Please, Please, Please Stop Bragging About Your Child

I’m at a point in my life when there are a lot of babies, toddlers and children orbiting my social life even though, for the moment, none of them are mine.

Instead there are lots of nieces, nephews, and cousins, lots of friend’s babies and neighbour’s kids and lots of bragging parents.

To be honest, it’s driving me absolutely crazy.

Sure, I get it. Your kid/s are great and you love them to bits. And yes, parenting is hard so the victory lap might feel very deserved, but too many parents spread their praise on too thick, or at the wrong time, leading to more annoyance than amazement.

The only problem is that the world we live in is an over-sharer’s paradise. TMI!!! With social media, you can talk all day long about your perfect spawn, along with pictures and video as proof to their superiority. In a way, the internet has made parenting into a competition, as if it wasn’t stressful enough already. But instead of pushing off the pressure and just getting on with raising their own kids, mums and dads are tripping over themselves to prove that, above all the others, their kid stands victorious.

Too bad it’s not a competition.

Yet we’ve all seen them, and many parents have been them. There’s been bragging about kids who are early developers, who learn faster than their peers, who are always on their behaviour and who never, ever argue with their siblings or their parents. It’s all a fantasy, and everybody knows it!

Your children are not high performing, they are kids. They are not engines to be maintained and detailed, polished and primped for public showing. They are kids. Sometimes they scream in shopping centres. Sometimes, they talk back. Sometimes, they don’t meet the ridiculous expectations that parents and society sets for them. It’s all ok.

What’s not ok is all the bragging. You might like to do it, but in most of its forms, it’s not good for anyone. Parents that brag constantly tend to attract more criticism from their fellow parents, and kids who receive too much praise either feel over-pressured or over-deserving, expecting everything they do to be met with rounds of enthusiastic applause.

When Is It Ok To Brag?

At this point, you might be asking yourself Is it even ok to brag about my child? Well, it might be appropriate in the following circumstances.

1. When You Aren’t Comparing Or One-Upping

One of the biggest issues with bragging parents is that they intentionally or unintentionally use bragging as a way to one-up other parents and children. For example, it’s great when you’ve gotten on top of a challenging parenting problem, but please don’t brag about something that another parent is struggling with.

2. When It’s About Effort

Bragging about effort is a bit different to bragging about accomplishment, and praising effort over achievement is usually a safe way to go. This means if you love talking about your kids, focus on the things they’re passionate about, not how they’re better than everyone else. This means statements like “My kid loves to draw” are great, while “My kid is a child art prodigy” probably aren’t.

3. When There’s Bit Of Balance

When it comes to bragging in a way that doesn’t really annoy people, some parents have it right. According to them, there’s a formula that makes listeners more open to ‘brag-gy’ statements, and it’s all about balance. For every boast that you have for your child, try and follow it up with a few ‘less-than-perfect’ attributes, when those kids aren’t around of course. So you might say that your child is a great reader, but you haven’t managed potty training. That’s balance.

4. When It’s To The Grannies

The only time when bragging is absolutely A-OK, as long as they’re happy to listen, and that’s your child’s grandparents. For the most part, grannies love to hear about the accomplishments, efforts and successes of their grandkids, and it’s nice for them to be able to brag back about their own parenting successes too. When you’ve survived that long, you get a bit more wiggle room.