This is so rich! I offer my musings via a re-interpretation of a couple conclusions Helen made.
I disclose that I’m a nerd, a sociologist and while this (parents) is not my area, race and culture is. But more importantly I’ve been a Black single low then middle income mom amidst White affluent parents my whole life, many of which are dear friends. Lots of traveled terrain there.
Helen said: “The reality is far more complex and contradictory. The American style of parenting is characterized by anxiety, but the source of that anxiety differs significantly according to societal privilege: there are parents terrified their children will drop down in class level, where they will then experience significant hardship, violence, danger, and ongoing difficulties, and then there are parents who are terrified because their children are already experiencing or in proximity to all of those things… For these parents, going “backwards” feels not just unconscionable, but terrifying. Which, again, makes sense: as a recent Brookings report made clear, as the income gap continues to expand, the ramifications of falling out of the upper middle class have become more severe… As a result, bourgeois parents’ focus shifts to the reproduction of the status quo — of their family’s privilege — even if that reproduction makes parents and kids miserable, even if that ends up eclipsing the more meaningful and joyful aspects of parenting, even if that means enduring unequal labor distribution within the relationship, even if that requires transforming parenting into a performative competition.”
I would say something different:
I do not think the two experiences—between White parents and Black parents and between White affluent parents and low income parents—are that kind of two sides of a similar coin; two relatively different positions vis a vis a similar anxiety. I don’t think one group fears the worsening and the others are “already experiencing” it.
I think it’s more than one group belongs inside the monster that is White supremacy and the rest are its prey. Radically different positions. My White upper middle class friend who is parenting to make sure her boy has it as good if not better than she and her husband had it, is not afraid her boy won’t make it. She’s afraid he won’t be at the top. I am afraid the monster will eat my boy. She is never afraid of that. Even if I parent my boy to make it, relatively, most paths upward into the monster will put my boy in danger. He’ll have to bargain with Whiteness, be immersed in it to access “the best” (schools, courses, colleges, jobs), etc. Our relationship with that monster is always antagonist so of course dealing with that monster does not consume my parenting nor define it. My parenting may be more enjoyable because the monster has nothing to do with how I think of my parenting. The monster is something I try and slay so that I may parent at all. If that makes sense? Whereas my White affluent mom friend can and does harmonize with that monster as parenting success (sure it’s sisyphean but that’s not the same as what I deal with).
So, I would say that not being atop the social hierarchy—not fear falling backwards—is what is untenable for my White mom friend. And I would say that is always the motivation, the core function of being White, not an adaptive response to anxiety. This distinction is important because we are not seeing these patterns bc White parents are witnessing “falling backwards” as a real possibility (Lareau’s study is old and there are probably older data than that). The stats about White life expectancy decline are way more recent than these patterns. Sitting atop a racial capitalist hierarchy and collecting “the psychological wages of Whiteness (the psycho-social-cultural kudos of Not Being The Black or Brown People)” was the very engine of creating a White middle class. Always. White people were and are given a shot at economic status that’s always tangled up with racial and cultural privilege over others. Understanding that helps understand the resistance to change. When you’re asking parents to stop white knuckling that privilege, you’re asking them to stop working on being top of the food chain thus, and in some fundamental way, you’re asking to stop being “White” bc in our system to be White means to be on top of the food chain (hence for example the need to “cheat” that some White people feel say by rigging voting or more recently, banning books!). And we’d need to have a conversation about that before any “bourgeois parent” avoids a majority Black and Brown and middle income school or neighborhood like the plague, right? This is harder to hear than “you should give up some extra curricular activities” and that is because ultimately it is a harder ask and harder task.
I love this reply, and you've really connected even more of the dots for me (and, I hope, for other readers). That last paragraph in particular, and the point that "When you’re asking parents to stop white knuckling that privilege, you’re asking them to stop working on being top of the food chain thus, and in some fundamental way, you’re asking to stop being “White." It explains so, so much. I'm really grateful you're here (something I want to say to every sociologist in the comments, tbh)
Came back to read this a few times today. Thank you so much for sharing these insights. I just finished reading Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property,” so all of what you’re saying feels particularly resonant.
I’d recommend Jessie Daniels “Nice White Ladies,” and Heather McGhee’s “The Sum of Us” which is a broader take on the idea of “wages of whiteness” that I find really well done: along same lines Katznelson “When Affirmative Action was White.” The original person to write about whiteness paying “psychological wages” was Du Bois in Black Reconstruction which is massive and unnecessary to be read in totality lol. But Du Bois figured all the things out and we all just keep reinventing the wheel...
