Children as Status Symbols

Listened to this lovely story on NPR about how having four children — and being able to send them to expensive private schools, hire consultants for potty training and teaching them to ride bicycles and buy fancy vehicles in which to transport them — is a symbol of status in some communities. I tried to keep it in mind as I sent my husband off to San Francisco for a conference on Linux, and spent the day trying to pack and ready the house so I could take my little status symbols camping for five days and not come home to a house where my feet stick to the floor from those same status symbols pouring their own orange juice. I tried to keep it in mind when I found myself having a full scale temper tantrum because the older status symbols wouldn’t put down their electronic babysitters when asked politely and put away their own laundry or interact with the younger s.s.’s so I could turn my back and not find that the younger s.s.’s had dumped the laundry I had just folded in preparation for packing all over the floor so that they could run around with the laundry baskets on their backs like turtles or slide down the stairs in the laundry baskets or do whatever other wonderful creative things you never see kids in Pottery Barn Kids catalogues doing with playdoh up their noses and so on. Remember when you could carry around a ridiculous little dog in a handbag as a status symbol? I am having fantasies with rhinestone collars.

I’ll see you sometime early next week when I’ve recovered from camping.