Expecting too much from our children

Mad Momma has a wonderful article on parents that want overachieving children. What happened to just wanting your child to be happy and content??




I am beginning to sound like a stuck record but I am sick of these parents who want their kids to be over achievers. Or even achievers. If I had one wish for my children, it would be that they are happy people. Not necessarily successful people. In fact most people feel that parents, especially stay at home mothers live their dreams through their children and want them to achieve professional success. I don't. I don't care what they do. As long as they are happy.

I don't care if they end up as beach bums, as long as they are happy. There. I said it. I am sick of people our age, having heart attacks at 28 (yes, I know two men who had heart attacks at 28!) due to stress. Chefs, engineers, artists, doctors, designers, gay, bisexual... anything..everything that others have thrown at me as options when I have made this statement earlier. As long as they are happy and good people.

Why are we so obsessed with records and making and breaking them? Why are we so obsessed with having children who can multiply insane amounts mentally, recite shlokas backwards and use the computer at 18 months? Why must all babies be super babies and why must every thing be an opportunity to learn?

Don't get me wrong, I am alright with pointing out everyday things and going for nature walks... but nothing is good in extremes. I will not be the mother saying, "Good morning Brat. When the sun shines, it's morning. Now pick up your toothbrush and brush your teeth or you will get cavities. Now wear your blue pants and red shirt and sit in your green high chair and eat your yellow egg."

Take a chill pill. Our parents did not use every opportunity to teach us and I think most of us have turned out alright. This whole obsession with super babies and building super bright achievers is getting out of hand.

Attachment Parenting - Overparenting

Babble has an interesting article on the whole idea of attachment parenting going a bit over the top. The author, Katie Allison Granju, describes the status symbols, like designer strollers, that parents buy, to mask their child rearing insecurities.

But as hard as we are on ourselves, we are even harder on our parenting peers. In its study of parenting attitudes, Public Agenda found that six in ten of us rate other parents only "fair" or "poor" in raising their children. And these days, one big way we try to out-do these "fair" and "poor" parents is to buy better stuff. Our parental anxieties now include the belief that without the hippest, newest parenting swag, successful child rearing is no longer possible.

In fact, we no longer choose a stroller, but a parenting identity. Are you a trendy BugabooAre we bungling the very thing we seek to perfect? Frog kind of mom or perhaps a Mclaren traditionalist? God forbid you show up at the playground with a straight-from-Baby-Superstore Graco. How tacky! One mother I spoke to for this article sheepishly confided to me that she had gotten a new credit card for the sole purpose of paying for her $1,000 Stokke Xplory stroller, saying it made her feel like there was at least one thing she was assured she would do "better than anyone else at playgroup" for her son.

Peggy O'Mara, publisher of Mothering magazine and a keen observer of American parents for the past two decades, says she believes the commercialization of parenting masks our insecurities.

"I think people think they need a lot of baby gear because so many people use their children as social collateral, and judge one another by what they have for them," says O'Mara.