Thank you! I've seen some of McGhee's talks but hadn't gotten to the book yet. And so true about Du Bois! You get to a point where you're reading something and wondering when Du Bois will come up because you know it's going to happen!
Definitely! The way she describes whiteness as a valued property through American history is super interesting and makes a lot of sense. She weaves in a personal story of her grandmother passing as white for job access, and what toll it took. And great explanations of how people object to affirmative action in part because it lowers the property value of whiteness. Just all around really important article.
Thank you for sharing your insight and analysis. I am working on a paper that attempts to excavate this concept of white motherhood for my undergrad studies in sociology and US women’s history.
Gah - I am notoriously bad at short comments typed on my phone. I would love to be able to quote you in my piece, Janine, and wonder if you’re open to me contacting you directly. ☺️
I really like this explanation about white middle class fears about "being the top", and I wonder if this is why my parenting style (and some of my white middle class peers) has become more removed from the rat race in some ways? For me, I've realized that "the best" gave me massive amounts of anxiety and depression and I don't want that for my daughter.
I've enrolled my daughter in a Montessori school and I love that it's "child-centered" learning and not about competing against peers to be the best. She's in one extracurricular activity (swim lessons) and loves it and if she ever wants to stop then we'll stop. I'm not interested in pushing her to be the best academically or athletically for a miniscule chance at a full-ride scholarship...but I realize how much privilege comes with that sentence. I can be less academically and athletically minded because as of now I'm on a path to be able to afford community college and/or state university for my one child (again, another privilege to have only one child!)
I'm starting to see this with other families, like stay-at-home moms homeschooling their kids so that they can have an individualized education that is tailored to them. Why force your kid(s) to compete in a toxic environment 6-7 hours a day that makes them want to die by suicide when they can have individualized work that they can complete at home in half the time that allows them to thrive?
Great read, with research that helps contextualize this trend! I first became a parent in 2000 when the culture was shifting to a more anxious style of parenting, at least for some. Clearly, this growing group of “security moms” was found more in two parent families with six-figure incomes times two. At 25, as a college educated married mom, I fell into that group but had no frame reference in my own family. My own mom never went to college, had her first at 19 and later divorced.
I’ve given a lot of thought to what parenting was like in the aughts, and have recently written about it. Looking back, I can laugh at a lot of things. But not everything. So much anxiety was needless. And my oldest Gen Z kid tells me, it wasn't so great for them either.
In my experience, a lot had to do with having a new generation of highly educated moms that professionalized motherhood. And then the internet took this to a whole new level. Every decision could be researched and quantified and compared.
But eventually I’ve learned that so many of the complicated parts of being a parent have nothing to do with the kids. Our parenting style is more about our own personality, privilege and need to feel validated. Over the years, I’ve gotten better at recognizing and owning my deeper motives as a parent. And as I do, being a parent feels a lot less complicated.
"Professionalization of motherhood" is a really great way of putting it — and that impulse itself is, of course, in part a reaction to the degradation/devaluation of motherhood (even though we supposedly value the work of mothers above all else, etc etc.)
Your next book title? I’d also be curious to know how these poll results break down among women who also work outside the home. I once read about the term “second shift” and the transition period between coming home from outside paid work and unpaid work from home. I was acculturated to believe I could have it all - the career and the family. But I always felt as though I was not doing either “job” well. I was too burned out trying to do both. Even the vernacular in my head supports your thesis.
Yes! I think parenting is often a great magnifying lens for your own "stuff". I am my most anxious as a parent the closer the kids edge to the times of my childhood/teen years that were hardest for me or when I see them starting to grapple with stuff that took me years to figure out. Stopping and recognizing my stuff versus their actual lived experience is really, really helpful.
My first child was born in 2004 when I was 30, so we're close to the same age. I have often expressed gratitude that I began parenting before Pinterest and Facebook so that some parenting patterns could be set before social media. I also think that highly-educated moms who stay at home can feel an extra pressure to professionalize motherhood - and monetize it.
I can so relate to this! My oldest was also born in 2000. I really felt a TON of peer pressure, but as a working mom in a community where at the time that wasn’t the norm, I felt I was damned no matter what I did out of the gate.
