A growing intensity of family life virtually forces adults to take more of their meaning from their home and their children. Everyone knows that both mothers and fathers are working more hours and feeling very stressed (and loaded with guilt, too). While parents seldom have free time to play—they go to the movies less, for example—or to socialize with other adults, the job of meeting their emotional needs has fallen on their kids. Take the case of children's summer camps and programs, which once served the important function of defusing family pressures on kids. For decades, well-off parents have sent adolescents abroad for a month or two of study, exploration and some independence. But responding to adults' requests to get in on the fun, some teen tours now allow the parents to join their offspring for part of the trip.
What Are Kids For?
In agricultural societies, there is an overt economic relationship between parents and children, and it's based on reciprocity. Parents provide food and shelter; kids contribute labor and the promise of care in old age. But in modern societies, kids seldom take on the burden of caring for elderly parents, so there's no economic payoff. Parents shell out lots of money for education, iPods and other gear. What do the children do in return? Why even have them?
Because, increasingly, what they supply are psychological rewards. "More and more, parents have come to be identified with their kids," reports sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom. She and Boston College colleagues David A. Karp and Paul S. Gray have conducted an in-depth study of the college application process among upper-middle-class families. One of the questions they've pondered is why parents pay for college. After all, it's extremely expensive and money deployed on their children can't be spent on themselves or socked away for fast-approaching retirement. But, the researchers found, financial open handedness makes perfect sense—if the kids are perceived as pure extensions of the parents. To a surprising degree, the researchers discovered, the parents' "identities and aspirations are wrapped up in the achievements of their children."
Further, paying for college is the way the class system replicates itself. "It's clear to upper-middle-class parents that education is the way for kids to maintain their social status. The parents are increasingly aware of the competition; there is the perception that the stakes are high. It's not necessarily this way throughout the class structure. For other classes, college is the ticket to upward mobility."
Resumes On Two Legs
"We treat children as projects, as things to be helped and shaped and pushed and prodded," says Mintz. "It's the sense that I am going to create a resume on two legs." Parents have always dreamed of perfection, but it used to be a very surface thing—posture, strict feeding schedules. Now, he says, perfection is defined so exclusively in terms of achievement that no other path to adulthood is acceptable. As he laments in Huck's Raft, there's no room for "odysseys of self-discovery outside the goal-driven, overstructured realities of contemporary childhood."
The pursuit of perfection in kids stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the task of parenting, Anderegg charges. "Parenting is not an engineering task, it's an endurance task. It requires a high tolerance for boredom. Engineering is based on the idea that if you do something right the first time, you don't have to do it again."
Efficiency, however, is inimical to child-rearing. "Parenting is a problem to be solved daily. It's a repetitive, quotidian task," says Anderegg. That's what maximizes parent-child interaction and persuades kids they are loved. "Seeing kids as well-designed products is a disease of really smart people," he notes. "They feel they have to make child-rearing a task worthy of their time."
It may be that people insert professional values in parenting because they are so well rewarded for them at work. Indeed, mothers are more highly educated than ever, and because they are waiting longer to have their babies, many are well-entrenched in careers. It's understandable that they would want to bring home what they know—setting long-range goals, keeping complex schedules, managing divisions and running things efficiently. Anderegg cites a mom who, clipboard in hand, stood at the door of the kindergarten as her child entered. She was taking notes, she said, because she wanted her child to get into an Ivy League school and she needed to make suggestions to the teachers on how to improve her child's education.
Ironically, the incredible shrinking family almost demands the encroachment of professional values on parenting. Today, about one in five children under the age of 18 is an only child, and "the fewer kids you have, the more precious they become and the more risk-averse you get," explains Anderegg, who chronicles the rise of parental anxiety in Worried All the Time. The more kids you have, the more you understand that each has his own temperament—and that your contribution is not the only thing influencing developmental outcomes.
It's bad enough that there are now many for whom parenting has become a profession. But for some it has become a religion. "It's the only source of transcendent meaning in their lives," observes Anderegg. "That fuels hysteria, encouraging parents to exaggerate the dangers facing kids and competition for resources."
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