All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (14 page)

Yet Marta couldn’t envision a world in which she
didn’t
do all these things. When I asked her why she was holding herself to such a high standard (all on a modest budget, and all while working full-time), she no more understood the question than if I’d asked why she was breathing.

The following day, I met her friend Chrissy Snider, another woman on “The Committee.” Chrissy stays home with her four kids, and she too told me she was “on a sabbatical year,” though she still held positions on the church council and child ministry team. I asked about her kids’ extracurricular schedules. Here was her response, transcribed verbatim:

Eddie will do two sports this summer. And he’ll have stuff during the day—swimming five days a week for five weeks. And he’ll have an art class too, but they’re with his older brothers, so I only have one drop-off. But then he’ll have T-ball and soccer, which are going to be a different schedule than Henry, who’s on traveling soccer and rec league baseball, and Ian, who’s just in rec league baseball. And then they both have tutoring for reading. Henry does piano and cello. He does cello at school, and he does private piano lessons. And he’s weighing which one, because it’s a financial thing, unless we win the lottery. He wants to do both, because this is his niche. And Ian does violin. That’s at school, but I have to be at his lessons, because it’s Suzuki.

Her youngest, Megan, was not yet old enough for extracurriculars. She was only two.

Neither of these women is flush with means. Their kids go to public schools. Chrissy and her husband and four children live in a 1,300-square-foot house—not exactly a palace. Each extracurricular choice they make means forfeiting some other pleasure. (Several times during our conversation, Marta mentioned the high cost of date nights with her husband, between the babysitting and the evening activity itself.) But this is what they do. It’s what other parents around them do. It’s also what they
read
they should be doing—this is what happens when you raise children amid the dust rings of the information age. “I read, ‘Girls who do sports are less likely to do drugs or get pregnant,’ ” said Marta, “and my response was,
Oh no, if she doesn’t do soccer at four, she’ll never do a team sport.
”

It took a while for it to occur to her that perhaps it didn’t matter, that her daughter would be just fine.

the rise of the useless child

Today most middle-class parents take for granted that Marta’s and Chrissy’s way is the natural way. As far as children are concerned, there is no such thing as excess. If improving their children’s lives means running themselves ragged—and
thinking
themselves ragged—then so be it. Parents will do it. Their children deserve nothing less.

Yet adults did not always take this indulgent view of children. Before the nineteenth century, they were distinctly unsentimental about them, regarding childhood “as a time of deficiency and incompleteness,” according to historian Steven Mintz. Rarely, he writes, did parents “refer to their children with nostalgia or fondness.” It was not uncommon for the New England colonists to call their newborns “it” or “the little stranger,” and no extra measures were taken to protect these little intruders from harm. “Children suffered burns from candles or open hearths, fell into rivers and wells, ingested poisons, broke bones, swallowed pins, and stuffed nutshells up their noses,” writes Mintz. Nor did grown-ups try to shield children from the more brutal emotional realities of life: “As early as possible, ministers admonished children to reflect on death, and their sermons contained graphic descriptions of hell and the horrors of eternal damnation.”

These quotes all come from Mintz’s meticulously detailed
Huck’s Raft,
a chronicle of American childhood from the nation’s beginnings to the present day. To any parent who isn’t a professional historian, the book is a revelation. Any good history provides useful context for present-day conventions and belief systems, but reading about the history of childhood is especially startling, because we tend to think of our beliefs about children as instinctive, and therefore as unchanging,
irreducible.
Yet according to Mintz, Americans hardly started with the notion that children are vulnerable and adorable innocents, although the idea was not completely unfamiliar: in the eighteenth century, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that children are pure and spontaneous creatures, free of inhibition and guile, and John Locke argued in the seventeenth century that children are born a blank slate, amenable to a parent’s guidance. But it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that adults began to think of children as precious. That’s when the high chair first made its appearance, literally signifying children’s newfound, elevated role (they’d earned themselves a place at the table, so to speak); the first advice literature on child-rearing appeared; and the United States saw the beginnings of public schools. Institutions protecting child welfare began to spring up, like children’s hospitals and orphanages. A thought revolution had begun.

For most children, however, this revolution didn’t translate into new privileges. Kids were too valuable economically. In the early nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution created a massive demand for child labor. In small towns, children headed off to work in the mills and mines that had begun to dot the landscape; in cities they flooded the street trades and factory floors. As agriculture began to be commercialized, child labor on farms became especially valuable; in fact, children
already
were integral to the farm economy, yanking weeds by the time they were five, according to Mintz, and harvesting crops by the time they were eight. In the late nineteenth century, children were more likely to earn money for their families than their mothers were, and the wages of teenage boys often exceeded those of their dads.

Not until the Progressive Era—loosely defined by most scholars as the period between 1890 and 1920—did adults finally make an organized, concerted effort to ban child labor. Change was still slow. Reformers generally made exceptions for farm work, because it was considered character-building; during World War II, restrictions on child labor had to be relaxed because so many young men were overseas. But the end of the war was the tipping point. Childhood as we think of it today—long and sheltered, devoted almost entirely to education and emotional growth—became standard for American children. Only adults worked full-time. Children did not; they could not. In fact, parents began giving
them
money: that strange custom we all know as “the allowance” officially began. The primary job of a child became his or her schooling. “The useful labor of the nineteenth century child,” writes Viviana Zelizer in
Pricing the Priceless Child,
“was replaced by educational work for the useless child.” Homework replaced actual work. Which had value, certainly.
But not to the family.
“While child labor had served the household economy,” notes Zelizer, “child work would benefit
primarily the child
[emphasis mine].”

