Photo by D Sharon Pruitt, flickr
But the pressure to always be working is hard to resist, even when it comes to my kid. And the fact that my kid tends to forget stuff that doesn’t engage him… well, maybe I should prepare a few summer lesson plans, just in case.
On the other hand, perhaps I should declare an unschooling summer, more impressive-sounding than “we’re not doing anything this summer.” Because really, that’s what my kid wants–a few months to do nothing. In reality, that means skateboarding, tracking weather, building stuff from random wood scraps. The kind of activities that produce new knowledge and great summer memories, but whose benefits aren’t measured by standardized tests.
How’s your summer shaping up?
Does ordinary equal boring? According to my five year-old, no.
Trying to help her get over an extreme case of bedtime giggles last night, I suggested she think about something boring in her life. Surely she had some boring moments she could reflect on.
Was preschool ever boring, I asked?
No.
How about home? After all, we don’t fill every minute of our kids’ lives with enrichment or entertainment.
No, my daughter answered. In fact, she said this, almost sounding like she was complaining: “There’s nothing in my life that is boring.”
Since she didn’t have any boring thoughts to fall back on, my daughter got to sit up with me and watch The Daily Show, followed by a very boring home improvement show that finally did the trick.
A friend of mine, one of those friends who has cats not kids, recently said to me: “You know what? You’ve become a martyr mom.”
She wasn’t being mean at all. She and I had recently gotten back in touch, and she was merely reflecting on who I used to be, before the never-ending obsessions about school, activities, enrichment and all that other kid-stuff took over. And she was right.
That’s the cruel irony with me — even as I defend my kid’s right to be just ordinary, not some high-achieving wunderkind, I fall so easily into the perfect-mommy-trap myself.
I don’t demand perfection yet I want my kid’s life to be perfect, giving him access to every possible opportunity out there. I dont’ pressure him to max out his potential, yet I beat myself up at the notion that I may be shortchanging that potential.
So I’ve decided to refocus some of my attention on myself, allowing myself to become more of an ordinary mom, perhaps even a slacker mom. Like the mom I met not so long ago at a school open house who couldn’t tell me much about her daughter’s classroom beyond this: “I drop her off in the morning, pick her up in the afternoon, and she seems happy. That’s good enough for me.”
Newsweek’s March 30th issue includes an article that gave me pause. “Generation Diva: How Our Obsession with Beauty is Changing Our Kids” looks at the trend toward younger and younger girls doing spa days, skin treatments and even plastic surgery.
The article begins with a provocative account of a mom applying self-tanner to a 2 year-old beauty pageant contestant. “Marleigh is one of many pageant girls on the show, egged on by obsessive mothers who train their tots to strut and swagger, flip their hair and pout their lips,” the writer explains, before drawing a parallel to a Brooklyn spa specializing in the tween and younger crowd. Then the writer drops this bomb:
Sounds extreme? Maybe. But this, my friends, is the new normal: a generation that primps and dyes and pulls and shapes, younger and with more vigor. Girls today are salon vets before they enter elementary school. Forget having mom trim your bangs, fourth graders are in the market for lush $50 haircuts; by the time they hit high school, $150 highlights are standard. Five-year-olds have spa days and pedicure parties. And instead of shaving their legs the old-fashioned way—with a 99-cent drugstore razor—teens get laser hair removal, the most common cosmetic procedure of that age group. If these trends continue, by the time your tween hits the Botox years, she’ll have spent thousands on the beauty treatments once reserved for the “Beverly Hills, 90210″ set, not junior highs in Madison, Wis.
I found this picture of the new “normal” a bit hard to swallow, and decided to ask my own in-house 11 year-old experts–my son and nephew. They attend very different schools with different demographics, yet both of them could name only one girl they knew who fit Newsweek’s description of “normal.” In fact, when I read the paragraph above to my nephew, he replied “bullshit” without missing a beat. Cursing is normal for 11 year-old boys, as far as I can tell.
On the other hand, there are spas for kids here in the Pacific NW and those beauty-obsessed reality shows litter the TV landscape everywhere, so somebody must be buying into the trend.
(And I won’t touch the seeming contradiction that even as kids are supposedly becoming more image-obsessed, they are simultaneously becoming fatter and more sedentary, if we are to believe the medical experts.)
But what happens when ordinary becomes ugly, and perfect is normal? And are we, as parents, to blame? Newsweek certainly suggests that in the title, “How Our Obsession… is Changing Our Kids” (emphasis mine).
What is an “ordinary kid?” I’ve been kicking that question around as I build this blog.
After all, an ordinary kid in rural Oklahoma isn’t going to be the same as an ordinary kid in lower Manhattan. I ran headfirst into that reality many years ago, when I transitioned from my small-town childhood to a prestigious private college filled with privileged East Coast kids.
I struggle with it today, too, as a mom. From technological changes to the global challenges, our kids inhabit a very different environment, even if they’re playing in the same streets and attending the same schools that we once did. Sometimes I wonder how much childhood itself has changed in the past 20 years.
However, when I talk about ordinary kids, I imagine these defining characteristics:
Do you agree with my list? What would you add?
