To find competitive parents annoying

[Pushmeinthepool]

I mean, what exactly is the point in being all competitive and trying to get oneupmanship on other parents?

I met up with a friend yesterday who has a DS the same age as my DS (13 months). The conversation throughout our meeting was peppered with competitive statements from her about her child.

Things such as:

"Oh, so your DS isn't walking yet?? REALLY? Oh dear. X has been walking for ages"

"I can't believe how happy and easily pleased your DS is to just sit there in the buggy. X is just so advanced, no way would he just be happy sitting there doing nothing. He needs stimulation"

"My DS is talking so well, his understanding is fantastic. I bet you can't wait until your DS is at that level"

Now, just to clarify, apart from walking, our DS's are identical in ability and how they behave. I didn't bother to get defensive and say "Actually he can talk" or whatever, because, really what is the point in even going there? It's fine mentioning these things in conversation but not in a way so as to put the other person down.

I've met so many competitive parents over the years since I had DD1 really and I can never quite understand their mentality.

lamp

but I can do better my unborn not even conceived yet child is considering which sport he'll compete at in london 2012

I am absolutely loving the nn Twoshits, and am going to mentally refer to one of my "friends" as this, which will make me less annoyed by her.

Thank you :-)

At 5 I said to my dad "look it up in the OED>" He gave me a gentle clout.

Do you remember a TV series showing the same children at different ages.?

A posh 7 year old said: " I dont know if I prefer the Financial Times or the Telegraph"

you can imagine how a lot of viewers would respond to that.

Mumbar

My other dc passed her English A level before she could talk.

She hopes to be a foreign correspondent when she stops crayoning on the walls and eating her own bogies.

True, Tokyo, he didn't actually define his type of average. I'll let him off then.

I was, of course, a very advanced sort of child at the time... oh yes.

I just find it amusing and don't get drawn in-they will find out eventually that DCs do things differently and life isn't a race. (If it is, they should remember the hare and the tortoise!)

YANBU I am so annoyed that they haven't realised yet my DS's are best at everything so they should keep their traps shut!

"True, Tokyo, he didn't actually define his type of average. I'll let him off then."

The tricky thing is that "average" is usually taken to be "mean" (add 'em all up, divide by the number of them) rather than the more usual "median" (what value divide the group into two equal sized subgroups).

It's not hard to construct distributions where the median is also the minimum, and they actually reflect desirable outcomes for education. Imagine a group of children have reading ages 5,5,5,5,5,5,5,6,7,12. The median of that group is 5, and I think that if they were all five years old we'd account that a good result. But the mean is 6, so 70% of the children are "below average". On the other hand, if the same ten children have reading ages 0,0,5,5,5,5,5,6,7,12 then only 20% of them are "below average" (the mean is now 5), so things have got better, yes? Hang on...

lamp You win and perhaps they could male bogy eating an olympic sport!!

Tokyo, using the magic of statistics like that, most of us can probably boast that our children have a higher than average number of legs.

It's true, too: no one has more than two legs, but a few people have one or none, therefore the average number of legs per person is slightly less than two, and most of us therefore have a higher than average number of legs.

It's a useful example if you want to demonstrate that statistics can prove absolutely anything, even if it's nonsense. Particularly worth remembering when the statistics are being waved around by politicians. (And of course if that kind of statistic keeps a proud parent happy, that's fine too.)

Peter:
Now, Mr. Spiggott, I couldn't help noticing almost at once that you are a one-legged person.
Dudley:
You noticed that?
Peter:
I noticed that, Mr. Spiggott. When you have been in the business as long as I have you come to notice these things almost instinctively. Now, Mr. Spiggott, you, a one-legged man, are applying for the role of Tarzan - a role which, traditionally, involves the use of a two-legged actor.