Suburban Turmoil
I’m on all fours in a roomful of strangers, growling and pawing the ground.
“Grrrr! I’m a tiger!” I say unconvincingly to my 2-year-old daughter, who is watching me from a corner.
She gives me a look that says, Actually, you’re an embarrassing excuse for a mom, and frowns. Stuck amid a traffic jam created by six other “tiger” moms crawling around me, I realize that I’ve hit rock bottom.
That’s how this story ends. It began when Baby was just a few months old.
“Have you signed her up for Gymboree yet?” my friend Kim asked. “Those classes really help with early development skills,” she said. “Amelia has been going since she was 2 weeks old.”
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
A week later, my friend Susan informed me that her 6-week-old was also earning credits toward his baby degree.
“I’ve enrolled Terrence in Kindermusik,” she told me. “You really should bring Baby. They say it’s crucial to develop tonal appreciation as early as possible.”
“I thought you were taking him to baby sign language classes,” I said.
“Those are on Tuesdays,” Susan said patiently. “Kindermusik is on Thursdays.”
I looked over at my baby, gurgling in her bouncer, and wondered what these mommies were smoking. The way I saw it, I could either sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and wave toys in her face at home, free of charge, or I could spend a few hundred dollars to do it in a room full of tiny, drooling germ carriers. And so for a long time, I refused to take Baby to anything that wasn’t free or at least dirt cheap, earning myself a reputation among my friends as the Stay-at-Home-Scrooge of Early Childhood Development.
But by the time Baby turned 2, the stakes were even higher. In addition to Kindermusik ($135 for five weeks, plus a $35 registration fee) and Gymboree classes ($60 per month, with a three-month minimum), Baby could start training with the Nashville School of Ballet ($295 per semester) or join a recreational soccer league ($80 per season, two seasons per year). At this point, nearly every mom I knew had signed her toddler up for something. As the lone holdout, I started worrying that my anti-curriculum crusade would turn Baby into a half-wit, intellectually starved on a meager diet of library books, Play-Doh, Nick Drake CDs and trips to the playground. What if I was making a huge mistake? What if she really needed a psychologist-approved set of activities that would have her throwing plastic balls into a barrel under the supervision of an Austin Peay dropout?
So I decided to take her to a few sample classes and determine whether they were really worth the Benjamins. That’s how Baby and I ended up at the local mall’s Gymboree play center, ready to mix it up with Bellevue’s best and brightest (under-3 division). Although only one other mom and toddler showed up for the class, I wasn’t fazed.
Trouble was, Baby was off somewhere in the back of the playroom, more interested in the slides and rocking horses than the day’s lesson on circles. It wasn’t long before the other toddler abandoned the class too, choosing instead to follow Baby around the room.
“I hate classes like this,” the teacher said several times as she guided the other mom and me in thumping tubes on the ground and holding a parachute over our heads while singing and marching in a circle. From time to time, shoppers in the mall would stop and stare at us through the play center’s plate glass windows. I tried to hide behind my hair, but one guy took video of us on his camera phone, anyway. I could already picture the YouTube headline: “And You Thought Your Life Was Lame.”
It took me a few weeks to recover before I gathered the resolve to try one more class. A few of my friends had kids enrolled in The Music Playhouse. (At $150 for 10 weeks, you could call it the cheap-ass version of Kindermusik.) Although eight toddlers filled the room this time, we moms still ended up doing the activities mostly on our own while our kids stumbled around the room in confusion. After pretending to be a tiger for a while, I ended up playing the caboose in a train full of mommies, all shouting “Woo, woo!” each time the instructor blew her special whistle.
As I said. Rock bottom.
In desperation, I fired off an email about the whole thing to parenting guru John Rosemond ( rosemond.com ), a fiery advocate of what he calls “traditional parenting.” He wrote back saying that the toddler teaching trend is one of his “favorite rants,” claiming the classes were mostly a way for moms to feel good about themselves.
“The implicit understanding,” he wrote, “[is] that the mom who has her kid in the most ‘enrichment’ activities at the earliest age is, of course, the best mom on the block and perhaps the best mom ever in the history of time and space!”
I was starting to like this guy. But unfortunately, he had some bad news for me.
“In part, this is how women make friends these days,” Rosemond explained. “Therefore, to pull one’s kid out of these silly programs is to risk not just a loss of social opportunities, but downright rejection. Who wants to associate with a loser?”
I guess I’m about to find out.