I was also lucky: I had friends who didn’t work and were very cavalier so the judgement never felt universal, and a partner who did more than almost any others I knew (and who had been raised by a powerhouse of a working mom). And the older the kids got, the more I appreciated hearing about all the different experiences, and the less I felt like taking on anyone’s judgement about me as a parent.
I don’t know if I have had time to really reflect on my deeper motivations, but I can say that i find it impossible to reflect on my experience without ALSO reflecting on the ginormous role gender role expectations play. Which I think we feel most acutely when we bump into the edges that make others uncomfortable.
Feb 5, 2023·edited Feb 5, 2023Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
As a white woman who has chosen not to have children, I’m seeing my decision somewhat differently now than simply not being wired to be a mom or too anxiety prone to adequately manage the stress and pressure of parenting, much less performative, intensive parenting.
For so many reasons, I would very likely not be able to reproduce the socioeconomic position and privilege that I grew up. And that as a white mom, I would be “expected” to provide. As the breadwinner in my relationship, that pressure on me would be even more amplified.
Maybe my decision to not have children is at least partly influenced by wanting to avoid the “ordeal” of “going backwards.”
I am also a white woman who is not having kids and I too would not have been able to give a child the upper middle class upbringing I had. I have never really thought about that as a conscious part of my decision (other than being sad when I was still considering it that I would not be able to provide a college education for a kid the way my parents provided one for me). I am the youngest by a bit of 3 siblings and I would have been the only one “going backwards” as my siblings have much higher means.
Was the an unconscious part of my choice, I don’t know.
I really appreciated the last line of this piece for its acknowledgement of the role of fear (deep fear) as the lifeline for a great deal of suffering in the present and for its perpetuation by validating oppressive systems, all for the "good" of "my" children, "my family." It is truly a myopic perspective that needs calling out. Everyone's children deserve better. (Even if we are not all parents, we have all been children.)
I've been thinking a lot lately about people who say they need to prioritize their families about all others. My MIL says often, "You have to do what's right for your family," to justify what her children sometimes do that is not right for others. It's also the ethos that has so many more SUVs on the road, making people in non-SUVs less safe in an accident and contributing to much more climate cost and wear and tear to the roads. Etc. etc. We live in an interconnected world.
Agree with many points you’re making here, and always a fan of Pew research for the reasons you outlined. But I do have a few points that I’d like to share based on my experience raising three boys.
First, the general argument about families wanting to preserve privilege for their kids? Still 90% socially acceptable, and largely understandable—but I don’t think I’d link so tightly to parents assuming that there’s a zero sum game afoot. In my experience there are sub-currents and a lot of regional variations that make this way less of a monolith. (I would love to see the data broken out by region and party affiliation as well.) I have so many friends who are excited for their kids to pursue jobs in the trades, including many who are doing so after completing college degrees. Similarly, the get-into-the-best-college game seems to be waning (thank all the deities for that one!) in part because of the very real challenges of student debt, and in part because I think there’s a growing understanding that pushing kids in a particular direction is generally a bad idea and leads to… depression and anxiety. The kids will get where they’re going to go on their own timelines. Sure, there are some kids who are driven by their own desires in that direction ON THE RIGHT TIMELINE to achieve that outcome. But there are also way more kids who aren’t, and that’s fine. I think the pandemic is also softening this particular pressure point: so many kids are dealing with aftershocks educationally, socially and emotionally—who would add pressure under those circumstances?? Finally, as a transplanted east coaster, the pressure here in the Pacific Northwest may be more than it was a generation ago, but it’s still pale in comparison to the east coast, where college-related status (for kids AND parents—ugh!) is generally a much more explicit deal.
My second point is about the gender breakdown. Our family is in the minority where I am the breadwinner (and have been since our second kid was born) and my husband is the primary at-home parent with a more flexible work schedule. I would have loved to see the data about mothers’ and fathers’ perceptions split by work status as well as kids’ age. I suspect that would be revealing (I haven’t dug to see if that is avail). I also think it’s worth noting that a lot of the pressure I experienced around parenting was feedback from other mothers, especially when the kids were little. Communities have parenting norms, and I didn’t fit within mine—and wowza did some other moms make some really memorably strong negative judgements about me as a mother (usually without having any context). I think there’s some really interesting work happening around the deconstruction of momfluencers, but gender in parenting generally is an under-explored area. Dads don’t seem to experience the cultural weight of other dads’ perceptions; moms definitely do. That’s worth discussion. I also can say from experience that as kids get older, the limitations of parenting to drive particular outcomes (part of what sucks about the little kids stage is an assumption that you CAN control outcomes!) become increasingly clear, and the peer pressure to be a certain way—or have your kids be a certain way—drops precipitously. Which, frankly, is a blessing.
