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December 10, 2007

Compare: Hipster kid club

For the harried, two-career urban parents nothing quite says loving-your-preschool child as purchasing a $2000/year membership at Peekadoodle Kidsclub.

At the Peekadoodle Kidsclub, little Jonnie can get a haircut while sitting in a barber chair fashioned like a shiny red Mercedes at the same time Mom breaks a sweat in her yoga class down the hall. Afterward, while Jonnie learns how to clean and sprinkle spinach over a pizza in his cooking class, Mom can grab a latte at the cafe and hit the Wi-Fi-equipped business center to get some work done.

Of course, Jonnie's family must have a Peekadoodle membership - which starts at $2,000 annually - and he can't be any older than 5, the club's age limit. But once in, the family is privy to all the services offered in the 10,000-square-foot building: the padded playground with the replica Golden Gate Bridge and Victorian homes, the hip clothing store for kids, the adult fitness gym and the partially organic dining hall. The toddler development courses in cooking, music and photography cost extra (the 12-week pizza-making class, for example, is $500).


Certainly, if the market is there then this business will be successful. However, is it really about need or narcisism? Or, perhaps, cluelessness:
"There's certainly a cultural need right now to have a place where kids and parents can both have their needs met," said Arlie Hochschild, a sociology professor emeritus at UC Berkeley who has written extensively on work-family balance. "This kind of business answers the time bind that busy moms and dads feel today."

But, said Hochschild, "This reminds us that those with money get in, those who don't, don't. Our culture needs to imagine unpaid ways of meeting these same needs."


Because, like us parents of old, we never thought of socializing with our neighbors, forming kid play groups, accompanying kids on fieldtrips through school, etc. But I guess the missing element to all that was the "hip" component.
Kurnit said one trend that Peekadoodle represents is the new relationship between parents and kids, who are now much closer in "hip sensibility" than Baby Boomers were with their children."

The idea of parents being cool, being connected and being with their kids is center stage nowadays," Kurnit said. "These places feed into all of that."


Yes, it is all about teh coool.

Posted by Darleen at December 10, 2007 06:37 AM

Comments

Well....if you total up the cost of a gym membership (easily $500 a year) plus child care at the gym (my last gym charged $20 a month per kid, and it wasn't a child care environment I'd actually consider suitable for small children if you're picky at all) plus the convenience of actually being able to send your kid for a decent haircut while you work out (I can't even send my husband to get the kids' hair cut most times, because it ends up all uneven and shoddy and he doesn't know what to tell them to correct).

Plus, it's San Francisco. Everything's twice as much there. And you have to market everything there as 'hip' there or it just doesn't sell.

The main reason I dropped my gym membership was because I had a choice between getting up at 5 am to go to the gym so my husband was still home with the kids, or putting them in the gym daycare while I worked out, only to walk in on my three year old seeing Robin Williams' plastic falsies on fire (that was the day I gave up on the gym daycare). It would be really nice to have an option locally where kids can actually do something constructive and educational while I have a little 'me' time. And given the parking situation around Ghirardelli Square, the 'one-stop' aspect of it is appealing too. We probably spend eight or ten hours a week in the car shuffling kids to playdates, school, errands, soccer, the zoo, museums, etc.

Posted by: Alice H at December 10, 2007 10:11 AM