The world of LA parenting: How did California child-rearing become so ideologically charged?

Fatherhood has made it a big year for Tim Walker, the Independent's Los Angeles correspondent. But the complex politics of the city's baby scene has added a whole new dimension to the experience

Tim Walker and daughter Peggy hang out in one of their LA haunts (Amanda Friedman)

Out on the campaign trail in August, the Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush referred to the American-born children of undocumented immigrants as “anchor babies”. Birthright citizenship, which extends to everyone born in the US, is one of the things that makes America America, and many Latinos find the term “anchor baby” offensive. As soon as he was made aware of his mistake, Mr Bush clarified his remarks, insisting the phrase was, “frankly, more related to Asian people”.

Before our daughter Peggy was born in May, my wife Bea and I attended a pre-natal class at the hospital in Los Angeles where she was due to give birth. As we introduced ourselves, I explained that we were both British, but that our child would be an American. When I described her as our anchor baby, it seemed to split the room: a few people laughed, others glared as if silently concocting a hashtag to agitate for my expulsion. Bea cringed and hugged her bump.

Several weeks after my strategic gaffe, Bea was deep into her day-long labour and waiting to be wheeled into surgery for an emergency C-section. That's when the maternity nurse decided casually to warn us that we ought to be wary when it came to vaccinating our very-soon-to-be-newborn. In certain corners of Southern California society, immunisation is as fraught a topic as immigration, but we did not expect to find a vaccine sceptic among the medical staff of one of the city's top hospitals.

In 2014, there was a spate of whooping cough cases in schools on LA's wealthy west side: Malibu, Brentwood, Beverly Hills. Not coincidentally, many well-educated, well-off parents in those neighbourhoods weren't vaccinating their children. It all started in the UK, with Andrew Wakefield's 1998 Lancet study purporting to show a link between the MMR jab and autism. The study was discredited and Wakefield struck off, but that wasn't enough to satisfy some California parents.

An LA Times investigation found that the percentage of the city's nursery schools where fewer than 92 per cent of children were fully vaccinated more than doubled between 2007 and 2014. The Hollywood Reporter identified one school in Santa Monica where two-thirds of pupils had a so-called “personal belief exemption” from jabs, based on their parents' religious, philosophical or medical convictions. The state only recently scrapped the exemption after a measles outbreak at Disneyland.

Parenting Venice Beach-style

The people in Bea's baby yoga class are split down a social fault-line between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers. In a sensible society, parents would heed their doctor's advice. Here, the hierarchy of perceived wisdom tends to be reversed: the one who knows best how a baby ought to be reared is the baby itself, followed by his or her parents, who've read at least three baby books and a bunch of persuasive unsourced articles that they found on the internet.

The paediatrician, meanwhile, is considered a corporate shill who just wants to poke needles in your child and pump it full of toxins, diphtheria and non-organic baby formula. A doctor's recommendations must always be filtered through a Facebook forum for concerned local moms. And what do doctors know, anyway? Only what they've gleaned from a decade of medical training and their years of subsequent experience, backed up by the full weight of modern science.

If I were to ask my parents whether they raised me according to Attachment, Tiger or Parisian principles, they'd wonder what on earth I was on about. Middle-class child-rearing across most of the developed world has become increasingly demented: consumerist, competitive, ideologically charged. And LA's “crunchy” moms and dads are pioneers, way out west at the crossroads of celebrity and new-age culture.

Here, newborns are nurtured with the same chemical-free care and devotion as a vegetable from the Silver Lake farmers' market. Toddlers are treated like they're all Jennifer Lawrence. We could easily get carried away with thinking that Peggy is a famous-person-in-waiting. True story: she was delivered by the same doctor as Madonna's first child. Now, at six months, she's having her picture taken by a photographer who previously shot Kylie Jenner and Xzibit.

If we live in LA much longer, we'll have to choose where to send her to nursery school. Our options include one institution which uses teaching methods laid out by the late L Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, and another whose lengthy application form invites parents to “rate their crazy” on a scale of one to 10, and to compare their child to one of a choice of 10 celebrities including Burt Reynolds, Amelia Earhart, and Ke$ha.

Or we could join the miles-long waiting list for Camelot Kids in Silver Lake, a preschool where children learn puppet-making, circus arts, yoga and organic gardening in idyllic surroundings that include environmentally sustainable bamboo floors, a rock-climbing wall, and something called “the womb room”. It's just down the street from Moby's new vegan restaurant. For the privilege of sending their three-year-olds to Cam-elot, parents pay approximately $18,000 (£12,000) per year.

Children are an expensive business, especially when you live in the world's only developed nation without paid maternity leave. (California offers new mothers modest benefits under its state disability insurance programme. That's right: here, parenthood is officially a disability.) We were lucky that our health plan covered childbirth costs; many new parents have to spend the first few weeks of their baby's life arguing with their insurance provider over the five-figure medical bill.

There's also no such thing as a state-subsidised health visitor in the US. But new parents with the bread to spare can hire a private army of lactation specialists, baby sleep consultants, night nurses and doulas. New moms pay for their placenta to be turned into pills that allegedly provide significant, if ill-defined, health benefits. One of our friends was too scared to take them after her son was born, but several years later still keeps them for posterity, in a jar labelled: “Your Amazing Placenta”.

As Peggy begins to crawl, we could even hire a baby-proofing specialist to modify every knife-drawer and coffee-table corner in our house so that it poses no potential threat. But people in LA do it, because they'd rather be seen as helicopter parents than bad parents. Luckily, we can get away with being bad parents – when you're British, bad parenting is thought to be charming, just like bad teeth.