The final point (if anyone is still reading! I know this is going on and on) I would like to make is that while the “all of the time” and “most of the time” had dramatic differences by race, there was surprising uniformity if you add the two top box scores together. I think that’s worth noting. I also wonder how the data changes if you sort by work status (full time vs part time vs other including stay at home) and age of kids. Little kids are darling! And also I can barely remember anything from that stage? And had anyone asked me these questions at that stage, I would likely have been in “most of the time” or worse, depending on the week.
All of this is hugely complicated, and the deeply established cultural patterns around parenting are confounding. In an era where the cultural power of evangelicalism and “traditional family values” are on the rise, I have a hard time seeing how we work for change outside of electing people who can see more paths (vote blue, friends). Or by being the contrarian family who sets things up in a different way. Finally, every kid is different—with often radically different needs and desires, so whatever theories you have as a parent are probably going to get jettisoned anyhow, especially when they don’t serve your particular kid. I guess my sense is that we all want the kids to be alright, and that can happen in an almost infinite number of ways.
I see the 'best college at any cost" thing push varied across region too. We have lots of friends in both California (bay area) and the Northwest and when our kids were high school seniors the experiences were very different despite almost all being upper-middle-class families with high-achieving, AP-taking, multiple-extracurricular-participating kids. The NorCal kids had a lot of pressure to get into highly competitive UCs and other top schools and they had so much stress and, ultimately, disappointment. The PNW kids almost all got into their first choice schools because those schools were, like, Seattle U or U of Montana. At least in this pandemic era I am encouraged to see a growing awareness of the importance of mental health and the danger of debt lead to a moderating of the college acceptance game pressures.
Love your points here - especially looking at age ranges of children and yes, the fact that every child is different! I was thinking about that while reading this: I have children with autism and other diagnoses. It is all much more complex when you figure these things in.
Yes! I mentioned this in another comment but I agree that the tide is changing a bit due to the rise of mental health issues like depression and anxiety.
I'm a millennial parent and unsurprisingly some of my white middle class peers (including me) are sending their kids to Montessori school or homeschooling them to avoid the toxic competition in public schools. Undergrad and grad school were mental health nightmares for me. I don't want that for my daughter. I want her to love learning for learning's sake and to internalize that her value and worth is not tied to her productivity/grades/athletic ability/physical appearance.
However, I realize there's a lot of privilege in these mindsets. Private school is a lot of money, and having a parent stay at home to homeschool requires financial security, too.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the big anxieties (jobs, education) and how they show up in the little anxieties (signing up for stuff). A lot of this has shown up in the “first-come-first-serve” race for summer camp/swim lessons/afterschool care, where the demand and supply are just nowhere close to being in sync, and the loss of this one thing can spiral out into much bigger consequences (e.g. no afterschool or summer care requires some combination of more money or more time, neither of which anyone really has!) There’s also a weird “locked-in” effect, where if you get in in time a, you are able to hold on to that spot for as long as you want it but which also has the consequence of shutting people out who literally missed a memo, or just moved to town, or had something in the background change. I’ve been quietly advocating for more things to be lottery based, just to take away the need to be at a computer at x time on x day otherwise your entire summer or school year is borked. It would likely create other anxieties, but it feels like a way to just turn the volume down a little bit.
Was talking with some mom friends about how a lot of the Seattle camps have moved to the lottery system, and how a certain set of parents are UP IN ARMS about no longer being able to totally master/dominate the system.
This is a huge topic in my community right now. We’re registering - or attempting to register - for after-school care for the first time this year. They just changed it from a Monday at 8am signup to a lottery. I think either way creates a lot of anxiety, but the lottery is more fair.
Our local baseball program just opened up the boundaries, and didn’t do staggered registration, leading to tons of people from the immediate area being shut out after years of participation. (Of course the gossip is that the new president of the org lives outside the former boundaries.)
All of this of course reinforces your point that there is an imbalance between the supply (of teachers, space, public facilities) and demand.
