Mommy bloggers (and their daddy counterparts, too) agree about almost nothing. Some favor co-sleeping; others do not. Some favor banning video games; others do not. Similar disputes surround breast-feeding, vaccines, cursing and whether it’s OK to force-feed your child broccoli.
But a rare consensus has emerged on at least one topic: That parents should stop bragging about their children.
Apparently you have the right to remain silent — and I have the right not to hear about — how your daughter learned to read at 16 months, your son scored 12 goals in the soccer game and your darling got into Brown, his first choice! (All these examples were taken from actual anti-bragging diatribes.)
Consider these recent headlines. BabyCenter: “I Hate Hearing About Your Gifted Child.” Cafe Mom: “8 Most Ridiculous Things Moms Brag About.” Yahoo! Voices: “Are You Sick of Being One-Upped by Fellow Moms?” Berkeley Parents Network: “My Friends’ Saintly Kids.”
I get the annoyance. A friend of my wife’s once boasted about her daughter’s high Apgar score. But I’ve also heard plenty of brags that seemed not only justified, but downright heartwarming: the tone-deaf parent marveling at a child who can sing; the parent who never went to college proud that a child got a scholarship; the harried mother of three grateful that an older sibling is acting sweet toward a newborn.
So why has this otherwise minor corner of family life elicited such strong feelings? Part of it may be that we live in an era with more activities, therefore more chances for scores, ribbons and gold stars. Also, with Facebook, Twitter and the like, there are more outlets for showing off. “Let me just snap a picture of that trophy you got for taking your first poop!”
The time seems ripe for a truce in the bragging wars. I set out to devise some guidelines for acceptable chest-thumping.
1 Brag about how good a child you have, not how good a parent you are. Adriana Trigiani, the best-selling author of Big Stone Gap and The Shoemaker’s Wife, says, “I’ve noticed when parents brag, it’s usually a reflection of their wonderful parenting skills and not their child’s natural abilities. When I see people like Donald Trump on TV taking full credit for how his children turned out, that’s the kind of bragging that gets under people’s skin.”
2 Brag about effort, not accomplishment — one of the signature parenting ideas of the last few years, which applies equally well to boasting. Brad Meltzer, who wrote The Fifth Assassin and two nonfiction books about children, says he doesn’t mind if parents talk about their children’s passions. “If you say, ‘My kid loves reading,’ that’s OK,” he said. “If you say, ‘My kid is the best reader in his grade,’ I start the hate machine.”
3 Brag in context. Meltzer says he generally doesn’t mind if parents brag, but “I want to hear the bragging in the context of real, gritty, poopy life. If you’re trying to sell me your perfect life, the hate machine starts humming again.”
4 Follow “the bragging formula.” Another common piece of advice — each time you criticize someone, you should give multiple compliments — applies equally well in reverse. Each boast about a child should come surrounded by three negatives: My son is on the honor roll (but still wets his bed).
Laura Zigman, the best-selling author of Animal Husbandry and Her, says she welcomes such a formula but is concerned that even this might end up being boastful. As she wrote in an email, “My son got an A+ in Sanskrit … but he still can’t write his name in Mandarin!! #dummy!” or “His room is so messy he’s going to discover new particles of matter in it someday! #MIT-bound.”
5 Don’t brag about something everyone else struggles with. Zigman says she doesn’t want to hear that you’ve nailed some child-rearing problem she hasn’t. “I don’t want to know what ‘healthy eaters’ your kids are,” she said, “unless you’re posting photos of your kids stuffing their faces with Cheetos and Oreos. If you post photos or updates of how much they love kale chips — for real — I will hide you from my feed.”
6 If you must do it, get it over quickly. Ian Frazier, the author of The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days, says he usually doesn’t mind when parents discuss their children. “The pleasure you take in something your kid does is greater than the pleasure in something you do yourself,” he said. But after a while, “my eye starts to droop.” Parents need to heed such warning signs, he said.
7 Avoid double bragging. Zigman says parents are also not allowed to use their children’s lives to draw attention to their own past glories: “Don’t brag about taking your kids on college tours if they’re tours of Ivy League schools and if you yourself went to an Ivy League school. That’s a double brag.” (“Was so weird to be back in Cambridge with my teenage son this weekend! Past and present colliding!”)
8 Bragging to Granny is not just acceptable, it’s desirable. Meltzer says: “There is, of course, the Grandparent Exception. You can brag all you want to the child’s own grandparents. And grandparents can — and will — brag back. This isn’t a choice. It’s nature.”
9 But even such intrafamily bragging has pitfalls. Trigiani, who has six siblings, said that when speaking to her mother, she is careful to compliment her own daughter, Lucia, only after doing the same to all of her nieces and nephews. Trigiani calls it “bundle bragging” — “You bundle brag when you don’t want to trump.”
As a parent, I find the unspoken reason this topic elicits such passion is that the same feeling underlies both the braggers and the anti-braggers: fear.
Most parents are quietly petrified that we don’t know what we’re doing or, worse, that we’re doing something ruinously wrong. If there is to be a truce in the bragging wars, it’s because both sides want the same thing: reassurance that they’re doing a passable job at something that’s very hard.