"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.