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Dad’s Corner
PUT DOWN THAT SHARPIE!

By: Justin P. McCarthy   |  March 23, 2023

So much has been said on parenting: A Google search for the word turns up more than 2,510,000,000 hits--and that’s just in English! It can be as surprising to find that something hasn’t been written yet as to encounter a fresh perspective worth reading.

 

Lots of people have lots to say --and loads of advice for anyone willing to listen--but there’s plenty of room for improvement in how we talk about parenting. Rearing children and guiding them toward the happiest lives possible is as integral to being human as breathing, eating or drinking, yet outside of university classrooms we consistently describe the experience with inadequate, divisive and strikingly un-colorful terms.

 

Filter your ideas through a faulty lexicon, and you’re bound to have a faulty conversation. If, as the anthropologist Franz Boas observed^[1] early in the Twentieth Century, the Inuit could have a meaningfully nuanced multitude of words for snow and related ideas; what’s to stop us from working a bit more creativity and precision into how we think and talk about one of the most important things any of us can ever do?

 

Consider our stereotypes. Parenting stereotypes are everywhere, and everywhere they are flawed: they separate parents instead of bringing us together; they facilitate our tendency to categorize others into broad types and discourage us from looking for individuality and humanity; they are so broadly open to interpretation that they’re often functionally irrelevant for describing actual people.

 

We're all familiar with different “types” of parents: the stressed, sleepless mom juggling pick-ups, drops-offs, grocery shopping and a million other odds and ends; the well-meaning, inept dad, often distracted by work and good for the occasional Little League sideline cheer, but not much else; the overbearing parent hell-bent on forcing (did I say "forcing?" I meant "guiding!") her children along the proper path to her definition of success; the snowplow parent; the helicopter parent and his counterpart, the satellite.

 

Many parenting writers are masters at this kind of sifting and sorting--at identifying what parents do wrong, how we differ, how the things we do bother one another, how some of us might be useful to others, despite our (wink, wink) flaws. Take these perfectly well-intentioned examples from a TODAY.com story:^[2]

 

The LBD Mom: "Like your favorite...Little Black Dress, you can always rely on these moms...You love them because they’re so helpful and you wish you could bring them with you everywhere."

 

The Bag of Chips Mom: "She had one child and it was so good she just had to have a bunch more. Just like a bag of chips, she holds everything together, even though her life is chaotic and things can be a tad messy."

 

The Birkenstock Mom: “This mom takes everything in stride. She's laid back…Her family eats organic (always) and she believes there’s nothing breast milk can’t cure…She's a good mom and doesn’t care how she looks to other people.”

 

The SUV Mom: "[T]he one who unapologetically pushes her double stroller down the sidewalk and grocery store aisles…and is totally nonplussed when her kid has a temper tantrum in public...Got something to say about it?"

 

Reading these—each one clever but none careful—I want to make a meme: Something like “COMPASSION: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!” where someone smiles and helps a fallen friend up with one hand while using the other to Insta a quick photo with a caption like “LOLZ! Learn 2 walk dummy!"

 

It’s not that we don’t all know people who might “fit” these and other stereotypes. It’s not that they’re necessarily all that far off in describing certain aspects of some people’s personalities. It’s not even that they’re (too) cynical, offensive or vitriolic.

 

It’s that the availability of each of these and other seemingly innocuous clichés–perhaps coupled with a chronic lack of sleep and a fierce competition for our limited cognitive resources–encourages us to fit the parents we meet inside them--and then leave them there. Once we’ve assigned someone to a particular type, we’re inclined to discount new information^[3] we learn about her which might not line up with the type. It becomes hard to imagine the Birkenstock Mom having a bad day, the SUV Mom volunteering for…anything, the LBD Mom being too stressed or busy to help plan the school party. It becomes hard not to trivialize the Bag of Chips Mom’s family planning choices.

 

We all share a nearly irresistible, hardwired inclination to stereotype. It’s a basic part of the brain’s information processing machinery (if you have a few hours to spare, start at wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype and just keep clicking—fascinating stuff!).

 

The trouble is, we’re not so good at assessing the quality or usefulness of a particular stereotype before we apply it, and we’re even worse at unseating one once we’ve begun using it. If first impressions are sketched in dry-erase marker, entrenched stereotypes are too often written in Sharpie.

 

Pair those peccadilloes with every writer’s impulse to be witty and eye-grabby, and you have a recipe for the broad, persistent adoption of imperfect,^[4] under-thought stereotypes.^[5]

 

So, how to resist? How to stop missing out on the chance to know other parents—and all other people—better, to judge them less?

• Become aware of the stereotypes you use.
• Identify the worst stereotypes you use and stop using them.
• Assess new stereotypes before adopting them.
• If you feel inclined to stereotype someone you’ve recently met, try to get to know him better, first.
• Be deliberate and conscientious about transmitting stereotypes to others–especially your children!

Stereotypes are just one example of how the words we choose shape the ideas we communicate as meaningfully as any underlying facts. They are convenient labels, often clever and seldom careful.

 

While I’ve learned not to weigh forty three years of cognition too heavily against millions of years of evolution, I’ve also regularly witnessed my brain’s heuristic shortcuts doing more harm than good. Now, when I label others—and when I model labeling behavior to my children—I do so deliberately, and I don’t use a Sharpie.

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^[1] https://wapo.st/3wuuqA5

^[2] https://on.today.com/3WzEjah

^[3] https://bit.ly/3XELuze

^[4] https://bit.ly/3XURaVJ

^[5] https://bit.ly/400y5Do

 

 

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