The Competitive Other Dads

There is a dad at the school gate — I will call him Toby because that is genuinely his name and he will not read this — who mentions his son's reading level in conversation the way other people mention the weather. Not maliciously. Not even, I think, consciously. It is simply his ambient condition: the knowledge that his son, who is five, is reading at a level beyond his years, and the need for this to be known.

Last week Toby mentioned, in a conversation that had begun about parking, that his son had read a chapter book. It was a smooth transition. I will give him that.

The landscape

Competitive parenting is not new. It is probably as old as parents, who have presumably been comparing their children's developmental progress since the species had developmental progress to compare. What is newer is the visibility of it — the social media layer that turns the private pride of a parent into a broadcast, and that makes the normal variance of child development look, from outside, like a performance metric.

I am not immune to this. I have checked where Ellie sits relative to her class. I have done it while knowing it is not a useful thing to do and doing it anyway, because the instinct is present regardless of the intellectual position I have taken on it.

What I have found is that the competitive comparison produces an emotion that is specific and unpleasant: a brief spike of either satisfaction (if she is doing well relative to the comparison point) or anxiety (if she is not), neither of which has any bearing on her actual wellbeing or on what I should actually be doing. It is a scoreboard that doesn't correspond to the game I am trying to play.

The particular thing about being an older parent

I wrote about the school gate and the unexpected freedom that comes with not having much left to prove. That freedom, I want to clarify, is mostly genuine. I care less than Toby, probably, about the external metrics.

But I do care about something adjacent: I care that Ellie is okay. I care that she is developing, and engaged, and building the foundations for a relationship with learning that will carry her. And caring about this means I am not entirely free from the comparison instinct — it is just that the comparison I am running is less about status and more about whether I am doing enough.

The reading piece addresses this directly. The anxiety I had about Ellie's reading pace was not primarily about how she compared to Toby's son. It was about whether she was all right. These are different anxieties, though they can look similar from outside.

What I actually think about Toby

I think Toby is proud of his son and has not entirely figured out how to express pride without it becoming information he needs to share. This is a forgivable condition. I have done versions of it myself.

I also think Toby is probably anxious about something — his son's future, his own performance as a parent, the ambient pressure of a culture that turns children into measures of adult success — and the chapter-book mentions are a way of managing that anxiety by gathering confirmation that things are going well.

This is a thing I understand. I manage my anxiety about my children differently, by writing about it at length on the internet, which is arguably less boring at the school gate but no less a way of processing the underlying thing.

The comparison I have decided to stop making

I have decided, with moderate success, to stop running the comparison against other children and run it against a different reference point: against Ellie-last-month, Ellie-last-term, Ellie-last-year. The rate of her own change is a more useful measure than her position relative to Toby's son, and it is also a more accurate one, because I have much better data.

By this measure she is doing extremely well. She is more curious, more verbal, more confident, more capable than she was six months ago, in ways that are specific and observable and that have nothing to do with whether she has read a chapter book.

Toby's son may also be doing extremely well by his own measure. I hope he is. I genuinely do.

I also hope the parking situation gets resolved. It has been a problem for three weeks.