Celebrity baby boom offers new parenting perspective

BOSTON — I suppose it is reassuring that when all hell breaks loose, the tabloids still keep their eyes on the heavens, or at least the stars. Even in the Middle East, a gossip sheet in the United Arab Emirates is dutifully chronicling the search for baby Suri.

The daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes is not exactly missing. No milk cartons please. It's just that the 3-month-old has not yet had her picture on the public show-and-tell circuit, a required rite of passage for celebrities.

The frenzied speculation about the TomKitten, as she is called in tabloidese, gives you an idea of the change in star tracking. These days the paparazzi are focused on the celebrity baby — from bump to birth and beyond. The fascination with these celebrity births has surpassed the fixation on celebrity love, marriage, infidelity, divorce and weight gain — unless they conveniently dovetail.

For most of Hollywood life, the bump was not a fashion statement, nor was it a smart career move. In 1953, when Lucille Ball had a baby in real life and sitcom life, you still couldn't say "pregnant" on TV. In 1991, Demi Moore broke a barrier when she posed nude and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair. But when Britney Spears appears that way on the cover of Bazaar, she merely looks, um, overexposed.

Cameras now stalk celebrity wombs. The Onion turns its satirical eye to announce celebrity satellites that can spot "baby bumps" from 13,000 miles above the earth. And when Reese Witherspoon sues Star magazine for false pregnancy reports, the mother of two is described as "empty-wombed."

The 2006 crop of top tots — courtesy of Brooke Shields, Gwyneth Paltrow, Gwen Stefani, et al. — climaxed with the birth in Namibia of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's daughter Shiloh. People magazine reportedly coughed up about $4.1 million for the photos to feed a public appetite for newborns that formerly was limited to grandparents.

Following the new script, celebrity parents are also displaying a postpartum glow and a few words of parental bliss. Even the zany Jack Black has publicly promised to enter and win the best-daddy-on-the-planet competition.

So how did this fixation on celebrity babies, this upbeat bump beat, happen just as we are being told that parenthood is onerous and grueling and that parents are overworked and overwhelmed?