The rise of sad beige parenting: how primary colours, shiny surfaces – and fun – got banished

Name: Sad beige parenting.

Age: New, but looks older.

Appearance: Runs the gamut from taupe to fawn.

A restricted palette, is what you’re saying. Like a field of stubble on an overcast January afternoon.

What has it got to do with parenting? It’s about applying this muted aesthetic to your children.

To their clothes, you mean? Yes, and their toys, their bedrooms and their sad, beige little lives.

A beige child’s bedroom? Not just beige, but also oatmeal, flax, cream, stone, rope, bone and ash.

Why would you do that to a kid? Some parents claim it’s calming and gender neutral.

And very hard to get stains out of. It seems to be about imposing one’s austere – and, ironically, expensive – tastes on one’s offspring while banishing primary colours, shiny surfaces and fun.

That is a losing battle. The sad beige parents seem pretty determined. “Our whole house isn’t changing because we have kids,” one mum told the Wall Street Journal.

Yes it is. Of course it is.

Isn’t pretending there are no colours bad for youngsters? There isn’t much evidence either way, but it seems less than ideal. “The motivation of having an Instagrammable house and not letting kids explore and make a mess worries me,” neuropsychologist Amanda Gummer told the WSJ. “I don’t think many kids’ favourite colour is beige.”

Where did this whole idea come from? As a marketing trend, it’s been bubbling up for a while. According to the online shopping portal Etsy, searches for beige kids’ clothes have jumped 67% year on year.

And as an aesthetic perversity worthy of our scorn? We owe that to American librarian Hayley DeRoche, who set up TikTok and Instagram accounts mocking the sad beige phenomenon.

How does she do it? She makes videos of real beige clothing and toy catalogues and narrates them as if they were being presented by Werner Herzog: “I call this one ‘I have looked into the abyss to see what hell hath wrought.’ Simple top, $45.”

And this stuff is expensive, you say? It costs a lot to dress your child like a 19th-century workhouse orphan.

When does the backlash start? This is the backlash. We’re under way.

Do say: “When I am old I shall wear purple, and damn this £130 ecru smock to hell.”

Don’t say: “Anyone seen my kid? He was right here in this sandpit, dressed in beige organic-cotton overalls and holding a sustainably sourced wooden … oh, there you are, darling.”