Parental High Anxiety

In addition to the usual materials about nutrition and health care, new parents are apparently also getting glossy four-color brochures titled "Your Child is Only in the 30th Percentile and Getting Dumber By the Day," which opens up to a second page headlined "25th Percentile...20th....Panic Would Be Appropriate Right About Now" and concludes with "Don't Even Bother, He's Going to Be Living in the Basement Until You Die."

Or so I would guess from reading articles like this one from last weekend's Washington Post magazine, which chronicles one mother's travails in finding the "right" preschool for her 20-month old son. Typically, the article starts with this scene:

It felt like I finally had the working mom thing nailed. Then one morning this past March, when my son, Milo, was 20 months old, I overheard a conversation at the neighborhood playground among some mom acquaintances that ran a Mack truck through my bring-home-the-bacon-and-fry-it-up-in-a-pan reverie.

"What lists are you on?" one of the moms asked.

"We're definitely trying for Aidan," said the one whose weekend outfits always matched.

"Hill Preschool sounds great; we're in for that one," added the one whose child was always too well-dressed for the park.

Umm, what lists?

In all seriousness, I don't mean to belittle the struggles of working parents, of which I am not one, nor the very serious problem of giving parents and children access to high quality early education and child care.

But these articles are always written from the same perspective: a college-educated women struggling to hold on to her values and sense of self as she confronts a strange, upper middle class, child-obsessed surburban culture. The cues are right there: "the one whose weekend outfits always matched," that is, one of those mothers.

The key is to give the reader permission to mock people like that while not feeling ashamed to follow their lead, to tell them it's possible to play the child competition game without internalizing, or representing, the values the little person rat race embodies.

That's a comforting message, which is why articles like this are such a staple of the parent- anxiety-stoking literature. But I'm not sure it's particularly honest. Personally, I'd rather read a first person account from the parent who decided not to blow a gasket trying to find the perfect preschool and is fine with the decision. Or I'd like to hear what the mom with the too-well-dressed child has to say, someone who's perfectly comfortable working hard to give her child every opportunity and doesn't feel the need to apologize for it. I don't know if I'd agree with her, but I'd probably learn from what she has to say.