Dealing With Super-Competitive Moms

Nine months into being a mom, I haven't felt the competitive nature that's been discussed here so far. The moms I connected with are all super laid-back and very loving toward all the babies in our group--we don't obsess about schools or what we're feeding them. I have to admit that I was a little sensitive when it felt like all everyone would asking me lately was, "oh, she's not crawling yet?", implying that she was late for that milestone. But I attribute that more to my own insecurity than competitive questioning. Maybe I will see it more as she gets older. We live in Silicon Valley where there's a lot of wealth and moms with time on their hands to groom perfect, little children who attend the best Montessori, language classes, world music appreciation, and baby yoga. I have also never seen SO many baby boutiques with insanely expensive clothes--there are over ten I can name off the top of my head (referring to the "where did you get his clothes" comment).

This momversation feels like another rehashing of this cultural construct "mommy wars" that's become a popular soundbite on TV shows and blogs. I wonder if it's doing more harm than good, making it sound like motherhood is just another arena of competition and bitchy women.

Sun, 2009-09-20 23:07

I don't know who you ladies are hangin with, but you need to find new social circles! Or, maybe I'm just oblivious to that behavior?

I have a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old, and I've never felt like other women were being "competitive" when they asked questions about milestones. I know I've been curious about how kids are different, so if I hear my kids do something before another child, I don't feel my family is superior, I just think, "OK, kids aren't all the same." Or if my kids are behind, I have the same reaction=no biggie.

If I ever felt what you ladies described, I would certainly avoid those moms. Life is too short to care!

Mon, 2009-09-21 07:36

Mon, 2009-09-21 10:39

I'm like Heather, I don't deal with them. I belong to a mother's group here where I live and I meet a lot of cool moms who are laid back like me but every once in a while I meet a mom who is asking me if I've already applied to private school for my son? Or what age was he walking by? How much did he weight at birth? Is he talking in full complete sentences yet? Ugh...

Sometimes when i'm at my son's nursery school I listen to the moms talk to each other and I am surprised at how the conversation goes. So much comparing going on it makes my head spin.

I remember being at the end of the year party at the nursery school and standing around with some of the other mothers while the kids played together. My son wasn't talking very much at the time where as the other kids were speaking much more. One mother motioned to Max and asked if he was talking yet? I looked at her and was yeah, can't you hear him? She was like, oh I mean does he speak in complete sentences yet? (My son was just over 2 years at this time) and I said well, not yet but it's coming. And another mom came into the conversation and said that Maw was bilingual (I'm american, his father is french) and that because he had this advantage he will speak later. I didn't disagree. And the mother who asked if my son was speaking in complete sentences responds, oh well my daughter isn't bilingual but at least she can ask me for something if she needs it. Her tone pretty much spelled it out that she took offense to the fact that my son was bilingual.

What can you do? I just ignore it. And try not to get caught up in it. Like Barbasaurus said, Life is too short to care.

Mon, 2009-09-21 10:51

I think I have internalized the competition by now. I do it to myself. Damn them! My son (now almost 17 months) was late with ALL the milestones, and people would say, "Gosh, he is so big, are you sure he's not walking yet?" No, I'm confused, is walking when one moves upright? Yes? Well then no, he's not walking yet. I'm sure. But then I would go home and wonder - is he going to be all OCD like me and not do things till it is done perfectly? Is he going to be late at something big, like reading? What does that mean for kindergarten? It's exhausting. And I find it is insidious - that I (silently, thank God) compare how one kids acts/eats/talks/plays with how mine acts/eats/talks/plays. I have to figure out a way to relax about it and stop the madness or at some point, all that competition is going to transfer down to him. The values these competitive moms are teaching their kids - best clothes, best school, first achiever, wins! - are the values that I worry about most in our culture already. :(

Mon, 2009-09-21 11:00

It all stems from how you were raised. My mother was never a competitive mommy...I understand now why she would shy away from my gymnastics or cheer meetings. Who wants to deal with those kind of moms...not me! We are all different...let's just embrace it. I may be thinner than you but I might not have as much money as you. Who gives a crap! I'm not a perfect mother and neither are you! Know what else bugs me...know it all moms! They act like because they know so much it makes them better mothers. I'm a learn as you go person and I don't know everything...that doesn't mean I'm less capable. All that should matter is if we love our kids and treat them right...but I guess even that could get competitive. I love my kids more than you do yours! LOL. Luckily I don't have to deal with too much competitiveness cause I'm the first of my friends to have kids. But I think we should all just try to help each other out...not put one another down to prove you are the better mommy. No one is better than anyone. We are all human and we have to provide for our children. End of story.

