When I was a child and teen in dance, I had a mother who cared about and who was invested in helping me to progress as much as possible as a dancer. But I did not have a Dance Mom. A Dance Mom goes beyond ally and facilitator and takes on the role of personal coach, agent, and advocate.
Here are a few other typical (but not universal) characteristics of Dance Moms:
- They put their child’s dance career above everything else, including their own careers, lives, and well-being. This includes:
- Making investments of time and of financial resources that they cannot afford;
- Requiring or encouraging similar sacrifice and dedication on behalf of their child.
- They are competitive with other Dance Moms, as well as with the progeny of the other mothers. This includes:
- Attending and watching all the classes, rehearsals and performances that they are allowed to be part of;
- Judging their own child’s progress and performance against that of others;
- Evaluating and critiquing the coach/teacher/rehearsal director in their interactions with their child;
- Reporting back to their child and their teachers with notes for improvement.
- They are Moms and not Dads. This is perhaps due to the fact that access to childhood dance training is typically gendered – many parents put their girls into ballet classes, for example, but their boys into sports training programs.
- They were not high-level professional dancers themselves.
The last bullet point on the list is speculative and not true in every case but it’s my view that high-level professional dancers are more likely to know the harms and limitations of Dance Mom-ing. The benefits of Dance Mom-ing are that this way of being does tend to produce highly advanced young dancers, particularly in the technical sense. The harms, however, include harms to the mother-child (usually mother-daughter) relationship if the child at some point loses interest in dance or who wants to be free of their mother’s control. There is also the harm to the Dance Mom of loss of self-identity apart from her child. If the child gets injured or otherwise rebels and quits, who will she be then? What will have been the purpose of her life, toil, sacrifices?
Professional dancers who are mothers, however, have the following advantages over Dance Moms who did not: 1) They can spot, early on, when their child lacks the aptitude and affinity for a professional career, either physically or in terms of their characters. This means that they can make the appropriate changes and interventions such as introducing the child to alternative life paths, for example. 2) They are better acquainted with the harms of Dance Mom-ing and can be on the lookout to avoid them. 3) They are less prone to the dangers of loss or and sublimation of self into the child because they have had their own fulfilling lives and careers.
In defense of Dance Moms, there is no real education out there (other than trial and error) for parenting a dancer. My own mother was a physician, and she used this knowledge to help me diagnose and treat my injuries. But this also caused the additional burden on her of knowing what the harms were of professional-level dance training without knowing, herself, what kind of alternative dance training was needed to dance more safely. She didn’t know, for example, which injuries were due to improper technique, which to the limitations of my body type, or which to over-use or over-training.
There might be, should be, could be, perhaps, a guide and training for dance parents that is child and parent-child focused. Often advice given to parents by dance teachers is simply how the child is doing in terms of technical and artistic development. Dance teachers are not usually training in child, adolescent, or family psychology – knowing when dance is helping or harming the child or their relationship with their parents. And the child themselves, if they are mired in and passionate about dance and in the danceworld itself with its unforgiving rules and norms are often too young and inexperienced to be able to tell the difference between disappointment due to failure to improve in dance and true lack of fit between dance requirements and an alternative life.
The problem of adolescence, which is particularly true of those whose lives are exclusively bound up in training, discipline, competition and fighting against “laziness,” is that the adolescent has no other experience with which to compare the life they are living. Another life is simply unimaginable.
When your mother cannot envision another life for you either, and fathers often absent themselves from a world that they have little experience with, then the end of a dance life is like jumping or falling off a cliff into the wide unknown.