The luxury baby products market has expanded steadily even through periods of general economic contraction, driven by demographics—older, higher-earning first-time parents, smaller family sizes concentrating spending on fewer children—and by the cultural intensification of investment in early childhood.

A $3,500 crib, to those outside its target market, represents an obvious absurdity—a piece of furniture a child will use for roughly three years, rendered equivalent in price to a used car. To its buyers, it represents something different: the expression of values about quality, safety, aesthetics, and the worthiness of investment in a child's first environment.

The high-end baby market has been growing at rates that outpace the broader consumer goods economy. Companies like Stokke, Pottery Barn Kids, and Restoration Hardware have built substantial businesses selling furniture, bedding, and accessories at price points that would have seemed implausible to the previous generation of parents.

The sociological explanation involves the postponement of parenthood. Couples having their first child in their mid-thirties tend to have spent a decade building careers and incomes, and have often developed aesthetic standards and disposable income that they apply to the nursery with the same expectations they bring to the rest of their home.

The safety arguments are more complex. Expensive cribs are not demonstrably safer than cribs meeting basic safety standards at a tenth the price. The Consumer Product Safety Commission's crib safety regulations apply to all products regardless of price. The premium is primarily aesthetic and status-driven.

That parents make this choice freely, with their own money, makes it difficult to criticize. It remains striking.