Competitive Child Rearing and the Exhausting Life
For the past couple of months, I’ve made it a habit to ask friends with adult children for their reflections on parenting. We even hosted a “Parent Wisdom Dinner” a few weeks ago.
My primary takeaway from these conversations has been the importance of creating a community of people who share similar parenting values. The goal is to avoid getting sucked into the exhausting achievement competition that marks neighborhoods and schools of the privileged.
Why does this competition exist? You could make the case that globalization and its pressures drive parents to do whatever is necessary to “guarantee” their child’s success. I don’t know if that’s true. But in the stories I heard from those experienced parents and in my role as an executive coach, I see a manufactured competition based on how sensitive we are to other people’s perceptions.
One part of the competition is based on what we consume—a bigger house, a nicer car, or any number of status markers. The other part of the competition involves the status we get from our kids’ achievements. We feel proud to report our kids are headed to an Ivy League school because that reflects well on us. And we’re embarrassed if they’re simply average. Even if they’re perfectly happy and competent humans, that loses us status.
I bring this up because, in response to last week’s post about experimenting with a Sabbath practice, a friend pointed out that I didn’t mention child-rearing or the perceived need to put kids in enrichment activities on weekends instead of allowing for rest.
Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with weekend enrichment—I went to plenty of nerd camps in my day. But if the drive to add those weekend activities comes from a fear that our kids will fall behind in the achievement and status competition, then we’re screwed. Not only have we potentially ruined our weekends, but the never-ending nature of the competition means we will not have even addressed the fear!
Besides, what’s so good about these formal enrichment opportunities anyway? In his book Juggling Glass and Rubber Balls, business executive and Stanford professor Joel Peterson mentions that his family opted out of some competitive sports because it would interfere with their Sunday religious practices. However, he found that the tough choice for his daughter to give up competitive soccer became an opportunity to display emotional maturity. He writes, “I was impressed that she’d chosen gracefully to deal with consequences, switching seamlessly to track without complaining.”
Moreover, in the introduction to The Sabbath, Susannah Haschel describes being enriched by the conversations and community her father convened each week. And on Ezra Klein's podcast, Judith Shulevitz noted that the collective decision to practice the Sabbath creates space for greater family connection, another type of enrichment.
I don’t want to get on a high horse about a Sabbath practice. I haven’t consistently done it nor convinced my wife that we should adopt it as a family. But I became interested in it after working with several executives who felt stretched at work and home. They didn’t believe they had the space to rest, which, ironically, hindered them in both aspects of life.
I suspect they felt stretched because they didn’t have an authentic life vision to help them opt out of the achievement competition at work and in parenting with confidence. It’s not intuitive for them to think, “I’m OK resting on a Saturday. I’m not worried about what someone else might do to get ahead because I’m not competing with them.”
If the insights from my conversations with experienced parents are true, it may also be that those professionals struggle because they lack a community that helps them see that the exhausting competitions are both manufactured and unimportant.