don't knock it till you try it: expecting brilliance from your child

Billboards have really been getting me worked up lately. For example, a pro-life advertisement in my neighborhood recently caught my eye. The billboard in question featured a grainy snapshot of a toddler on a sled. The "don't get an abortion" message? "Your child could grow up to be an Olympic bobsledder!!!"

This pretty neatly sums up what I hate about that striving, desperate brand of parent who observes some normal, everyday kid thing and immediately equates it with future impressive achievements. Your daughter grabbed a wooden spoon and waved it around? Obviously she's a budding gourmet who will one day run her own farm-to-table restaurant! Your son clocked another kid at the playground? The next Muhammad Ali, no doubt!

I suppose some of these pronouncements are meant to be humorous, but I still think they betray an underlying anxiety about the pronouncer's child. Just under the surface of "mommy's little neurosurgeon" is the possibility that the kid will be disappointingly normal--a clerk at Home Depot, perhaps.

Recently some people came over to my house for lunch. My daughter (just over one year old) was in attendance, and one of my guests entertained her for awhile by encouraging her to drop some coins into a cup. She became quite adept at placing the coins in the cup. I was so proud! "My baby's gonna grow up to work on an assembly line!" I exclaimed.

Although I thought this was a hilarious joke, I later learned that one of my guests did not agree. Evidently he thought that I really was afraid that Lydia would grow up to work on an assembly line due to the putting-things-in-cups skills she was developing that day. Perhaps we weren't encouraging her cognitive development as aggressively as we should have been? Maybe some baby sign language could have been incorporated?

I'm trying to imagine being part of the intended audience for that pro-life billboard--pregnant, not so sure I wanted to be pregnant, weighing the options. But then, the sudden realization: "If I keep this baby, he or she very well might grow up to have some kind of impressive profession or skill that could reflect positively on me!"

Because isn't that the whole reason to have kids? If people knew the truth--that their cute baby would one day turn into a teenager who would take hallucinogens and climb under the Lake Street bridge, then get depressed and graduate from an expensive liberal arts college in preparation for a job as a receptionist a community newspaper--I imagine more ladies would be checking the correct placement of their diaphragms.