terrified the life out of her.

Don’t think it’s just the mad Brits and Americans. WAGs Rebecca Judd and Terry Biviano recently threw birthdays for their toddler daughters that looked more like magazine spreads than genuine celebrations of a lovely milestone.

Roxy Jacenko’s daughter Pixie is as much brand as child, while Natalie Bassingthwaighte’s new kids’ clothing collection positions kids as on trend accessories with all its moody blacks and greys.

When we “style” childhood we strip it of fun. Of ease and spontaneity. Of holey leggings and mismatched gumboots. Of a parent’s delight in them and not the accoutrements pedalled by an industry obsessed with what childhood looks like rather than how it functions.

I suspect the early years with children are imbued with a melancholy we are not yet ready to acknowledge so we try to stem it with nice things. The assault of work and raising a family makes us feel like we’re compromised at both so we staunch our discomfort with stuff. Expensive stuff.

Pretty stuff.

Stuff that fills a hole in ourselves.

Yet as the philosopher Alain de Botton points out:

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”

Like those Alessi lemon squeezers from the 90s, “styling” kids is aesthetically pleasing but ultimately pointless.

Just as the rocket-shaped device failed to produce any juice, a gold cot and a trench coat will not make them laugh.

Autumn leaves will do that.