Isn’t all of it missing the point a little though? If 50% of kids need after school/camp/whatever why do we make enough slots for 25%? We don’t run public schools that way. There should just be sufficient access for whoever needs it.
I agree 100%. Our kids go to public school, and the after school care is a service of the district, but isn’t funded by the govt in the way that school is. It’s all part of the bigger issue that we don’t see childcare as a public good, which ends up disproportionately affecting women, and especially single moms.
Absolutely this — I didn't get into it in the piece, but all of these failures affect single parents the most. There's a reason it's so much easier and more attractive to become a single parent outside in, say, Sweden!
Right. I am financially relatively privileged and paying for childcare is still a major strain for us and still something I am always barely holding together - like why is there a half day every month in our district? For me the anxiety about camp signups is really just about the fact that there aren’t enough slots and I have no backup plan because our family is far away and not reliably helpful even when they are nearby. I used to kind of laugh at the crazy mom stereotypes but then I had a kid and realized the system makes you crazy.
In many districts, those half days exist to allow for meetings and planning time. This is in lieu of keeping teachers late into the evening for these things.
I think this is actually a pretty great distillation of what makes things feel untenable (and also creates animus between parents and the school district). If we have accessible and affordable afterschool and break care *as infrastructure* — aka, funded in a way that makes it available to all, like other countries with our wealth level — then a half day for teachers to have additional prep and meetings would be celebrated.
I mean, whether lottery is more fair than first come first serve. Either way someone is going to get screwed. One may be marginally more “fair” but we need to treat childcare at hours that match work hours like more than just something nice to have.
Definitely don't think lottery is the solution — more like it takes away a small amount of power from those privileged parents who've figured out how to "master" the system. The real solution is affordable, high-quality after-school and summer care for all, and because child care is a "market failure" (it cannot be supported by the market, similar to, say, road maintenance, and public schooling) it must be funded publicly (again, like every other country of a similar GDP as the U.S.)
I'll be honest, I don't see a lot of parents who are gaming the system where I am. Granted, I am far west enough of Boston that there is not the level of cutthroat competition that I am told exists in the fancier suburbs. I just see desperate, exhausted parents who can't afford $400+ a week of camp all summer long refreshing their rec department account on the day camp opens.
I don’t think the idea of “mastering” the system is gaming it at all. There is just an acknowledgement that to be “good” at successfully enrolling amidst these circumstances often requires job flexibility, and the wherewithal to plan for all the possible outcomes (easier in a two-parent, middle to upper-middle class household with reasonable work schedules etc etc).
I think there is a fine line between acknowledging there is privilege at issue here, but also that the system is fucked for most of us due to a lack of infrastructure.
I’ve worked in the public elementary education sector in various roles for almost two decades and I can offer some insight into this.
First of all, the reason why after care slots are in short supply has a lot to do with staffing. It’s hard to find people who can and want to work 3-4 hours a day in the late afternoon for fairly menial pay. Considering childcare infrastructure and having funds to pay these workers more would help.
Staffing shortages are also hitting public schools for similar reasons. However, aftercare and public schools are governed by two different sets of regulations in many states. Public schools are expected to accommodate all students who enroll, staffing shortage or not. Legal maximums for students per adult don’t exist in many places. Aftercare programs are often licensed as child care facilities. Most states actually have more stringent rules for adult to child ratios in child care settings. My state even has legal ratios for square footage per child for child care centers. For example, the aftercare program at my school uses a classroom as a licensed space. The state says that classroom can accommodate 24 children as a child care setting. However, during the school day, the same classroom holds 33 children and that is perfectly legal.
I know that Anne Helen knows this, but just to be clear: the reason that Pew doesn't show even more breakdowns by race and class is likely that their sample size wasn't large enough to estimate responses that precisely. The sample size required for small group estimation is very very large.
I would love to see a question that asks, “What role does family play in your children’s upbringing?” In my cultural background, family played an enormous role, across multiple generations. It provided certainty and stability, two things that are so valuable in any household. My parents were not stressed out by having to pay for and manage child care, which is an enormous worry for so many people, especially single parents.
Ever since Jessica Calarco pointed me to the data on the correlation between education level and distance from family members, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it — that would've been a great additional question (I want a Pew survey all about who and how parents find care for their kids!)
It’s not just childcare, either, it’s other domestic care tasks like meals, laundry, housekeeping. Who is making dinner every night/how many dinners per week is an individual parent responsible for?
