Jacob Frere was making a mad dash along a Manhattan sidewalk on a recent afternoon. Ducking in and out of pedestrian traffic. Jacob giggled as he weaved his way to what he thought was certain escape. But Jacob didn’t get very far, as twelve or so steps into his getaway the gRrabber stopped him. Bethany, his mother, ran over and scolded him and then assured the flustered onlookers that her toddler son was never in any real danger.
A few moments earlier Jacob had given in to the sudden and insistent urge to bolt. “He’s a runner,” said an exasperated Bethany. “You either have to have lightning-quick reflexes or be Elasti-Girl when you’re out with him… Unless you have this.” Bethany tapped her half of the gRabber, an electrical box that resembles an old wireless pager.
Paul Felix invented the childcare gadget. It is no coincidence that Mr. Felix is also the inventor of another device, one that keeps canine pets within an unseen boundary by sending electrical pulses through their collars. This fact makes the gRabber a very controversial parenting aid.
The gRabber debuted at the annual New York Toy Fair last month. At the booth flat screen televisions broadcasted a closed-circuit promotional video that featured a computer rendered toddler wrestling free of his mother’s grip and headed toward traffic, only to be saved by an inhumanly stretched arm that extended from a black box worn on the mother’s belt. “The gRabber,” said the narrator’s voice, “The long arm of parenting.”
The booth attracted a crowd of parents who munched on hors d’oeuvres and discussed situations in which they would employ the use of the grabber. One mom imagined it being a biting deterrent, another as a long distance squabble stopper. Mr. Gates, a dad visiting from Chicago, imagined that the gRabber would have come in handy a few weeks ago when he happened upon his daughter, Lacey, squeezing a bottle chocolate syrup into his drawer full of expensive neckties. “I would have only used it if I caught her before the act,” he said.
One parent yelped when her husband accidentally stunned her with the gadget. The salesperson, in an attempt to prove the benign nature of the gRabber’s shock, invited parents to give multiple transmitters a test run as he sang the kids’ classic, Old McDonald, while wearing the receiving end of the device around his wrist. He only mooed here and there before he could no longer hide the involuntary twitching that gave away his discomfort.
“Okay, that’s enough guys,” he said. “You’re all a bit trigger-happy today aren’t you?” It was easy to determine that he had gotten this job more for his baritone vocal delivery than for his presentation skills.
Ms. Carly Phillips, a local advocate from the children’s rights group Friends of Urban Community Kids, was invited to the demo with the hopes that she would back what the company sees as a product that would reduce child injuries in urban settings.
“It’s horrible to think that parents have to resort to Abu Ghraib-styled torture because they are either too lazy or too fat to keep up with their kids,” said Ms. Phillips. “I’d like to see that guy sing the Sesame Street song with that thing wrapped around his scrotum. That would be a good test as to how it would feel to a three-year-old whose skin is still extremely sensitive. I bet he’d sound more Elmo than Oscar then.”
The gRabber has not passed standard child safety tests and the patent is still pending.
