"Playdate" and Other Abominations of the Parental Playbook

I never realized, when I opted to have children, that I would be handed a membership card to an incredibly competitive culture of child-rearing. Those of you who don't have kids now, or do but who haven't been online (or on the right websites) or picked up a book on parenting in the last ten years might not realize this, but it's war out there, and for those who are currently enlisted to fight in it, these are but a few of the battlefronts from which you can choose:

Breastfeeding or Formula? To Circumcise or Not to Circumcise? Spanking or No Spanking? Vaccines or No Vaccines? Electronic Toys or Old-fashioned? Cribs or Family Beds? Attachment Parenting or Babywise? Cloth diapers or Disposables? Television or No Television?

And whichever side you choose, you are fighting for the ultimate objective: The Perfect Child.

What is The Perfect Child, exactly?

That would be one who always says "please and thank you," who will grow up loving his mother and father, be the star of his or her class, go to Harvard on a scholarship, and become a respected member of whatever career he or she chooses (hopefully a doctor). In other words, a child who will validate the choices we agonized over for months and years while raising him, a child who will be the living example of everything we did right, who will be the one that will make us look down our noses at in disgust those who did differently and suffered different outcomes. "Well obviously Johnny is a little miscreant. He was formula fed!"

I can't tell you how many times I've seen examples of such arrogance in fellow parents. These are parents who treat their children like leather-bound day planners in which they write their best intentions, hopes, and dreams. These are people who raise their children not like dynamic, organic human beings, but more like high-performance vehicles. Machines, in other words. Just like a Mercedes Benz requires an oil change every 3000 miles, Johnny requires his allotment of social interaction three times a week in the form of a "playdate."

A friend of mine asked why I abhor that word. Why it makes me want to vomit every time I hear someone use it. I'll break down everything that the word "playdate" implies for me about modern parenthood and the parents who use it:

1. It is a term that brings corporate sloganeering to parenthood. We've replaced "having a beer after work" with "team-building exercise." And now "getting the kids together" has become "playdate." This is because:

2. Given the changing family dynamic with a typical household requiring two working parents, something as simple and free-form as "play" has to be "penciled in." And we had to give it a cute little name like "playdate." Because it's like a date, isn't it? It's a social scenario where parents have to meet and put their assets (in this case, their children) on display like a status symbol, against which their worth as a caregiver will be measured. If little Johnny has a meltdown, then you have failed a little bit, haven't you? Clearly this is a result of you not letting Johnny sleep in your bed. He's expressing his angst at feeling detached from his mother.

3. The use of "playdate" also implies that you wear really high-cut jeans, embroidered vests, and likely drive a mini-van with little soccer stickers on the back. It implies that whatever hotness you once had that attracted your mate to you and got you pregnant in the first place has morphed into a Stepford-like sterility that is devoid of any and all human appeal. It implies that you have become a Mombot, and that your husband will likely be banging his secretary within three years because your vagina feels cold and metallic. Like an unused sink drain. Again, that's what it implies. If you are not a high-waisted jeans wearer with a sink drain vagina and you use the word "playdate" as part of your daily parental vernacular, you are part of a special minority.

But all that aside, I have noticed a trend in parenting, not only during my tenure as one, but also in the years preceding that. At some point, we forgot about our instincts. At some point, we became convinced that whatever we once thought was right was wrong, and we turned to books written by "experts" to show us the way. At some point, we said to ourselves that we weren't good enough or smart enough to figure out on our own whether we should pick up our babies when they cried, and from that point we looked at every choice we made for them the choice between whether we were raising angels or devils.

I stepped off that particular battlefield long ago, when I realized that even the best choices can produce even the worst results, and I don't merely mean bad children. I mean parents who are douchebags.