That’s where there have to be honest conversations between couples about tasks and finances. The kids can participate, too and I think they might enjoy being involved. My friends who grew up in restaurants all had responsibilities as soon as they were old enough to write and make change.
As someone who lives 9 hours away from the closest family member, yes to this point! I'm always a little jealous of the "dropped the kids off with their grandparents for the weekend" crowd, to be honest.
Yes!!! I also lived 6+ hours away from family from the time my oldest was 6mos until he was 8-9? And when we did move back around my family, we had been out of the picture for so long, and my family hated my ex... so, basically even when we were around family, I had zero help/support from them. That was the most challenging aspect for me.
I'm curious about this - we've always lived near my in-laws, who have been very caring but are older and less able to engage than my parents. I have a friend who has had no family nearby, and she's so resentful. What I'm curious about is how found family and other adoptive communities function to replace biological family. I know that I'm lucky to have family who watches my kids, but I'm frustrated with my friend's unwillingness to acknowledge the help she receives from her friends.
Agreed, especially given how the presence of an extended family/neighborhood community can intersect with race and class demographics. I think that’s a major piece missing from the Pew research.
I wonder what answers would have come up if they asked about financial stress related to parenting? like, I wonder if the reason lower income parents report more positive emotions about parenting is that they see the stress they're feeling about money as financial stress, not part of parenting their kid. even if they are worried about being able to provide for their kid, the phrasing of the questions may have made people not consider financial stress when answering some of them. ex: my mom experienced struggling to pay rent as a single parent and getting legal action for child support as issues with money and my dad, not issues with us, even though we were the main thing she was spending money on. I mean, it's pretty obvious that lower income people would be more worried about finances but I do think it's a missing piece here.
I’m not a parent, but I’ve worked in elementary education for 18 years as a teacher and administrator. I’ve seen much of the anxious style of American parenting play out from varied vantage points. I’ve worked in urban, suburban, and rural schools in three different states. I’ve also served schools at a wide variety of socioeconomic levels.
I currently work as an elementary school assistant principal in a large urban school district. We were one of the few large urban districts in the country to offer in-person schooling to elementary students for the entire 2020-2021 school year. The reactions of families to this plan seems to mirror some of the insight in this survey.
During the 2020-2021 school year, elementary families in my district could elect to enroll in in-person or online classes provided through their neighborhood school. Despite the fact that many advocates of opening in-person school pushed a narrative that schools had to reopen to protect vulnerable students living in poverty.
When school opened, it actually turned out that schools in the more affluent neighborhoods saw a higher percentage of their students return to in-person learning. At my school, which primarily serves lower income families, more than 60% of students were enrolled in remote instruction. Families cited various reasons for these decisions, but an overwhelming theme is that many of these families experienced COVID personally due to employment outside the home in the early days of the pandemic. These experiences led to fear for the safety of their children.
Parents in the more affluent areas were more likely to be working remotely or in jobs where they saw less exposure to COVID and probably had fewer personal experiences with severe outcomes from the virus. I would also guess that some of the comments about trying to maintain positions of privilege also impacted the decisions of more affluent families to send their children to in-person school.
The data on "the most important" vs "one of the most important" aspects of identity is really interesting. I feel like I know many white, wealthy moms who would say "the most important" as part of the performance/the gendered expectations around motherhood (note: I'm the mother of a toddler, so most moms I know are, too). I find myself often grappling with my own feelings - not wanting parenthood to be "the most important" part of me for fear of losing other aspects of myself (not just my ability to be human capital) and not wanting to subscribe to such performance/expectations, though also fearing discussing how important it is to me for being perceived/judged as "just a mom," which is its own performance and buying into sexist notions of motherhood being lesser than? It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't feeling (which also betrays my own socioeconomic status related anxieties!)
This new data casts light on how much of a perceptual gap there is between older Americans who set and control social policy in the country vs. the younger end who are tearing kids. The greater emphasis on family values among Hispanic and Black parents today is not something older Americans can understand easily. 82% of Americans aged 45-74 are white, for example. They live in a 1980s world, racially speaking, while the country’s ethnic mix and approach to family have moved on.
What a great conversation, thank you so much for this! I'm so interested in the group dynamics that make any kind of opting-out feel so impossible for these white bourgeois families. I know a lot of it has to do with "I want to do what's best for my kid" but at this point, there is so much mounting evidence that stress and anxiety are major problems for these kids. So at what point are the returns sufficiently diminished where opting out feels like a smart choice? Rhetorical question obvi, but one that I hope we all learn more about.
