OPINION: Time for parents to retreat from the cupcake wars
Eileen White Jahn of Rockville Centre is a professor and chairwoman of the business administration department at St. Joseph's College in Patchogue.
The cupcake wars have erupted again, this time in the West Babylon school district. But we're all missing the point in the forbidden baked-goods cacophony. While a ban in schools may curtail childhood obesity, hyperactivity and anaphylaxis, it can also put the brakes on another, perhaps even greater, societal ill: Parental Competitive Disorder.
This syndrome is characterized by escalating, repetitive, irrational behaviors, such as the act of sending cupcakes and related food substances into school for every conceivable occasion. We do it in an effort to make ourselves feel that we are wonderful parents. Each act of culinary generosity must then be topped, setting up a competition in which no one wins.
I have so been there.
Honestly, I don't remember my mother ever sending cupcakes into school for my birthday, but I think I saw it once on a "Leave it to Beaver" rerun. I am no June Cleaver, but once I had kids of my own, I figured if I sent in cupcakes I might feel like her. When I was working too many hours, I could still send elaborate baked goods to school, in an overcompensating attempt to show that I was a Real Mom. During times when I was full-time at home, I'd do the same - to show that I was doing a Real Job.
The problem is that over time, the collective compulsion grows worse. Every little milestone, minor holiday or made-up event becomes an opportunity to conspicuously celebrate in school, showering the whole class with treats.
Over the years, I have watched the mounting competition in horror. Once the in-school birthday cupcakes were de rigueur, we upped the ante to goody bags for every classmate. I understand goody bags at the actual party (which everyone still holds in addition to the in-school celebration), but at school?
The last day before the Christmas-Hanukkah break used to see kids toting home a stack of holiday greeting cards. Now they haul home a Santa sack of culinary cheer. Parents send in candy, cookies and, yes, goody bags to be distributed with each card.
It used to be that the day before the Easter-Passover break, the teacher might have out a bowl of jelly beans. Now parents send in Cadbury Eggs for all. And cupcakes. And goody bags. Are live chicks next?
Valentine's Day once meant a cheap card for each classmate, scrawled with a sloppy signature. But each year, bigger and better pieces of candy started to get taped to them. Last year we got Godiva. Additionally, parents bake and bag heart-shaped cookies for the whole class (and cupcakes, and goody bags . . .).
Don't even get me started on Halloween.
With only so many holidays on the calendar, next we grown-ups started inventing events. Enter "Star of the Week," when each child in the class gets to be celebrated for an entire week. On Friday there's a party, and the parents arrive bearing treats. I've seen a cake with the star's likeness laminated to the top.
I participate in the annual Community Reader Day at my children's school - an opportunity to share a bit about your profession and read to a class. Last year, I was outraged to see the chair of the village planning board giving out brownies to her group! What next? Will the mayor hand out marzipan likenesses of the Village Hall?
Fellow parents, take heed! We are doing our kids no favors here. They don't need our cupcakes or our self-aggrandizing. Let's give them the best, most stable home we can and the best, most loving time we have, and lay off the culinary competition. The food ban is just the school's way of helping us go cold turkey - before we start sending cold turkey in for Thanksgiving to show how health conscious (and wonderful) we are.
