Honey, I Smothered the Kids: A Case for an Uncompromised Life

So this week's NY Times Magazine is dubbed "the college issue," wherein different articles take a look at everything from the admissions process to how campus life and postmodern 'studenthood' have changed, to the encroachment of capitalism and competition on higher education at the expense of, well, higher education.

There's this one story about two or three kids applying to colleges, some needing full tuition to go at all, and some just hoping to clang the bell with their academic sledgehammers and get in to a good school. At any rate, college admission has become a full-time moonlighting gig for all of them, piled up on top of the day job of AP classes, perfect SAT scores, and oh yeah, working on that novel they started at Interlochen two summers ago. As you'd imagine, the climaxes are Olympic. The agony of rejection from Princeton; the thrill of a seemingly random Dartmouth victory when some other girl with better test scores gets turned away.

Quarterbacking the whole Herculean tournament is the hyperconscientious parent. The suppertime consultations start in 10th grade ("raise your hand once a day in that class, sweetie, so you can hit the teacher up next year for a recommendation") and give way to a veritable war room by the start of senior year. Dining-room tables disappear under stacks of file folders. Application sessions drag on until 3 a.m., with parents handling all of the project management from deadline reminders to daily task lists (like completing the nth application with time to spare before dawn to work on the prize-winning Halloween costume).

Sure, applying to college has become a morass. In the ugly struggle among schools to manipulate their rankings, a lot rides on trawling for more and more applicants to reject. Students are the dazed victims here, even as they covet campuses with flashy 'curb appeal' and concierge desks designed (and paid for with all that sky-high tuition) to attract them in the first place. It's hard to read about people killing themselves to play along with the seemingly impossible game. It's not unlike the insanity of finding and keeping decent health insurance. I'm always hoping the insanity will give way any second to full-scale consumer mutiny, and I'm in. Got my poison pen and canned goods ready.

Meanwhile, where are these parents finding all this time? As if the 24-hour suicide watch on toddlers weren't enough, parenting has now become a full-blown cottage industry with endless job assignments, the Parent/Agent/Manager/Scout/Publicist/Decorator/Life Coach. Grooming kids on the farm team to get to the show, coaching them on all the plays so they get a shot at a first-round draft pick. Then what?

And I'm not talking about the kids. They're going off to college to get on with their overachieving lives, or to overturn them maybe, and they'll either come out ahead or have their parents to blame if they tank. And what are these parents going to do with themselves? The big yucky question nobody wants to answer. I guess you could argue that some parents are fairly well-developed in the important personal and interpersonal ways, and that they'll snap back into their original selves once the kids are out of the house, and find something compelling to do. But what I see more of is a sort of self-abnegating focus on kids' lives as the most important element of the family, at the expense of vibrant marriages and, probably, happy kids. If there's a way they could turn all those acquired fussing skills into something marketable, though, I'm buying. At my stage of life now, with the stakes higher than ever, what I really want more than anything is a set of parents like that to help me out. But as a kid....there's at least five kinds of sick about your mother getting more upset than you do over your rejection letters. Or your parents doing all your strategizing for you while they also run the household, cart you around town and clean up after you. And you people out there ghost-writing those admissions essays, you know who you are. You're all busted.

Maybe I'm just jealous and resentful because I had the kind of parents who refused to sign up for the overparenting trap. They saddled us with housework, made us do our own lunch and laundry and figure out our own rides to theater practice and speech tournaments. If we weren't prepared at school or left our lunch at home, we took the hit and self-corrected pretty quickly. We made our own Halloween costumes out of posterboard and clothes we found in the attics of rent houses we lived in. My parents rarely interfered with Real Life on our behalf, which pretty much kept them out of our business too. With no one to take the fall we had to decide what kind of people we intended to be. In the meantime, they included us in who they were -- working parents who had their own dreams, friends, interests and problems, and who sometimes weren't available to us because of those. So with more deliberation than I give them credit for, they raised me to be independent, not comfortable. They taught us to manage by not doing it for us, and to my knowledge they suffered no guilt. Inadvertently maybe, they supplied us with enough deprivation to cultivate things in us like gratitude, respect, stamina and mindfulness. Oh, and creative problem solving. They taught us to survive; the achievement part was largely up to us, and though we didn't do as well as we might have with more "help," at least we knew the credit was entirely ours. I like to think the survival skills gave me the audacity to pursue an uncompromised life that interests me. It takes more guts, I confess, than I'd really planned on. Did we all turn out just perfectly and beautiful and Hollywood? God, no. But we've had an adventure. Everyone got a turn to shine. We all have interesting stories to tell. It was never dull.

So go ahead, slack off. Drink beer and play canasta once in a while and let your kids figure it out on their own. Sure they'll resent you later -- for having more fun than they did, not for micromanaging their time. Make those little rascals responsible for their own happiness. My parents were fond of a card game they called Three-Toed Jesus. Doesn't that sound like a party waiting to happen?

At Princeton they have some advice for concerned parents at freshman orientation. Don't call here, they warn, worrying about whether your children are doing OK or not. If they aren't smart enough to solve their own problems, they don't belong here.

Canasta, anyone?

Posted by Thelma, a frequent parent stunt double