Under Pressure

The documentary Race to Nowhere has been making the rounds in our communities, and all around me, parents are tsk-tsking the achievement-obsessed pressures put upon our kids today. In the Silicon Valley, where everyone is hustling to create the Next Big Thing that will Change Life As We Know It, the pressure is even greater as parents try to instill that drive to excel in their children at a very early age.

But it’s not just the kids who live in this pressure cooker. We parents are getting cooked right along with them. When my son started kindergarten, I was immediately approached by the PTA recruitment team, mostly comprised of the wives of the VP’s, CEO’s, and CIO’s that run companies like the one at which I work. They needed room mothers, fund raising task force members, traffic council volunteers (“traffic council” is a fancy word for being a crossing guard in the school parking lot). They’re very lucky that they don’t need to earn a living with jobs that dictate how to spend 10 hours of the day, but I do and their husbands work me to death. I don’t have the energy to work for them, too.

We can’t just sign up our son for Little League, we have to coach, too (they must be strapped for coaches if they’re asking us). And I can’t bring cupcakes for him to share with his classmates on his birthday due to a strict no-sugar policy. Instead, I am supposed to put together a book about his life that I need to present to the class. Really, he’s the one in kindergarten, but I have to do a project?

We get weekly reminders – er, I mean newsletters – to pack healthy lunches, buy organic, support local businesses, recycle, conserve water, compost, participate in school events, read to our children at least 15 minutes every day, sign up for [insert sport here], and (my favorite) slow down and enjoy quality time with our families.

It’s not that I have any issue doing those things, but we can’t just do them. We must perform them at the highest level at all times. And for some reason, even though I believe that I would try to do most of those things on my own anyway, it becomes so stressful when there are external levers driving those behaviors.

Don’t get me wrong. I love where I live. I love the diversity. I love the culture of innovation. I love having my family close. I love having Stanford in my backyard. And I love the weather. I just wish this area came with a safety valve.

Declaring Victory

It's been a little crazy over the last few months, and I haven't had time to properly declare victory over the tiny diapered diva. Yes, after many frustrating months and an EPIC battle of wills, V finally shed her diapers during the day around the start of the year.

If you had asked me back in November, I would have told you V would be wearing diapers all the way to the day she graduates high school. It felt like there was nothing she wanted enough for us to dangle before her as a reward, no punishment scary enough with which to threaten her, no shame too great to inflict on her psyche. She simply wanted nothing to do with the toilet or underpants and that was the end of discussion for her.

(By the by, yes, she does display my mother's stubbornness and temper, aren't I lucky to be sandwiched between them?)

So how did we finally turn the corner? I'm not proud to admit it, but I pretty much had a melt-down in front of her. We had been trying to send her to the potty every hour to get her to pee in the toilet, and I had just returned from such a fruitless journey to the bathroom when she ran back to the play room, defiantly plopped down on the carpet and had a pee of such gargantuan proportions that it completely saturated and defeated her pull-up. So I grabbed the closest thing I could find to soak up the mess, which turned out to be one of her favorite shirts (a coincidence, I swear). And instead of cleaning it up, I threw the shirt at her and made her wipe it up. Then I screamed at her that I was done and I wouldn't be cleaning up her mess anymore, and I couldn't care less if she wore diapers for the rest of her life. I pulled off her wet pull-up, stuck underpants on her because I was too lazy to open a new pack of diapers, then I left to fume.

Probably not one of my finer moments of parenting.

But the next day, she didn't wet her pull-up at all, and the day after she started wearing underpants, and she's had nary an accident since. All in all, my momentary loss of parental dignity was well worth the results. Duh, winning!