What's with all the pressure?

Kelly Corrigan’s column, GRAIN OF SALT, appears with permission from The Hills Newspapers and was first published on April 7, 2006.

My town recently voted on a $56 million Ballot Measure to retrofit the schools, in the event of an earthquake. My kids don’t go to school yet but they are close enough that I ought to have an opinion about this. Fortunately, over a slice of pizza one night, I discovered that a couple women I know had spent the week calling voters about Measure E. Hey, I thought, if these friends of mine are willing to call people at home, and risk getting the kind of response unsolicited callers to my home get, that’s good enough for me. Opinion formed.

Later that night, I explained to my husband that I was deferring to friends on Measure E. But, hearing my thin logic out loud made me feel kinda sheepish about it, like I cheated on my homework. Because my husband relishes a debate, he asked me questions like, What if these friends have personal reasons for backing the measure? And what if they just had some windfall that makes the tax payment painless? And what if their kids aren’t going to be upended by the construction? A couple sentences later, we were knee deep in the idea of deferential parenting.

I could probably flabbergast you with a short list of decisions my husband and I have made without a minute of research. For instance, we picked our home based on the reputation of its school district. Rumor has it, it’s a good one. We didn’t go sit in a classroom, or meet a teacher, or even look the school up online at greatschools.org to see how it compares to others. We just plunked down 20% and moved in. And, I should add, we picked this school system when my oldest was just barely talking, so it’d be laughable to suggest that we took her learning styles into consideration. Furthermore, I expect that when it comes time to set an allowance and, later on, a curfew, we’ll probably just average what other families do and call it a day.

What’s the harm in that? From the very first decisions parents make about circumcision and immunizations to some of the last decisions, like dating and curfews, we’re all referring to impromptu polls we take over coffee or chardonnay. For starters, it’s efficient. And I guess it’s not a problem, unless no one is doing the primary research, unless we’re all passing around dusty, half-remembered information, like a spun out game of telephone tag.

And then, in case you thought peer pressure ended at high school keg parties, imagine how annoying and unpopular you’d be if you were on record going against conventional wisdom, even on something as benign as, oh, desserts. Say word gets out that you only give your kids sweets on Saturday nights. You can bet people will talk about it, and roll their eyes as they do. It’s just so quotable – “Kelly Corrigan? Yeah, I know her. Don’t you think she’s kinda over the top? I mean, she only lets her kids have sweets once a week. It’s like, come on, let your kids be kids already. They have the rest of their lives to watch what they eat.”

Underneath the commentary is a longing to be affirmed (“Yeah, you’re right -- that’s nuts!”) and reassured that your way is the right way, or at least a better way. And underneath the longing is the thing that binds us all: the over-powering need to be effective, conscientious parents to these kids we hold so dear.

My first exposure to the competitive undercurrent in parenting revolved around binkies. Ah, how the pacifier debate divides us. I think the maddest I’ve even seen my husband in the past year was when a then-childless woman dismissively blamed our daughter’s laughable overbite on our indulgent binky policy. She’ll see, we said to each other, and then we put all Claire’s binkies in a box and gave them to the “the babies”.

And I have witnessed a perfectly nice cocktail party come apart at the seams as the invitees took sides on the private v. public school debate. In 30 minutes, just about everyone had been offended in some way and was itching to get into the car with their spouse to speak freely and “colorfully” about the other side.

Those heated disagreements are a testament to our commitment as parents. But they’re also a testament to the impact of current culture, which seems to be telling us a thousand different ways how “high the stakes are.” When we were kids, I get the sense that parents didn’t take it so seriously. My mom likes to remind me that my life began inside a body that was metabolizing martinis daily and that didn’t give up smoking until I was 30. “You never had a drop of breast milk,” is another line she pulls out, watching my generation fret over every ounce. “They’ll make forts,” she says when I pine for a backyard.

Maybe it was imago therapy, or Dr. Phil, or that talk show host with the red glasses. I don’t know when the consequences of these parenting decisions started to feel so dire. But I know that when it feels like there’s a lot on the line, anxiety passes between us like the flu and we turn frantically to books, talk shows, and each other, instead of to our gut, where the answers have been all along.