Colman Noctor: Competitive parenting serves no one and puts pressure on parents and kids

Dr Colman Noctor: "Perhaps all we can do is take a deep breath, ask ourselves what matters, and step out of the race. You cannot lose if you are not playing the game"

When I was getting married 15 years ago, an older friend said to me, ‘Being married is easy — it's the becoming a parent bit you have got to worry about’.  In hindsight, he had a point.

It’s a privilege to be a parent, and raising children is a deeply rewarding experience. However, parenting is hard and seems more difficult now than it was for past generations. 

Getting my three children to their three separate activities on Wednesday evenings is a logistical nightmare.  By contrast, when I was growing up in the 1980s, very few ‘extra-curricular activities’ existed, so ferrying children was not an issue. 

Other differences include the birthday party circuit, which was far more low-key and inexpensive than it is now. Also, the school tour to the soft drinks factory was a lot more manageable than going skiing in France for a week, which seems par for the course in recent years. 

According to ALDI Ireland’s Mammies and Daddies report launched last week, 61% of mothers and 42% of fathers surveyed find meeting societal standards of good parenting challenging.

The study of 500 parents of children under 12 aimed to understand the economic, emotional, and societal impact of being a parent today. Its findings provide interesting insights into the pressures of modern-day parenting.

A key theme of the report was how parents perceive their value and worth, how they deem the family unit values them, and how they feel society values their role.

The concept of parents being uber-conscious of their performance seems to be growing in significance. For many, the pressure to appear they are ‘winning’ at parenting is real. Being constantly bombarded by information about how successful other parents’ children are is a constant reminder not to ‘drop the ball’ if you want to raise successful children.

That our children’s success reflects our parenting skills is a pressure many parents feel. Whether it is comparing how so and so’s child won a judo competition at age eight, while your nine-year-old still wears Velcro shoes or watching another child outshine yours on the football field and feeling it’s because you don’t practice enough with your son, the avenues for parental guilt are almost at every turn. Even the most chilled parent feels the pressure of competition at some point.

Pressure points for parents

The pressure we feel as parents is passed down to our children, whether it’s getting them to master tying their laces or encouraging them to attend grinds to improve their grades.

This transfer of pressure from society to parent to child is a major contributor to childhood anxiety. While we often blame the mental health crisis our children are facing on too much time spent on screens and social media, parents' using social media to compare their children’s successes is also a contributing factor.

Producing ‘successful children’ is challenging enough, but when you also have to squeeze in time for career development, self-care, and regular date nights with your partner, it’s even tougher. Not only do you have to be in contention for parent of the year, but you also need to thrive at work and have an impressive lifestyle.

The Mammies and Daddies report also found several pressure points for parents, including maintaining a work-life balance, managing the financial pressures of running a household, demands on their relationship, and the emotional stresses and strains of daily parenting.

Trying to do it all is exhausting, but it seems a necessary evil if you are to survive parenting in the 2020s. 

Almost two-thirds of parents in the study (65%) say that becoming a parent has had a negative impact on their finances, with both mums and dads experiencing this to more or less the same degree.

 The endless requests for money for school events, new shoes, mobile phone top-ups, Roblox and a monthly trip to replace lost gumshields and shin pads all add up, not to mention the big hits that come at Christmas, summer holidays — and school supplies for a new term. 

Health toll of parenthood

Apart from financial pressure and competitive parenting, many of the parents surveyed said the time they have for maintaining their physical and mental health has been drastically cut since becoming parents, with more than half (55%) saying their physical health has gotten worse since becoming parents. Strikingly, 63% of these are women, which points to the disproportionate toll parenthood often takes on them.

Overall, this report's findings highlight parents' varying degrees of difficulty, with only 4% saying they measured up to society’s definition of good parenting. 

Without minimising the challenge of contemporary parenting, especially given we're negotiating the ever-shifting sands of the technology landscape, I wonder if we have overcomplicated it. The pressure parents experience and the societal standard we hold ourselves up to are created by us. 

Of course, we want our children to do well. But what benchmark are we using? It seems the bar is rising all the time, and perhaps it is parents who are fuelling that trend.

Whenever we share stories of our children’s successes, we put pressure on other parents. While I doubt this is our intention, it is an unfortunate side effect.

Children's birthday parties are a barometer for this societal pressure. As soon as you plan to have a more extravagant event than the last party your child attended or when you buy extra sweets to ensure the party bags the children go home with are not smaller than the previous party they attended, you are participating in the parental competition game. Perhaps this pressure to compete is not with the desire to outdo any other parent, but rather it is fuelled by a fear of being ‘outdone’.

I don’t have a solution for parental competition. I had hoped with the experience of pandemic lockdowns, we would have had an insight into the futility of these material things and focused more on creating experiences, connections and memories, but that does not seem to be the case. 

We seem to have picked up exactly where we left off. But perhaps all we can do is take a deep breath, ask ourselves what matters, and step out of the race. You cannot lose if you are not playing the game. 

 While my children might complain that they did not have the most impressive birthdays growing up, hopefully, they will appreciate the fond memories of having a dad who was a little less mentally stressed, financially pressured, and physically and mentally exhausted.

• Dr Colman Noctor is a child psychotherapist