The Problem with Parents - obnoxiousness of New York City parents - Brief Article

National Review, Nov 20, 2000 by Richard Brookhiser

There is war in New York. Not Mets vs. Yankees, and certainly not Democrats vs. Republicans (Republicans were cleansed long ago). It is the war against parents.

The main front pits parents against the childless. For this contest, parents could hardly have picked a worse field than New York. Biological parents, or at least mothers, are all over the place. Their strollers give Boy Scouts in spirit the opportunity of helping to carry them down into the subways. But most of these parents are wards of the state, therefore not parents in the full sense of assuming responsibility for their families. To the bill-paying combatant they are like native levies who only know how to take scalps, and desert.

Once the indigent have been factored out, the residue faces heavy numerical odds. Only in a monastery or an aircraft carrier could they be worse. New York is Gaylandia, whose spokesmen assure us that a civil union, a picket fence, and an adopted child are the universal goal of every boy and boy; yet a glance into the gyms or the trendier restaurants still reveals a lot of churning gay singles. Then there are the childless by choice-those who have forgone reproduction to devote themselves to making money, writing plays, or staying up til two o'clock in the morning (not getting up at four to give a bottle). Such people are drawn in disproportionate numbers to a city so dedicated to art and mammon that they do not have to justify their predispositions. Finally, there are the undecideds: that vast compound demographic of the ambitious and the distracted, the people who can't pencil in making a decision until February, and the people who are incapable of making one at any time. New York attracts shoals of both.

So see the New York parents, awash in an ocean of the unsympathetic. To do the parents justice, it must be said that they provoke unsympathy by their gross and multiple obnoxiousness. Modern parents assume that wherever there is a hungry infant and a park bench, all that is needed to complete the picture is a naked breast. At feeding time places of public accommodation can look like a page out of National Geographic. The space between aisles in an urban grocery may be measured in Roach Motel widths, but New York parents think nothing of ramming through baby carriages, not the simple strollers of the poor, but infant SUVs with play stations on the roll bars. Come to think of it, real SUVs-the ones that don't belong to drug dealers, anyway-are bought mainly to ferry the little rascals to soccer practice. Parents in conversation lay down layers of boredom and dementia like banks of poison gas. Be honest: There was nothing you wanted more to know than how Trinity School compares with Demiurge Academy, or that little Weenus has learned to recycle. After nine rounds with a parent, I would rather talk about the NBA, or whither cinema.

The boorishness of parents is matched only by that of their children. Monster children have their defenders: "What's a poor kid supposed to do in a restaurant at 9:00 at night?" I don't know, eat? Instead they make repeated trips to the bathroom, whine that the salad isn't ice cream, punch each other, and engage in loud Arafat/Barak negotiations with their overtaxed elders. The kids probably aren't tired at all, just angry at being taken away from their web surfing. New York children in public make pacifist Unitarians wonder where the culture put its birch rods and sermons on Hell.

These are the firefights that run on everyone's internal CNN. But New York parents wage war on a second front, with a deadlier foe. They fight themselves.

Triumphant meritocracy means that every bright, ambitious New York parent (and there is no other kind) is struggling to hoist his children into a few scarce slots. The child's margin of advantage comes from his or her activities, which begin in preschool. German educators taught us to speak of kindergarten. Now we have garten-tilling. The exasperated parent flies from date to date, from karate lesson to kazoo class, anxious lest any chance be missed.

She is right to be anxious. Four years of snobbery, networking, and liberalism at Harvard, Yale, or some other Hogwarts for trial lawyers may not seem like a glittering prize, but securing a place in one really does guarantee success in life-if not the multi-millions earned by geeks in garages, then at least the safety net of membership in the upper middle class, where the game of upward mobility can begin again in the next generation. Success as a parent means raising children who will be able to buy French lessons for their own three- year-olds.

But New York parents also struggle against their own expectations. If they cannot do the best for their children, then they will have failed in their own eyes. Test-takers all their lives, they must submit blue books of love, multiple no-choice tests of their affection. If they don't make every effort, all their warm-heartedness will be negated. If they make every effort, they must have warm hearts.