“That would have been a very strange story when I was little, and now it’s a very common story,” notes Matthias Doepke, an economist at the London School of Economics. He says “there is this aspect of a race,” which has become particularly pronounced among America’s upper middle class over the last few decades.
Indeed, according to a recent Pew survey, nearly half of American parents characterize themselves as “overprotective,” more than double the number who say they give kids “too much freedom.”
Overprotection can have unintended effects.
Many adults remember a childhood playing sports with neighborhood kids during the afternoon, and being told to get home by 5:30 or 6 p.m. Now, in lots of leafy suburbs, where a soccer game could easily come together, you’ll find the streets abandoned at 4 or 5.
Kids are busy: They’re taking after-school math classes, being shuttled to ice hockey practice, enrolling in SAT prep courses, trying to get good enough at the viola that a college might want them for the orchestra.
Doepke was the co-author of this book Love, money, and parenting, argues that there’s a clear rationale for parents to hover over their kids: income inequality. As inequality has surged over the last 50 years, middle- and upper-middle-class parents have increasingly worried that if their kids don’t have the right kinds of credentials, the consequences will be dire.
In many countries, however, the parenting style of most Americans would be seen as strange and unacceptable.
Doepke examined, with Fabrizio zilibotti (a Yale economist), the link between global inequality and parenting styles.
Parents tend to push kids harder in countries where income inequality is higher. Parents tend to be more relaxed in countries where there is more equality.
The World Values Survey found that countries that value “hard work” over other attributes are some of the most unequal — including Russia, China, Turkey, and the US. Countries where there’s less inequality, and more of a safety net — like Japan, Sweden, and Germany — don’t rank “hard work” as highly.
Zilibotti, his wife, and their daughter spent time in Sweden. They observed that the free Swedish nursery schools encourage play and exploration but discourage any formal learning. And even when kids start school — at seven years old — “stress and anxiety are considered the prime evil from which children should be sheltered.” They are not graded in subjects until turning 13.
Scandinavian countries could be considered outliers. Japan is more mainstream. In Japan, 25% of respondents believed that teaching kids the value of hard work was a good idea. In America this figure was 70 percent.
This makes complete sense.
Starting around 1980, Doepke says, inequality in the US began to surge, after “one of the most equal times we’ve probably ever had.”
And a major piece of this surge was the rise in the “college premium,” the amount that the average college graduate makes, versus the average high school graduate. College graduates used to earn about 40% more. Now it’s closer to 100 percent.
Not surprisingly, the pressure to get kids into college — often, prestigious colleges — has spiked. Both mothers and fathers now spend more time with their children than they did in 1960. The US family size has decreased over the last decade, which means all of that time will be spent with fewer children.
It is fair to say that American parents were once more like Scandinavians or Japanese parents. Before inequality, we believed that being intense was not a problem.
Ironically, it is possible that by trying to help our children succeed in the short run, we are actually jeopardizing their long term success.
Doepke says that we focus too much on the activities and achievements which can be included in a college admissions application. We ignore everything else. Although jobs reward teamwork and those who can deal with imperfect situations in the workplace, the college application process emphasizes individual achievements and unrelenting perfection.
Julie Lythcott Haims is a former Stanford Dean who wrote in 2015 of the changes she saw in her students and their families. It was, she noted, “a new phenomenon — parents on the college campus, virtually and literally. Each subsequent year would bring an increase in the number of parents who did things like seek opportunities, make decisions, and problem solve for their sons and daughters — things that college-aged students used to be able to do for themselves.”
Doepke notes that we’ve seen a major uptick in depression and anxiety among kids. Social media is certainly a factor, but intense competition affects both parents and students.
For parents with less means, the psychological stress of America’s divergent economic outcomes is acute. And the pressure to get kids into college — even if that college isn’t Princeton — can be tough to shoulder.
Nazli Kbria is a sociologist at Boston University. She says that people who struggle to stay in middle class are influenced by what the richer classes do. They are increasingly putting pressure on themselves in order to emulate it. She believes that “everyone now has at least the ideal in their head that good parenting means this kind of very involved, extra rich, supplemented parenting.”
Kibria says this could mean working extra to pay for tutors, camps, or lessons. She sees low-income mothers investing their own time to figure out how to supplement kids’ knowledge at home. It may be that they have to pick which of their children is most suited for college, as it’s impossible to pay tuition for two.
Ironically, this rat race — which has intensified during a period of growing inequality — may do little to help those who finish first. In the future, however, research suggests that creativity and collaboration will be more important than ever. workers’ real sources of value.
Memorization is limited, as the rise of AI shows. Innovation and initiative are not yet programmed. What if the SAT prep class is not as important as a soccer match organized by a child? What if reassembling an old clock was more valuable than learning calculus ahead of everyone else?
Doepke believes that we are taking a big risk when we adopt this parenting style. There is a danger “that this streamlining of everybody doing the same thing in the same way stamps out innovation that we’d all benefit from.”
Follow Kara Miller on Twitter @karaemiller.