Mon, 2009-09-21 11:25

Mon, 2009-09-21 20:25

As always, awesome topic. This wasn't an issue for us until recently, and I'm already so tired of it. I think there are two camps (but some moms fall into both camps): the materialistic moms and the super moms. And we, similar to Rebecca, are living in an urban area and on a mega budget. And I work. So, I couldn't fall in one of those categories, even if I wanted to. I'm doomed from the start.

It's like, if you get nice Old Navy clothes for your kid, they get designer stuff. If you breastfed for a year, they did it for 2. If you enroll your kid in a music class, theirs is in 3 classes. They've already weaned from the pacifier, they're already walking, the don't spank, they're already blah blah blah. It's so annoying. I could care less what other kids are doing, I'm focused on my own, and I think everyone else should be too.

And I swear, the next mom to ask me what brand my bottles/stroller/kiddo clothes/shoes are and then gives me that quiet, smug, down-the-nose "oh" gets it right in the kisser.

Tue, 2009-09-22 13:03

I have to think that these experiences have something to do with where you live -- maybe in the suburban enclaves of Weeds, all the moms are scheming to outclass one another. Where I live (which is, in its own way, a well-to-do part of a large city), people who ask things like when your kid learned to walk are just trying to calibrate their own expectations, make sure that their kid is still on track, maybe get a sense of the degree to which kids vary. Sure, there are snotty moms, but there are plenty who are just trying to figure it all out, and especially who figure that sharing the experiences along the way helps us all get through. Maybe my outlook is colored by how important a local moms' group (that grew out of a breastfeeding support group) has been to my own survival of the first 18 months, to my definition of "normal variation," to my ability to shrug off critical family members. But I think maybe this super-bitch-mom thing is as much a creation of popular culture as it is a pervasive phenomenon...

Here's hoping I still feel this way once we hit the school and birthday party era! %^)
(and let me say, if the catalogs I get in the mail are any example, I'll have nothing but scorn for the parents who are shelling out the big bucks for their kids clothes! they're toddlers, folks!!)

Wed, 2009-09-23 08:48

My son is almost four and it doesn't seem to stop. Mostly I don't pay attention, but occasionally you do feel it. My most recent competitive mum moment was actually about my new puppy. I had put on my facebook that I was thinking about getting a Cavoodle or a Spoodle or similar. Well. I got all manner of comments about this, including one from a friend who said, "Oh no, Sally, I don't know about spending hundreds of dollars on a crossbreed... My Cavalier King Charles have papers, and the kids love them... blah blah blah." I said, "Dude, I couldn't care less about papers. The thing will be getting the snip. I just want a small dog that doesn't shed."

In the end I got a Lhasa Apso x Poodle x Border Collie that cost me just $350 and he's the cutest little guy in the world! I guess that's my equivalent of saying, "I got it on sale" or "It's a hand-me-down"

On another note, I was a ballet girl growing up, and I remember how competitive the mothers were. Oh my. I always remember thinking, even as a child, "I get why the kid is competing with me, but you're a mother - aren't you too old for this?" I always wanted to have a girl and put her in dancing.I didn't have a girl (yet), but my son now does dancing, swimming and soccer, but I tell you, if it starts getting over-the-top competitive, we're out of there!

