Call Off the Baby Race

Some time back, a feature on All Things Considered described the frenzied competition for entrance to the best academic institutions. The institutions in question were pre-kindergartens. One woman whose three-year-old had been interviewed (!?) but rejected said "it was like a death in the family." Given the soaring suicide rate of teenagers--more than tripled in the last 20 years--she may have been more accurate than she knew. Jules Feiffer recently savaged the Baby Race with a cartoon series in which a three-year-old recounts his failures and closes by saying, "My parents were considering adoption."

The pre-kindergarten frenzy is only one example of the Baby Race. Psychologists investigating what babies know and when they know it often unwittingly provide such anabolics--we know, for example, that if a pregnant woman reads "The Cat in the Hat" out loud twice a day, her baby will prefer that story to another read by a different voice. Can we start the Baby Race in the womb? The comic strip Cathy lampooned such efforts, suggesting in the process that they are commonplace.

Even though it fits our national psyche, many people are uncomfortable with the phrase the Baby Race. The questions I get--what is the best public school in X county, does the Montessori method grow a superior product; should I fork out for an SAT coaching school--are invariably couched in the context, and often the exact words, "I want to give my child any advantage I can." The parents want desperately to believe that they are doing all of this in the child's best interest. (For parents who can't afford the engines of the Baby Race, we devise a social program called, naturally enough, Head Start.")

The notion that parents might be doing all of this not in the interest of the child--and feeling guilty about it has been eagerly grabbed by advertisers for a whole new set of guilt-trip ads. Daddy buys Xerox office equipment so he can get home to his daughter's birthday party; a TV mommy talks about the nutritional quality of ready-made soup so a harried mommy won't feel guilty about opening a can.

But the desire to give any advantage to a kid, even to plan for a child, may backfire. Sociologists note that parents have higher expectations for planned children and live more vicariously through the planned child's successes. But what happens if the kid doesn't "turn out right?" What if, after you've given them every possible advantage, the kids choose something other than what you had in mind? We got an idea of the irrational anger that can produce in the '60s. Whatever did the hippies do to produce such rage in their elders? They rejected life-styles and value systems their parents had planned for them.) A study in one major metropolitan area found that 91 percent of all abused children had been planned.

The idea that if Johnny can't read by age three he's lost (and there is evidence that many can wait until age 8 without harm), coupled with the prevalence of television and its relaxed standards of morality have had a dramatic unanticipated outcome: the Baby Race is eliminating babies, or at least children. This outcome is reflected in many books such as Neil Postman's the Disappearance of Childhood, Marie Winn's Childhood Without Children, and David Elkind's The Hurried Child, to name but three.

Of course, our babies don't have to have a childhood. Childhood is a rather recent invention. Prior to the 17th century, there were no special clothes for children, no special institutions, toys or language. Children were largely ignored until around age 7. When it then appear that they actually had some chance of living long enough to become adults, they were treated as such. Maybe our tendency to abandon children's clothes and put them in miniature dress-for-success garb is simply our way of returning to an earlier time. Somehow, I don't think so.

The above are is excerpted from an essay of the same title published in Style Weekly (Richmond, Virginia) almost exactly 20 years ago. Thinking about the increased competition for "the best" preschools, the ever earlier onset of menstruation in girls, the "academization" of kindergarten, and the generally over-scheduled kids of today, it looks like the only thing that has changed in those 20 years is that we've moved to warp speed.