Children, in a funny way, became the first true members of the information economy. Schoolwork, which corresponded little to the life skills needed to run the house, became their area of greatest expertise. Academics and sports. Modern childhood had begun.

As I noted in my introduction, Zelizer found a memorable, five-word phrase to describe this historic transformation. Children had become “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”

CHILDREN BENEFITED A GREAT
deal from this new sentimentality. Being considered precious and irreplaceable gave them far more power in the family hierarchy than they had ever had when they were contributing to the family till. Some sociologists went so far as to argue that their newfound sacred status stood the traditional family structure on its head. Writing in
Fortune
magazine in 1953, urbanist William H. Whyte described the postwar United States as a “filiarchy,” or culture in which kids run the show, at one point even calling children’s influence “dictatorial.” (He’d go on to write the best-selling
Organization Man
in 1956.) The moment children stopped working for adults, everyone became confused about who was in charge.

This inversion has had even more pronounced behavioral consequences for the middle class today. “Middle class children,” writes Lareau in
Unequal Childhoods,
“argue with their parents, complain about their parents’ incompetence, and disparage parents’ decisions.” This was not true of the children she followed in poor and working-class homes, where they would “respond promptly and wordlessly to directives from adults.” Lower-income parents, she noticed, give orders and directives. Middle-class parents give choices and negotiate.

Children sense their solicitousness. The kind of lip discouraged and punished by parents in other eras is something middle-class parents now reward. While all children were once told, more or less, to know their place, only the less affluent—who lack power to begin with—are told to think this way today. Middle-class children, on the other hand, are told that they are fully empowered. In the long run, this attitude may or may not serve them well, because they then enter the world with the sense that no power structure is too formidable to defy or outmaneuver. But one thing is immediately clear: this attitude is not very good for
parents.
“The very same skills parents encourage in their children,” writes Lareau, “can and do lead children to challenge, and even reject, parental authority.”

The newly emboldened child may help explain the appeal of the Boy Scouts to so many mothers and fathers. The Scouts teach order. They teach respect. They aren’t the only institution to do this, of course; religious institutions do too. But the Scouts put
parents
in charge, not strangers dressed in robes. As Randy, the podiatrist and Cubmaster, told me: “The kids see you as a role model, and then they start to act out the things we’re doing automatically.” He thought this over for a moment. “It’s very
nice
to have your kids be polite. Or to go to a restaurant and have them act properly.”

HAD THE CHILD’S ROLE
been the only role to change within the family, that alone would have been a significant historical development. But industrialization and modernization inevitably changed the role of parents too. As time went on, mothers and fathers also lost their traditional function in the family economy. Before the Industrial Revolution, parents provided educational, vocational, and religious instruction to their children; they also tended to them if they got sick, helped make their clothes, and supplied the food on the table. But with industrialization, these jobs were gradually, one by one, outsourced to non-family members or entire institutions, to the point that the idea of the “family economy” practically ceased to exist. The sole job of parents became the financial and physical security of their children.

Ever since, every debate we have had about the role of parents—whether they should be laissez-faire or interventionist “Tiger Moms,” attachment-oriented or partial to the rigors of tough love—can be traced back to the paring down of mothers’ and fathers’ traditional roles. Today, we are far less clear about what “parenting” entails. We know what it
doesn’t
entail: teaching kids mathematics and geography and literature (schools do that); providing them with medical treatment (pediatricians); sewing them dresses and trousers (factories abroad, whose wares are then distributed by Old Navy); growing them food (factory farms, whose goods are then distributed by supermarkets); giving them vocational training (two-year colleges, classes, videos). What parenting
does
involve, however, is much harder to define. The sole area of agreement for almost all middle-class parents—whether they make their children practice the violin for three hours a day or exert no pressure on them at all—is that whatever they are doing is for the child’s sake, and the child’s alone. Parents no longer raise children for the family’s sake or that of the broader world.

As parents, we sometimes mistakenly assume that things were always this way. They weren’t. The modern family is just that—modern—and all of our places in it are quite new. Unless we keep in mind how new our lives as parents are, and how unusual and ahistorical, we won’t see that the world we live in, as mothers and fathers, is still under construction. Modern childhood was invented less than
seventy
years ago—the length of a catnap, in historical terms.

the globalized, optimized child

“Did you find the place all right?” Leslie Schulze, forty and lovely and dressed impeccably well, is greeting me at the door of her redbrick home in Sugar Land, an upscale suburb southwest of Houston. Though it has five bedrooms and 5,200 square feet to roam around in—she and her husband bought the place roughly a decade ago, for $350,000—her house is by no means outsized for her neighborhood. Her well-tended block is studded with homes of equally ample capacity (two family rooms, cathedral-like kitchens, en suite bathrooms for all), and the drive to her place, along Palm Royale Boulevard, features larger houses still, a few on the order of 14,000 square feet. (I first mistook them for country club facilities, until I noticed they were popping up one after another, in some kind of
Dynasty
version of tract housing.) Shortly after my visit with Leslie, I would be told repeatedly by other Sugar Land residents that wealthy Indian doctors owned a number of these sprawling estates, a fact that isn’t entirely confirmable, obviously, and to some ears might strike a gratuitously racial note. But I soon learned that this attunement to demographic change had a larger context. In 1990 Sugar Land was 79 percent white. Today it is 44.4 percent white and 35.3 percent Asian. The politics of the district were and still are conservative—it was represented by Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader, until his 2006 resignation—but the recent influx of high-achieving immigrants from India and China has changed the face of the area and, in the view of many white Sugar Land residents, directly affected their lives by rewriting the standards of academic excellence in the local schools.