This is so rich! I offer my musings via a re-interpretation of a couple conclusions Helen made.
I disclose that I’m a nerd, a sociologist and while this (parents) is not my area, race and culture is. But more importantly I’ve been a Black single low then middle income mom amidst White affluent parents my whole life, many of which are dear friends. Lots of traveled terrain there.
Helen said: “The reality is far more complex and contradictory. The American style of parenting is characterized by anxiety, but the source of that anxiety differs significantly according to societal privilege: there are parents terrified their children will drop down in class level, where they will then experience significant hardship, violence, danger, and ongoing difficulties, and then there are parents who are terrified because their children are already experiencing or in proximity to all of those things… For these parents, going “backwards” feels not just unconscionable, but terrifying. Which, again, makes sense: as a recent Brookings report made clear, as the income gap continues to expand, the ramifications of falling out of the upper middle class have become more severe… As a result, bourgeois parents’ focus shifts to the reproduction of the status quo — of their family’s privilege — even if that reproduction makes parents and kids miserable, even if that ends up eclipsing the more meaningful and joyful aspects of parenting, even if that means enduring unequal labor distribution within the relationship, even if that requires transforming parenting into a performative competition.”
I would say something different:
I do not think the two experiences—between White parents and Black parents and between White affluent parents and low income parents—are that kind of two sides of a similar coin; two relatively different positions vis a vis a similar anxiety. I don’t think one group fears the worsening and the others are “already experiencing” it.
I think it’s more than one group belongs inside the monster that is White supremacy and the rest are its prey. Radically different positions. My White upper middle class friend who is parenting to make sure her boy has it as good if not better than she and her husband had it, is not afraid her boy won’t make it. She’s afraid he won’t be at the top. I am afraid the monster will eat my boy. She is never afraid of that. Even if I parent my boy to make it, relatively, most paths upward into the monster will put my boy in danger. He’ll have to bargain with Whiteness, be immersed in it to access “the best” (schools, courses, colleges, jobs), etc. Our relationship with that monster is always antagonist so of course dealing with that monster does not consume my parenting nor define it. My parenting may be more enjoyable because the monster has nothing to do with how I think of my parenting. The monster is something I try and slay so that I may parent at all. If that makes sense? Whereas my White affluent mom friend can and does harmonize with that monster as parenting success (sure it’s sisyphean but that’s not the same as what I deal with).
So, I would say that not being atop the social hierarchy—not fear falling backwards—is what is untenable for my White mom friend. And I would say that is always the motivation, the core function of being White, not an adaptive response to anxiety. This distinction is important because we are not seeing these patterns bc White parents are witnessing “falling backwards” as a real possibility (Lareau’s study is old and there are probably older data than that). The stats about White life expectancy decline are way more recent than these patterns. Sitting atop a racial capitalist hierarchy and collecting “the psychological wages of Whiteness (the psycho-social-cultural kudos of Not Being The Black or Brown People)” was the very engine of creating a White middle class. Always. White people were and are given a shot at economic status that’s always tangled up with racial and cultural privilege over others. Understanding that helps understand the resistance to change. When you’re asking parents to stop white knuckling that privilege, you’re asking them to stop working on being top of the food chain thus, and in some fundamental way, you’re asking to stop being “White” bc in our system to be White means to be on top of the food chain (hence for example the need to “cheat” that some White people feel say by rigging voting or more recently, banning books!). And we’d need to have a conversation about that before any “bourgeois parent” avoids a majority Black and Brown and middle income school or neighborhood like the plague, right? This is harder to hear than “you should give up some extra curricular activities” and that is because ultimately it is a harder ask and harder task.
Anyway I love this group is thinking about this.
I love this reply, and you've really connected even more of the dots for me (and, I hope, for other readers). That last paragraph in particular, and the point that "When you’re asking parents to stop white knuckling that privilege, you’re asking them to stop working on being top of the food chain thus, and in some fundamental way, you’re asking to stop being “White." It explains so, so much. I'm really grateful you're here (something I want to say to every sociologist in the comments, tbh)
Came back to read this a few times today. Thank you so much for sharing these insights. I just finished reading Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property,” so all of what you’re saying feels particularly resonant.