Sun, 2009-09-27 20:23

1:43am Stream of conciousness (i.e. brain dump): Someone mentioned that they would see how their strategy of coping with competition and their son would "work out in the long run" and someone else mentioned that "the proof is in the pudding". And a lot of the mom's in the video clips seem extremely aggressive and competitive about being the most non-competetive moms and what I want to know is what IS the finish line? If your child gets into an Ivy league school? If they stay married for 50 years? If they have 1 child, 2, 4, 10 or no children? If they are an Olympic class athelete? If they make x.xmillion/billion/trillion dollars? If they win the nobel/pulitizer/clearinghouse prize? I just watched an episode of "House" the other night where the main character is a genius that has found a cough syrup/vodak cocktail that helps to dumb himself down, so that he can be happy in life and not want to kill himself or others in disgust. Einstein failed his college entrance exams, couldn't get hired as a high school teacher and worked nights in a patent office, he divorced his first wife and his second wife was his first cousin. Sean Connery is a wife beater. In real life, McDreamy married a woman 30 years his senior. Herbert Hoover wore ladies underwear. Kenneth from 30 Rock in an episode says, "I feel as useless as a Mom's college degree." (All this to say these people are successful/brilliant/popular/powerful in some conventional ways and completely outside the norm in others, so what are we valuing?) I've read another book where American and French characters are arguing. The American says, "The problem with the French is that you have no ambition." And the French character replies, "The problem with Americans is that somebody's child has to drive the bus and we want our children to be happy if they end up doing so." So what IS success? In all my years living here and abroad the one thing I have found that everyone else in the world seems to have in common with each other EXCEPT for us Americans is the knowledge that LUCK has a LOT to do with it. Bill Gates probably wouldn't have been Bill Gates if he had been born 2-4 years earlier or later or if his mother hadn't been on the PTA of his middle school or if he hadnt' lived near the University he worked for in high school (read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers to understand why.) And do we value Bill Gates because he's enormously wealthy? smart? entrepernurial? hard-working? philanthropic? If he was bagging groceries at your local store would you look at him twice? think he's a failure? A performance artist in NYC put a suggestion box on the street in Times Square and then published the suggestions in a book and the one that stands out to me most is written by a foreign traveler, "May I suggest that Americans work less on their individuality and more on their humanity?" So your kid can read at 3 - what if your kid is the same one that develops schizophrenia at 17. Your child can walk at 9 months - what if she's pregnant at 14? I'm not making any judgements I'm just sad, discouraged and exhausted by all this perfectionism. Perfectly competetive, perfectly non-competitive, perfectly neutral. You do the best you can with your child and you let go and you won't know if what you did was right until it's too late and there is no too late because no matter what we do they are programmed to rebel to safely individuate from us. If you're toostrict they may turn out wild or wimpy, if you're too lenient they may turn out wild or wimpy. Think about your own childhood and your siblings. I know most people that I've talked to say, "My parents were BLANK with me and BLANK with my sister/brother and they should have done the exact opposite with each of us. I need acceptance. My sister needs a kick in the pants", but maybe if it was the other way around it would still need to be the other way around. But you and your parents can't know that until you're an adult. Watch Top Chef and think of each dish as a child. Each chef is out to win the Grand Prize EVERY time, but sometimes fatigue, a bad knife draw, a bad teammate, something forgotten at the store, a faulty freezer, etc. SOMETHING goes wrong through no fault of the chef's and the chef doesn't win, but it doesn't mean they didn't give it their all. Adolf Hitler wanted to be an artist - what if someone had been kind to him re: his paintings? How different would things have turned out? or would they have? Scientist have done studies that if someone performs an act of kindness, they, the recipient and ANYbody that simply witnesses the act all have endorphins released into their systems and a reduction in stress, so maybe we should all focus on being kind to each other, because you never know how long you have or how much you may need that mom you're being a bitch to at the playground. It's all relative baby.

As Einstein predicted, relativistic effects can also cause clock drift due to time dilation. This is because there is no fixed universal time, time being relative to the observer. Special relativity describes how two clocks held by people in different inertial frames (i.e. moving with respect to each other but not accelerating or decelerating) will each appear to tick more slowly to the other person.

In addition to this, general relativity gives us gravitational time dilation. Briefly, a clock in a higher gravitational field (e.g. closer to a planet) will appear to tick more slowly. People holding these clocks would agree on which clock appeared to be going faster.

Note that it is time itself rather than the function of the clock which is affected. Both effects have been experimentally observed.

Time dilation is of practical importance. For instance, the clocks in GPS satellites experience this effect due to the reduced gravity they experience (making their clocks appear to run more quickly than those on Earth) and must therefore incorporate relativistically corrected calculations when reporting locations to users. If general relativity were not accounted for, the reported location would be off by about 1 km.[1]

Abraham Joshua Heschel:
When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.

On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation
1-800-660-2811
www.actsofkindness.org
DreamWeavers
www.randomactsofkindness.org
Random Acts of Kindness
www.giftofkindness.com

Sun, 2009-11-29 23:33