Weights and Measures

Once a month, my wife measures and weighs our little one to see how she's growing. As of today, the baby is 28 inches long and weighs in at 15.6 pounds. Not too bad for a 10-month-old. Fiftieth percentile, in fact, if the growth charts can be trusted.

Not that I care too much one way or the other. As long as she's not an outlier by more than three standard deviations, and as long as her general health is good, I'm not worried about where she falls on a chart. Unlike some people.

I'm writing this because I've already heard tales of parents eager to compare every dimension of their suckling infant against those of other kids, as if these parents find some sort of validation in where Junior places on a developmental scale. This, I suspect, is where it all begins.

Sad.

I promised myself long ago that any children I had would be allowed to grow and learn at their own pace, that I wouldn't permit outside pressure from other parents to suck them - or me - into some ridiculous competition. I can see how parental insecurity drives comparisons but deep down, I don't get it. You kid's a quarter-inch taller than mine. He got a 98 on a math test in which my child scored a 97. To which I should respond... congratulations?

We are not our kids. If we do our jobs right, they'll fail or succeed on their own terms. Either way, it's little reflection on us. That's not to say I won't share in my child's pride at earning an award or honor sometime in the future. But neither I nor my self-worth will be defined by my child.

The flip side of this phenomenon seems to be resentment. A cousin of mine, when he was about 10, won every end-of-year academic award at his school for his grade, prompting grumbling among other parents that my aunt and uncle had exercised some sort of undue influence on the school staff. My uncle shrugged and said, "he got what he got." And besides, he was ten. Awards won at ten, for better or worse, are meaningless soon thereafter.

When my wife was pregnant, I sometimes wondered how I'd interact with other parents. Deep down, next to the place I store my confusion about how adults confuse themselves with their own children, lies a rather wicked sense of humor. Should I encounter the sort of parents I'm writing about here, I'm kind of afraid that this humor will surface, spreading rumors of non-existent PTA meetings, sharing bogus tips from real friends in the college admissions world, and speaking in whispered awe about some whiz-kid star athlete who just moved to the area and who'll surely be district's sole Harvard acceptance come fall.

Parenthood is a shared bond, and a wonderful one, but no relationships are perfect. I'm actually looking forward to meeting my child's friends' parents. Maybe my fears will be unfounded. Maybe I'll share this blog post and we can all have a good laugh. Or maybe, just maybe, I'll meet That Mom, That Dad, that one parent who lives and dies by every detail in his kid's existence.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll convince him that colleges have started looking at elementary school transcripts to better gauge an applicant's "evolution of maturity" so his little seven-year-old Susie had better get her butt in gear.