Parents Using College Acceptances to Compete

TheGFG
Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:44:47 +0000

Your last paragraph, 3girls3cats, is a nice encapsulation of one distinction between bragging and sharing. It’s kind of like the difference between getting an invitation to a home sales party from a friend, versus from a casual acquaintance who hasn’t ever shown much interest in you before. If the only time you hear from that person is when she’s selling something, the invitation has a different feel to it.

That said, I used to think that sharing the bad and good equally, or sharing bad stuff more often than good, would offer me some protection from parent competition and jealousy. For example, my youngest has many disabilities and I’ve been very open about them. I wrongly assumed people would be more generous in being happy for my other child’s success knowing my younger one will be unlikely to succeed in traditional ways. It didn’t work that way. So again, I think there are people who will be jealous no matter what and we should be careful putting the blame on the “sharer.”