Family and parenting: Why parents compete behind their children's backs

Anyone with children - and even many who don't - knows a competitive parent.

Some parents flaunt their children's cognitive or scholastic achievements.

Others parade their offspring's extracurricular activities or "help" them attract the attention of influential "gatekeepers" in their lives.

At best, competitive parenting leads to the overworked parent standing on the sidelines of soccer matches.

At its worst, competitive parenting can manifest itself in races to reach developmental milestones and wars of shame over packed snacks at home.

Yet despite the ubiquity of this phenomenon, surprisingly few theories thoroughly explain what motivates competitive parenting.

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One theory is that it's because of our need to validate our own worth as parents by "proving" that we're "good enough."

The study found that insecurity led teenage mothers to compete to provide material goods for their children.

Other commentators point out that unfettered consumerism or the environment of social networks reinforce and normalize this type of behavior.

But the results of a recent study shed further light on the imperatives driving this phenomenon, both in the case of mothers and fathers.

Researchers argue that competitive parenting may be a coping mechanism for individuals who are responding to feeling threatened or incompetent in other areas of life.

For example, when we feel threatened in one area, such as our work roles, we may want to advance that position through another area, such as parenting.

This is known as "status switching" - and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

It is useful to have various branches of life that influence the perception of our own success, experts say.

But understanding how status switching can affect some examples of our behavior, including competitive parenting, can potentially help us not fixate on just one area of ​​life in order to gain a sense of self-worth.

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The best parent in the world!

"In today's hyper-competitive and interconnected environment, upward social comparison is inevitable," says Anat Kinan, associate professor of marketing at Boston University's Questrom School of Business and author of a recently published study.

"Individuals often respond to status threats by shifting to areas where they can highlight their own achievements and feel superior."

In one of their experiments to test this theory, Keenan and her co-authors Dafna Gor and Nailya Ordabaeva studied the behavior of parents.

The researchers recruited 502 employed parents and divided them into two groups: "at-risk" and "not-at-risk" groups.

Both groups read material that said they were planning to go to their graduation anniversary and hypothetically read a newsletter informing them of where their former classmates were today.

Then, in the "state of danger" group, the participants read in the newsletter that one of their former friends from the department was declared the most successful businessman of the year.

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The participants were then shown two phone cases that they should imagine wearing on their anniversary: ​​'The best job in the world! Congratulations on your success!' and 'The best mom/dad in the world! I am very happy that you are my mom/dad!'.

They were asked to rate how they would feel about their lives if they showed any of those phone cases on their anniversary.

The disadvantaged group rated the 'best parent' phone case more highly, preferring to emphasize parenting achievements rather than work, in a context where one of their former classmates had already been named the best businessman of the year.

In other words, they felt that switching status with the help of a 'world's best parent' phone case would be a more effective way to regain their status than trying to highlight their own work achievements.

Of course, this "switch" doesn't just apply to parenting.

Keenan explains that we cling to areas such as morality, spirituality and unique non-vocational experiences such as racing, participating in extreme sports or visiting exotic travel destinations to signal our own status and enhance our sense of self-affirmation.

As part of the same study that investigated this status-switching phenomenon, researchers also analyzed 113 bumper stickers on 97 cars parked around the Crans-Montana golf course, one of the largest and most luxurious resorts in Switzerland.

They hypothesized that while owners of luxury cars might signal their status by driving conspicuously expensive cars, owners of more common vehicles might want to find more alternative ways to express their status, potentially through car decals.

In accordance with their hypothesis, sticker analysis showed that 83,6 percent of owners of ordinary vehicles signaled status in areas of alternative wealth, in contrast to only 35 percent of owners of luxury cars.

Stickers on more ordinary vehicles concerned extreme sports (such as paragliding or wrestling), sporting achievements via the well-known 26,2 sticker for marathon runners, exotic holiday destinations, famous events such as the football World Cup.

There were also music festivals or spirituality and themed family stickers, including children's names and even a "baby in the car" sticker.

Stickers on luxury cars generally signaled success in fields associated with wealth such as golf.

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"Important Identity"

Kinan believes that these conclusions reflect our tendency to substitute one form of status for another, as we strive for success in multiple areas.

Then again, given that there are different options when people want to "switch status", why is parenting the area that people emphasize so often?

According to Kinan, the answer lies in our beliefs about compensation between domains.

We tend to believe that gaining status in one area comes at a price in another, she explains, such as business success coming at the cost of close family relationships.

With her co-authors, she discovered that the most frequently expressed beliefs were "that status and wealth are associated with sacrifices and costs in family life, social life or personal relationships".

And when areas of our lives such as wealth or career become threatened, we are most likely to switch to some other area that we have already set as an automatic price for them, like two sides of the same coin.

As far as parenting is concerned, this "switching" requires a more competitive and emphatic response because of how deeply we experience this role of ours.

"Parenting is an identity that parents have, they want to highlight it and be rewarded for it," American psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer explain to the BBC.

"Moreover, it may be the most salient and important identity for many people."

This agrees with the findings of our research.

Keenan explains that the switch of status to parenthood in the case of the phone mask study was a phenomenon observed across genders equally.

In the end, "it all came down to whether you see parenthood as a central part of your identity and self-view," she says.

The more centrally we identify with our role as parents, the more likely we are to resort to flaunting our parenting accomplishments as a means of transferring status.

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"Switching Between Life Areas"

All in all, the status shift that encourages competitive parenting is not a completely negative phenomenon.

As Keenan reassures me, my Best Mom in My Class and Best Teacher in the World mugs at home don't necessarily mean I feel threatened or incompetent in either.

Moreover, a bit of status switching in our daily lives might even be healthy.

While bragging is never desired or recommended, it can be helpful to remind ourselves that "there is more than one way to feel successful, and there are alternative ways to fulfill one's need for status," Keenan says.

"It's not a bad idea to remind yourself of your other roles and the things you care about. Overall, status switching is a healthy psychological mechanism to be flexible in how you define your success."

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The key is not to define success too narrowly or fixate on just one area of ​​life, as this creates an extremely competitive atmosphere.

And just as transitioning into parenting can help relieve the stress of competing in other areas, transitioning from parenting to other areas is vital to maintaining a healthy relationship with your children.

After all, too much competitive parenting is linked to destroyed friendships among adults and increased stress among children.

In order to prevent everything from spiraling out of control, a more fluid view of oneself is necessary.

"Our ability to move between life domains reflects the complex and multidimensional lives we lead and the different kinds of hats we wear every day," Keenan says.

"Fortunately, this complexity can protect us from the stress of upward social comparison and encourage a healthier, less one-dimensional view of ourselves by helping us draw confidence from multiple areas at once."