A funny thing happened en route to the ass-kicking I was about to deliver my kid at the climbing gym. Ass-kicking? Definitely. Let me backtrack a bit\u201d\u00a6<\/p>\n
One thing I abhor, even as a bourgeois, overindulgent parent, is the idea of letting my 9-year-old daughter beat me at stuff. When we play against one another, I\u2019m in it to win. I\u2019m not going to mysteriously fade out the last 10 yards of an 100-yard sprint, or flail about in the deep end before she reaches the side of the swimming pool before me.<\/p>\n
I hate seeing parents condescend to their kids this way. It\u2019s demeaning to a kid who\u2019s doing her best to beat you, and it\u2019s also often a lame-ass kind of passive-aggressive cop-out on the part of the parent. (Who hasn\u2019t seen a dad racing his kid at the park, only to lose steam you can tell by the red face and humid-looking bald pate and pass it off as a jovial\u00a0 \u201dGood race! You really beat me, son!\u201d aka, I let you win.)<\/p>\n
In any case, while handicaps are fine \u201d\u201d hey, they do it at the race tracks losing on purpose is not.<\/p>\n
In other words, having your ass kicked by mom is a positive thing. It shows my child that I take her seriously enough to not condescend to her, and she learns that her mom\u2019s not a washout, either.<\/p>\n
After all, why should a third grader beat her mom at a foot race? \u201dWow, Speedy, you\u2019re faster than me, even though my legs are longer than yours, I work out four times a week, and I just took my Ventolin!\u201d Lame. Pardon the ablest pun.<\/p>\n
And why should a 36-year-old play Scrabble like a 9-year-old? That would make me borderline illiterate, right? What kid respects a university-educated mom who can\u2019t spell at a junior-grade school level?<\/p>\n
And, long-term development-wise, here\u2019s the thing. Girls and women compete over popularity, guys, high-visibility internship placements, jobs\u201d\u00a6. Unfortunately, it often leads to bitterness and cattiness in our culture.<\/p>\n
Even the mother-daughter relationship has been historically been painted with shades of unhealthy competition. The maternal fear of being overshadowed by a daughter\u2019s burgeoning beauty and independence drives every frickin\u2019 fairy tale in our canon: Cinderella, Snow White et al. (Many tales originally featured evil moms, not stepmoms, until the latter hired better PR.)<\/p>\n
I think daughters benefit from friendly competition, by moms and well as peers. Friends compete. Someone gets their ass kicked. Afterwards you share beer and wings (or 2% milk and pizza). It\u2019s no biggie.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the messed up thing, though. I was blindly confident that I\u2019d keep winning until my kid was 11 or 12, but something changed when she turned 9. She was always athletic, but now, it\u2019s like she\u2019s on a secret diet of multihued, vitamin-rich fruit, veg, dark chocolate (for the polyphenols, obvs<\/em>) and protein shakes.<\/p>\n Her biceps are like raw baking potatoes. Her abs have that line in the middle that Shape<\/em> magazine models boast (or get Photoshopped in). She can climb like a spider monkey. She takes my breath away with her athleticism when she\u2019s making her way up a climb that I can\u2019t even fathom starting, let alone finishing.<\/p>\n We recently joined a climbing gym. I\u2019m stuck in the baby climbs, 5.7\u2019s. But my child is now muscling through 5.9\u2019s, after just three weeks! To give you an idea of that level of progress, it\u2019s my goal for three months from now.<\/em><\/p>\n