Brief thoughts on paternity: on parental vanity

Parents often agonise about their children’s schooling and extracurricular activities — spending a long time researching schools, straining their budgets to afford private schools or tutors, signing kids up to clubs, pushing them to do more, earlier.

All these things are fine in themselves; I’m not one of those people who think children should be ‘left to be children’, and not be encouraged to develop their skills early. Children will surprise you with their ability to learn things before you’d think they can — if anything, my advice to parents is to raise your expectations of what kids are capable of.

But I think parents need to reflect on their motivation for doing all the above. I believe the reason many tiger-parents do all these things is to satisfy their own vanity. Which is not to say they do things that are harmful to their kids’ wellbeing — despite everything that’s written about kids being too stressed, I’ve never met anyone who’s regretted the skills they learnt early in life.

However, I have two concerns with parents whose decisions on their kids’ upbringing is guided by what (they think (in their heart of hearts)) will reflect better on themselves. The first is that the things they are pushing the kids into will not satisfy their vanity. Unfortunately, it’s more than probable that it’ll have the opposite effect. If you send your kids to an elite private school, their peers (and their parents) will be richer, or will come from older money, or will be better-travelled, or will be better students, or will speak more languages. Similarly with extracurriculars — there’ll always be a better tennis player or violinist or chess grandmaster. If vanity is the reason for signing up for children for all these things, I’m afraid in most cases your vanity will come out bruised.

Second, motivated reasoning leads to bias and to rationalising bad decisions. Private school and lots of extracurriculars might well be what’s best for your child (and in general, they are) — but they might not; and if your real goal is not what’s best for your particular child, you are likely to make wrong choices. Perhaps the benefits of a more diverse state school would outweigh those of a more academic education for your child; perhaps your child is more into (and better suited to) martial arts than a more genteel activity (or, if your bias goes the other way and you want to raise a bad-ass, perhaps it turns out your child is more into ballet than krav maga).

(Lest all this comes across as sanctimonious rather than self-reflective (it is in fact both), I should say I am keenly aware of vanity (the desire for pride in my children) as a motive for some of the things I impose on my children. And I’m aware of my ability to rationalise the choices I make as being the right choices regardless — ‘it’s easier to learn to ski as a child!’. I can only hope that my awareness of my own vanity helps reduce any biased thinking, even if by a little.)