ladylore
Account Closed
Every Opportunity
DALE HRABI, The Globe and Mail
March 24, 2009
'I have this great fear my kids will be left behind, and I find myself over-functioning and overpaying," says forty-something Janice Paskey, a Calgary college instructor and mom of two boys, 8 and 10.
She's a competitive, whip-smart, self-mocking woman who showed great compassion in 1989 by employing me at the McGill News in Montreal, despite the fact that I showed up at the interview in wide-legged suede pants.
The stresses of recession-era parenting have mellowed Ms. Paskey, whom I called "the killer-girl-next-door," but she's still relentlessly frank.
"If my husband or I lost our jobs, and my kid wanted to sign up for a $1,200 spring hockey program," she says, "I'd borrow the money, I'd take a loan. That makes no objective sense. It's just me, being warped, but I feel an enormous amount of pressure every day."
She's not the only child-rearer who's unravelling. As financial markets shrivel, a similar paranoia has gripped every parent I know (except for one dad who contentedly nibbles artisanal cheeses every night while his wife handles all the irrational-thinking duties).
In The Perfect Baby Handbook: A Guide for Excessively Motivated Parents, I sympathetically satirize this fear that infants will abruptly devolve into hobos if you fail to give them "every opportunity," from Introductory Flamenco classes to an advanced edition of Pat the Bunny known as Pat the Great Gatsby.
Canadian cultural analyst Carl Honor? explores the same phenomenon (somewhat more soberly) in Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting, a book Ms. Paskey recently devoured. "And I stuck with his strategies, too," she says, "for 24 hours."
While Ms. Paskey can still comfortably afford special diving programs and imported enrichment workbooks, more and more would-be flawless parents have had to retrench, often in curious ways.
A cash-strapped Chicago socialite recently served party guests broken discount cookies while hoarding intact ones for her kids, presumably because the sight of biscuit shards can lower test scores.
Mr. Honor?, who currently lives in London, knows a recently downsized woman who took out a new credit card just to pay for her daughter's archery, pottery and ballet lessons, willfully ignoring the fact that the instructors only accept cash.
"It's traumatic for these couples," Mr. Honor? says, "especially when they've decided that their merit as parents is measured by how many extra classes they can give their child. I'm seeing families go through withdrawal and it's like coming off heroin."
Eventually, he says, the cravings taper off: "An unemployed dad told me he woke up one Sunday and realized they had nothing to do, no activities to drive the kids to. 'It was such a relief,' he said. 'I exhaled as if I'd been holding my breath for years.' "
New parents Sara Graham, a thirty-something Toronto installation artist, and her husband Gregory Elgstrand, an unemployed arts administrator, are doing their best to avoid getting addicted. Relative poverty helps, Ms. Graham says. For now, she's taking advantage of free reading programs at the library, unconcerned that baby Samuel might model himself on the homeless bookworms who congregate there, and trying to ignore experts who hint that babies won't amount to anything without classical music courses. (She did, however, systematically play Duke Ellington songs while pregnant, and swears that Samuel wriggles more attentively whenever he hears Villes Ville is the Place, Man.)
"I question a lot of the advice that's being espoused," Ms. Graham says, pointing out that the increasingly narrow definition of parenting success "always comes back to money, getting your child into the right schools and the right career. And I don't equate money with happiness."
Unfortunately, as an artist, she does equate good design with happiness, and her determination to perfect Samuel weakened when she saw the Argington Babylon High Chair, a $200 minimalist model that grows with your child and eventually turns into a magazine rack. "We debated the purchase for five months," she says, "but ultimately it seemed practical."
Sorry, but much of it does come back to money, says Colette Liesen, 48, a Vancouver single mom who teaches gifted math to privileged kids, but is having trouble ensuring that her own tween, Pascale, 10 - the sort of child who spontaneously charts the Tudors' family tree - has a living hamster, let alone a failure-proof future.
"At the beginning of the month, when my paycheque isn't even covering my rent, I tell Pascale, 'Okay, you aren't allowed to be an -er - as in writer, photographer, tree planter. The way to avoid crying at the grocery store is to be an -ologist - dermatologist, ophthalmologist, you know. At 3, she was threatening to become a cocktail waitress."
Conventional wisdom holds that it helps to teach your children the value of currency, especially if your budget's scrawny. That's why Karyn Hodgens, a California educator, and her husband invented KidsSave - computer software that lets children as young as 6 visually track the value of saving their allowance (with compound interest, if you offer it) with graphs that can be projected up to 30 years into the future.
"We created it," she says, "because our seven-year-old, who had a bit of an addictive streak, was spending all his money on Pok?mon cards." Now 14, her offspring has both a paper route and stocks in Chipotle Mexican Grill.
For his part, Mr. Honor? finds the idea that six-year-olds should be staring at computer screens to maximize their allowance, instead of, say, digging up twitchy earthworms, incomprehensible.
"While one of parents' duties is to teach delayed gratification," he says, "this strikes me as the projection of adult mores onto children, another manifestation of a culture that denigrates the simple and the free."
