What’s going on here? What kind of unresolved adolescent anger are New York parents trying to express by plastering images of angry rockers and political revolutionaries on their tots? Could it maybe be anger at the pressure to acquire a baby, now, as if it were the latest Marc Jacobs handbag—cramming it into your closet of an unaffordable one-bedroom?

 

 “Children were always dressed in a way that would allow parents to convey to other people what their identity was,” said Tory Higgins, a professor of the psychology of business at Columbia University. But registering for a ribbon-trimmed layette at the late, lamented Peck & Peck, as one might have done in the 1950’s, is one thing; forcing one’s tots into what looks like the miniaturized garb of disaffected collegians is quite another.

 

 

Down on the Lower East Side, Stephanie Dolgoff likes to dress her twin 2-year-old daughters in T-shirts bearing flippant slogans like “President Poopyhead” and “Bush Is a Tush.” During the family’s regular perambulations around their neighborhood, the incongruous sight of the tots in their special shirts often inspires hearty guffaws or approving nods from the few remaining political radicals that live there. “I don’t want to make them out to be like walking posters,” said Ms. Dolgoff, 38, the health director at Self magazine, defending the fashion choices she makes on her kids’ behalf. “Really, it’s just funny. The old folks in the neighborhood think it’s funny. They agree Bush is a shithead … and I tell them not to curse in front of my children.”

 

These shirts are produced by Baby Wit, a Portland, Ore.–based online company run by a woman named Andrea Frost (slogan: “You may not be cool, but your baby can be.”) They are two of her hottest sellers—particularly among the large population of liberal parents in New York City.

 

Like Ms. Manwarring, Ms. Frost started Baby Wit two years ago when her daughter, Ava, was 4 years old. In a phone interview, Ms. Frost admitted that she doesn’t really want her daughter to idolize the Sex Pistols. “I certainly wouldn’t take my child to a show; she would have to be a lot older to go to something like that,” she said. “But the Sex Pistol shirt on a baby means something different than it does on an 18-year old kid. On a baby it says, ‘My parents think I’m a badass.’”

 

Stores selling this kind of merchandise are multiplying at an alarming rate in New York City. The Slope is home to the flippant children’s boutique Babybird, while the Village has two locations, East and West, of a place called Lucky Wang, carrying shirts imprinted with the words “L’il Goddess” and images of the Buddha. The East Village is a veritable hotbed of similar shops, including Exit 9, while the Lower East Side is home to Funky Fresh.

 

Manhattan parents defend their patronage of such establishments, saying that putting their kids in “edgy” clothes is preferable to engulfing them in the blander, more conventional messages of mass-market society. “It’s no better or worse than wearing an Old Navy shirt,” said Ms. Dolgoff, the Self staffer. “If you put a corporate logo on your kid—which many people do—it’s advertising a belief.”

 

And, of course, some parents aren’t actively shopping for the shirts, but rather receive them as well-meaning gifts from that New York staple: childless hipsters. Arthur Schellenberg, a 32-year-old bachelor living on Sutton Place, recently bought a Sonic Youth T-shirt for his 14-month-old nephew, adding to a collection that includes “President Poopyhead” and “I Already Know …. ” The gesture was meant as a slight dig at his sister, who lives a comfortable suburban life with her husband in Westfield, N.J. “It’s just a little something saying, ‘Your kids will probably end up being cooler than you are,’” Mr. Schellenberg said.