If you’re a mother or a father, which you probably are, and if you’re reading this, which you obviously are, then you’ve at one time or another experienced the brutal underground counter-culture of Parental One-Upmanship.
Come on, don’t play innocent, you know what I’m talking about. Your 11 month old takes her first brave hesitant steps and you rush to the nearest play-date, parent group, Gymboree, or Chuck E. Cheese to proudly announce your baby’s milestone accomplishment only to be knocked down a notch by parents extolling the unparalleled brilliance of their own ambulatory wunderkinds. “My Rosie walked at 7 months. My Charlie ran at 6 months. My Elizabeth did a back handspring out of my vagina.” You counter with a “Well she also said her first word this ….” And you’re interrupted with a flurry of “My Rosie said her first word at 7 months. My Charlie knew nursery rhymes at 6 months. My Elizabeth recited Shakespeare out of my vagina.”
Your immediate instinct is to skip the “One-Upmanship” and go straight to “One-Up-Yours-manship” and shout retaliatory haymakers at the sanctimonious antagonists you thought were your friends, but you don’t want to get pulled into a futile war of who’s child is bigger, better, faster, stronger. Your inner voice, the one that sounds like Keanu Reeves, presses the question, “What do you do? What DO you do?”
The Today show recently addressed why some parents engage in this type of exhausting and futile competitive banter. Well, the piece actually only concentrates on the over-the-top Moms for some reason, but I think we all know how competitive Dads can be as well (see Youth Sports + Living Vicariously Through Your Child + Inappropriate Juvenile Social Behavior)
Apparently the root of this evil can be traced back to personal identity insecurities and as a way to bolster a shaky self-image. Moms it seems, because again Dads were strangely left out of this psycho-mélange of aggressive parenting analysis, transitioning from the business world transfer that corporate mentality into their parenting style. In other cases the child becomes an extension of the parent and way to validate their self-worth.
Regardless of the cause, Today offers some sage advice to parents who don’t want a healthy relationship between friends to degenerate into a “the only way to make myself feel better is to make everyone else feel like shit” situation. Some suggestions are to empathize with the competitive parents and try to understand where they are coming from, to use non-competitive responses and to reduce the possible escalation of an exchange by not upping the comparative ante.
So, the next time “that” burgeoning stage mom brags about how her Elizabeth strolled from the birth canal rhythmically finger picking her umbilical chord like a Mariachi with a flamenco guitar, remember that it’s not about winning, it’s about appreciating ourselves and our families for who they are and about connecting with the people we love; and in our minds connecting with a perfectly placed uppercut.