Then again, he says, "parents of my generation are so vulnerable and anxious ... even as I'm talking, I'm thinking, 'Maybe my son needs those graphs!' "
DALE HRABI, The Globe and Mail
March 24, 2009
'I have this great fear my kids will be left behind, and I find myself over-functioning and overpaying," says forty-something Janice Paskey, a Calgary college instructor and mom of two boys, 8 and 10.
She's a competitive, whip-smart, self-mocking woman who showed great compassion in 1989 by employing me at the McGill News in Montreal, despite the fact that I showed up at the interview in wide-legged suede pants.
The stresses of recession-era parenting have mellowed Ms. Paskey, whom I called "the killer-girl-next-door," but she's still relentlessly frank.
"If my husband or I lost our jobs, and my kid wanted to sign up for a $1,200 spring hockey program," she says, "I'd borrow the money, I'd take a loan. That makes no objective sense. It's just me, being warped, but I feel an enormous amount of pressure every day."
She's not the only child-rearer who's unravelling. As financial markets shrivel, a similar paranoia has gripped every parent I know (except for one dad who contentedly nibbles artisanal cheeses every night while his wife handles all the irrational-thinking duties).
In The Perfect Baby Handbook: A Guide for Excessively Motivated Parents, I sympathetically satirize this fear that infants will abruptly devolve into hobos if you fail to give them "every opportunity," from Introductory Flamenco classes to an advanced edition of Pat the Bunny known as Pat the Great Gatsby.
Canadian cultural analyst Carl Honor? explores the same phenomenon (somewhat more soberly) in Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting, a book Ms. Paskey recently devoured. "And I stuck with his strategies, too," she says, "for 24 hours."
While Ms. Paskey can still comfortably afford special diving programs and imported enrichment workbooks, more and more would-be flawless parents have had to retrench, often in curious ways.
A cash-strapped Chicago socialite recently served party guests broken discount cookies while hoarding intact ones for her kids, presumably because the sight of biscuit shards can lower test scores.
Mr. Honor?, who currently lives in London, knows a recently downsized woman who took out a new credit card just to pay for her daughter's archery, pottery and ballet lessons, willfully ignoring the fact that the instructors only accept cash.
"It's traumatic for these couples," Mr. Honor? says, "especially when they've decided that their merit as parents is measured by how many extra classes they can give their child. I'm seeing families go through withdrawal and it's like coming off heroin."
Eventually, he says, the cravings taper off: "An unemployed dad told me he woke up one Sunday and realized they had nothing to do, no activities to drive the kids to. 'It was such a relief,' he said. 'I exhaled as if I'd been holding my breath for years.' "
New parents Sara Graham, a thirty-something Toronto installation artist, and her husband Gregory Elgstrand, an unemployed arts administrator, are doing their best to avoid getting addicted. Relative poverty helps, Ms. Graham says. For now, she's taking advantage of free reading programs at the library, unconcerned that baby Samuel might model himself on the homeless bookworms who congregate there, and trying to ignore experts who hint that babies won't amount to anything without classical music courses. (She did, however, systematically play Duke Ellington songs while pregnant, and swears that Samuel wriggles more attentively whenever he hears Villes Ville is the Place, Man.)
"I question a lot of the advice that's being espoused," Ms. Graham says, pointing out that the increasingly narrow definition of parenting success "always comes back to money, getting your child into the right schools and the right career. And I don't equate money with happiness."
Unfortunately, as an artist, she does equate good design with happiness, and her determination to perfect Samuel weakened when she saw the Argington Babylon High Chair, a $200 minimalist model that grows with your child and eventually turns into a magazine rack. "We debated the purchase for five months," she says, "but ultimately it seemed practical."
Sorry, but much of it does come back to money, says Colette Liesen, 48, a Vancouver single mom who teaches gifted math to privileged kids, but is having trouble ensuring that her own tween, Pascale, 10 - the sort of child who spontaneously charts the Tudors' family tree - has a living hamster, let alone a failure-proof future.
"At the beginning of the month, when my paycheque isn't even covering my rent, I tell Pascale, 'Okay, you aren't allowed to be an -er - as in writer, photographer, tree planter. The way to avoid crying at the grocery store is to be an -ologist - dermatologist, ophthalmologist, you know. At 3, she was threatening to become a cocktail waitress."
Conventional wisdom holds that it helps to teach your children the value of currency, especially if your budget's scrawny. That's why Karyn Hodgens, a California educator, and her husband invented KidsSave - computer software that lets children as young as 6 visually track the value of saving their allowance (with compound interest, if you offer it) with graphs that can be projected up to 30 years into the future.
"We created it," she says, "because our seven-year-old, who had a bit of an addictive streak, was spending all his money on Pok?mon cards." Now 14, her offspring has both a paper route and stocks in Chipotle Mexican Grill.
For his part, Mr. Honor? finds the idea that six-year-olds should be staring at computer screens to maximize their allowance, instead of, say, digging up twitchy earthworms, incomprehensible.
"While one of parents' duties is to teach delayed gratification," he says, "this strikes me as the projection of adult mores onto children, another manifestation of a culture that denigrates the simple and the free."
Then again, he says, "parents of my generation are so vulnerable and anxious ... even as I'm talking, I'm thinking, 'Maybe my son needs those graphs!' "