"The Secret" to Being a Prick

Human beings can be incredibly pathetic creatures. When it comes down to it, we're miserable. We know we're miserable, and we will do next to ANYTHING in order to not be miserable anymore. Those things include (but are not limited to): drinking excessively, abusing drugs, compulsive shopping, compulsive sex, compulsive gambling, lighting things on fire, kicking people in the nuts, primal scream therapy, and finally: clinging to the latest version of recycled self-help mantras that have been on the market for the last thirty years, but have now been modernized to appeal to your attraction to The Da Vinci Code.

What was that last one, you ask? Oh please, like you really NEED to. If none of you have heard of the latest self-help craze The Secret by now, you have probably been too busy being happy of your own accord.

According to the authors of this system, it basically boils down to something like this: If you think about something you want long and hard enough, it will eventually just happen!

Now, I know what some of you are already going to say. "There is nothing wrong with that approach, Allie!" Or some of you die-hard optimists out there are going to tell me that I am being too negative, that I will never get anywhere in life if I don't start thinking more positively about things, and by and large, I will agree with you. But here is my problem with programs that over-sell the concept of positive thinking, and it will be illustrated by a really sucky metahpor that I've come up with basically on the fly:

There are three types of vehicles you can choose to drive through life. One of them is a piece of shit that always breaks down and uses your soul for fuel. Listen to the song "Piece of Shit Car" by Adam Sandler, and you will get what I'm saying. You drive this car, and you begin to resent every other driver on the road for having something better than you.

The next type of vehicle is a luxury land yacht that runs on sunshine, children's laughter, and butterfly kisses. The interior is gingerbread and gumdrops. It makes you so happy, that you pretty much forget about the people in the shitty car, and you turn into a pretentious dickhole.

And then there is the "car" that people drive. It's the middle of the line vehicle that might have a crack or two in the windshield and might stall from time to time, but it will get you where you're going, provided you keep the oil changed, have a decent set of tires, and enough money for good old-fashioned gasoline.

In other words, there is nothing wrong with harboring occasional feelings of negativity, so long as you're still GOING somewhere or DOING something. You have to keep "driving," and remember that although you could be driving the Sunshine Land Yacht of Happiness, things could be considerably worse. You won't get there in the lap of luxury, but you'll get there.

How does this apply to The Secret? For starters, it's ridiculous in the way that it treats the concept of optimism like something that people haven't heard of, and that the Land Yacht is your only option. Second, it presents this idea of "visualizing your goal" as something almost mystic in nature. If you want a 15 carat diamond ring, you need do nothing more than cut out a picture of that ring, hang it up on your refrigerator, and think about it really, really hard. But this doesn't apply to only material things. Got cancer? Paralyzed from the neck down? Forget about that nasty medical crap, and just think positive! According to The Secret, Christopher Reeve was not positive enough, because if he had been, he would have been running the Boston Marathon instead of dying from an infected bedsore.

Think that last sentence sounds bitter? That's called "blaming the victim," a concept that is highly recommend in "The Secret." It goes so far as to advocate not only avoiding negativity, but completely shunning it, because it can seriously interrupt the positive thought process it might take for you to get your shiny red bicycle. Bad things happen to people simply because they weren't thinking positively enough! You must separate yourself from people who are having hardships. Only then will you succeed in claiming what is yours!

In other words, be a detached psychopath, and you will be rich!

And they call this shit a "Secret?"

So what does this boil down to? The Secret is nothing more than a tool to turn people into complete and utter... tools. It insists that you eschew things like reality, empathy, and compassion and turns you into a materialistic asshole whose eyes are focused on nothing more than the self-serving prize.

I think the world has enough of these types of people, don't you?

The only thing that should be shunned is this kind of "program," that at its core is ugly in the most transparent way in its attempts to lure people with the promise of happiness by bringing out what is one of the worst things about human nature: its selfish vanity.

In making you think that you are on the road to happiness, The Secret has done nothing more than encourage you to line the pockets of the only person who is truly benefitting from your transformation into a smilingly deluded imbecile-- Rhonda Byrne, the creator of The Secret.