DADWAGON

Seems about right.

From this week’s New Yorker, a funny one:

Congratulations! The application on behalf of your child for a place in the pre-kindergarten class for the 2012-13 academic year at The School has been rejected. This permits you to begin the Type-A Parent Appeal Process. We think of it as just the kind of challenge that makes the type-A parent’s life worth living.

Type-A Parent Appeal Process:

1. Threaten to introduce bedbugs to the pre-kindergarten blankie-storage cubbies if you are not granted an immediate personal interview with the full Board of Trustees.

2. Send money. The School cannot bow to parental pressure, of course, but it will accept cash in exchange for reconsideration of your child’s application.

3. Many type-A parents in your situation have found that blackmailing a School faculty member is a nonviolent attention-getter and has the additional benefit of saving you heavy legal-defense costs if your efforts to gain admission for your child have been accompanied by ethnic slurs, phony claims of physical handicaps, or the forging of the child’s date and country of birth.

File it under Seinfeld’s “it’s funny ’cause it true” rubric. This reminded me of a conversation I had with a neighbor I had the other day, about how to game the system to get JP into pre-kindergarten. Apparently, just filling out the forms and assuming that my child will be placed into the system of public education isn’t enough. Oh, no. I need to haunt the school administrators, demand a seat, cajole, lie, ply with bourbon and promises of heavenly retribution.

Now I’m not criticizing my neighbor. Her daughter got into our local pre-k, after being rejected twice (if you can make heads or tails of the Board of Education’s site on entering pre-k, and can come up with a better word than rejection, I’m all ears), after spending several hundred dollars to secure a spot in a local private school just in case, after waiting until the day before school began to actually get in….to pre-kindergarten.

Type-A is the way to go, right? For whatever reason, I’m not sure I have it in me. I want what’s best for JP, mind you, but the harassment, infighting, and general pushiness required to get things for him is sometimes beyond me.

One of the assumptions built into this New Yorker column is that fighting to put your kid forward in life is part and parcel of rich, entitled living, and maybe it is. But the world I live in, while comfortable compared to some, is hardly elite. And yet you still gotta push. What does that mean? Is middle-class the new privileged? Are the prerogatives of the upper crust open to all? I think not. It just means that parenting in this society has become, like so many things in our culture, a zero-sum game that you can’t really win. Not every child gets to go to Harvard (or in my case. P.S. 321).

I have no defined answers as to what to do about all this, other than screw up my nerve and start calling the principal every day until he lets JP in. If it doesn’t work, who knows what I’ll do. Certainly not what The New Yorker recommends:

If The School’s Final Verdict Is “No”

1. Check to insure that the applicant is in fact your natural child. Even wealthy parents have been surprised—and relieved—to discover that the babe sleeping peacefully in the nursery has been masquerading as legitimate kin when in medical fact he or she is an impostor.

2. Put your child up for adoption by a better family in order to improve his or her chances for acceptance.

3. Adopt a replacement child from a superior gene pool.