MARGINALIA

SO WHAT’S WRONG WITH "DOING WHAT’S BEST FOR THE KIDS"?

Valerie Weaver-Zercher

I’ve often felt pity for children who race from school to soccer practice to violin lessons, then home for a quick freezer dinner, homework, and bed. Thankfully, in recent years the media has begun emphasizing the importance of "down time" for kids, when they can catch ants and stare at tree roots, and some suburban parents are organizing themselves to defy the tyranny of athletic practices and scheduled activities.

When hearing these reports, I’ve felt grateful for my own unscheduled childhood hours of making acorn soup and tunneling through piles of leaves in our backyard. I’ve also felt proud of our urban neighborhood, where families seem to spend lots of unscheduled time together, braiding hair on the front porch or grilling out back.

So I was chagrined to realize recently how susceptible I am to the same impulse that drives parents to overschedule their kids. Obviously raising an 18-month-old doesn’t make my drivenness take the form of classes and homework (although if there were classes on "Flying Biplanes for Toddlers" or "Bulldozing for the Very Short," my son would be there, with or without my consent). My parental perfectionism is surfacing in a more—at least seemingly—benign form: He should always have "what’s best."

I hadn’t named it as such until I began tallying up my hopes for him—which, of course, soon turned into a list of the ways I daily "fail" him. He should have a big backyard with a stream and woods so he has easy accces to the natural world, but the yard shouldn’t be so big we don’t have neighbors his age close by.

Speaking of friends, he should have playmates from a variety of racial, ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds, so he becomes comfortable relating to people different from himself. But he should also have enough friends with pacifist parents who believe in time-outs rather than spanking, the Narnia series rather than Pokemon, and organic zucchini casserole rather than hot dogs and cheese curls.

And he should go to city public schools because too many white middle-class folks like us have abandoned them, but of course he should also go to private schools—preferably small Mennonite ones like I did—so he is challenged intellectually and gains a sense of peoplehood and identity.

He should have enough toys that he doesn’t grow up feeling deprived, but not so many he learns a sense of entitlement. He should spend a significant portion of his childhood in another country so he can learn another language and culture, but he should also live down the street from his grandparents.

You begin to see my dilemma.

So when did my love for my child turn into a grocery list of my own perfectionism? When did I get caught in this catch-22 of socially conscious but middle-class parenthood? In short, when did I become one of those moms in minivan or SUV commercials?

I’m not sure when or how, but it’s a comfort to know I’m not the only one facing the dilemma. In recent conversation with a friend who lives on a farm, I said I was afraid my son would become one of those city kids who doesn’t know where milk comes from. She told me fears the opposite: that her daughters will become "country hicks." "I want them to have all the [positive] experiences I had as a child—and all the ones I didn’t," she said simply.

Exactly. It sounds benign enough: I mean, who can argue with wanting your children to have the best experiences possible? What parent doesn’t?

Perhaps it comes down to one’s definitions of "best." I’m beginning to think that I, and many parents, have been hoodwinked by false notions of what’s best for our children, so we won’t consider ourselves to be adequate parents until . . . (fill in the blank with your own neuroses).

I’m not sure who’s done the trickery. Advertisers, who survey and spy on us until they convince us to buy every Little Kitty and Bob the Builder trinket? Our own psyches, stirring an odd alchemy of love and ambition for these little folks into a nagging sense that we’re not doing right by them? A competitive nature, threatened by the fact that another’s child might have richer experiences than ours? A religious upbringing and cultural milieu that tend to emphasize the contradictory—or at least paradoxical—goals of simplicity and "taste," identification with the poor and higher education, peoplehood and diversity?

No matter who is responsible, I and other parents are left to figure out workable definitions of what’s best for our children. Can what’s best include limits and deficiencies and even conscious choices to have less than everything we want for them? Can it mean having enough instead of having it all?

Judging from my contradictory hopes, it will have to. And sometimes I find comfort in smallness, limits, and decisions for less. Sometimes I know in my gut that raising a happy and healthy child has little to do with yard or school, friends or toys, and has much to do with kisses and affirmations and bedtime prayers.

So perhaps the question becomes this: Can I be at peace with my children having "enough"?

The day I’m hoping to finish this column, the mail brings a glossy catalogue. Its products, it claims, will give my child "higher scores in school, a competitive edge in the real world, career advantages in our global economy, and a world of personal fulfillment." All this for that diaper-bottomed toddler currently experimenting with how toilet paper tastes?

I’ve learned to toss most such catalogues in the trash—decorating my child’s room in Pottery Barn paraphernalia just doesn’t make it onto my to-do list (or my budget). But this catalogue is selling something I could fall for: videos and tapes that teach your child a second language. A gushing mother testifies: "My daughter, who is now 21 months old . . . has better pronunciation than I do. And I took five years of French!"

Three months older than Sam, I calculate. I feel that familiar, creeping dread that I’m failing if my son can’t conjugate German verbs by the time he’s three. I thought I was immune to this pressure by now; after all, I’ve spent this whole essay analyzing it. I know they’re preying on exactly this sense of inadequacy, counting on it to move through my body, toward my hand, and out into my checkbook.

But analyzing something doesn’t equal freedom from its power, I’m learning. At least for now, however, my checkbook stays in its place.

This small step doesn’t deliver me from perfectionist motherhood. Yet in these vulnerable days of early parenthood, any step away from feelings of inadequacy and toward trust and confidence feels like victory.

—Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is the mother of a toddler son she is not trying to nudge toward perfection as well as assistant editor and columnist for DreamSeeker Magazine.