Would you recommend?? Definitely one of those pieces I see cited a lot and have always been meaning to read and hopefully this is the push to do it
I’d recommend Jessie Daniels “Nice White Ladies,” and Heather McGhee’s “The Sum of Us” which is a broader take on the idea of “wages of whiteness” that I find really well done: along same lines Katznelson “When Affirmative Action was White.” The original person to write about whiteness paying “psychological wages” was Du Bois in Black Reconstruction which is massive and unnecessary to be read in totality lol. But Du Bois figured all the things out and we all just keep reinventing the wheel...
I just got “Mothering While Black” by Dawn Marie Dow - am making my way through the introduction which ties a lot of these concepts together!
Thank you! I've seen some of McGhee's talks but hadn't gotten to the book yet. And so true about Du Bois! You get to a point where you're reading something and wondering when Du Bois will come up because you know it's going to happen!
Definitely! The way she describes whiteness as a valued property through American history is super interesting and makes a lot of sense. She weaves in a personal story of her grandmother passing as white for job access, and what toll it took. And great explanations of how people object to affirmative action in part because it lowers the property value of whiteness. Just all around really important article.
(Forgot to mention: it’s been on my mind since running into a mentions in a couple of
Books, but Sherri Spelic asked me recently if I’d read it and that was what nudged me to get to it.)
Thank you for sharing your insight and analysis. I am working on a paper that attempts to excavate this concept of white motherhood for my undergrad studies in sociology and US women’s history.
Gah - I am notoriously bad at short comments typed on my phone. I would love to be able to quote you in my piece, Janine, and wonder if you’re open to me contacting you directly. ☺️
Hey Carole yeah of course (I’d be honored). I’m at jdenovais at gmail dot com
I really like this explanation about white middle class fears about "being the top", and I wonder if this is why my parenting style (and some of my white middle class peers) has become more removed from the rat race in some ways? For me, I've realized that "the best" gave me massive amounts of anxiety and depression and I don't want that for my daughter.
I've enrolled my daughter in a Montessori school and I love that it's "child-centered" learning and not about competing against peers to be the best. She's in one extracurricular activity (swim lessons) and loves it and if she ever wants to stop then we'll stop. I'm not interested in pushing her to be the best academically or athletically for a miniscule chance at a full-ride scholarship...but I realize how much privilege comes with that sentence. I can be less academically and athletically minded because as of now I'm on a path to be able to afford community college and/or state university for my one child (again, another privilege to have only one child!)
I'm starting to see this with other families, like stay-at-home moms homeschooling their kids so that they can have an individualized education that is tailored to them. Why force your kid(s) to compete in a toxic environment 6-7 hours a day that makes them want to die by suicide when they can have individualized work that they can complete at home in half the time that allows them to thrive?
Great read, with research that helps contextualize this trend! I first became a parent in 2000 when the culture was shifting to a more anxious style of parenting, at least for some. Clearly, this growing group of “security moms” was found more in two parent families with six-figure incomes times two. At 25, as a college educated married mom, I fell into that group but had no frame reference in my own family. My own mom never went to college, had her first at 19 and later divorced.
I’ve given a lot of thought to what parenting was like in the aughts, and have recently written about it. Looking back, I can laugh at a lot of things. But not everything. So much anxiety was needless. And my oldest Gen Z kid tells me, it wasn't so great for them either.
In my experience, a lot had to do with having a new generation of highly educated moms that professionalized motherhood. And then the internet took this to a whole new level. Every decision could be researched and quantified and compared.
But eventually I’ve learned that so many of the complicated parts of being a parent have nothing to do with the kids. Our parenting style is more about our own personality, privilege and need to feel validated. Over the years, I’ve gotten better at recognizing and owning my deeper motives as a parent. And as I do, being a parent feels a lot less complicated.
"Professionalization of motherhood" is a really great way of putting it — and that impulse itself is, of course, in part a reaction to the degradation/devaluation of motherhood (even though we supposedly value the work of mothers above all else, etc etc.)
Your next book title? I’d also be curious to know how these poll results break down among women who also work outside the home. I once read about the term “second shift” and the transition period between coming home from outside paid work and unpaid work from home. I was acculturated to believe I could have it all - the career and the family. But I always felt as though I was not doing either “job” well. I was too burned out trying to do both. Even the vernacular in my head supports your thesis.
Yes! I think parenting is often a great magnifying lens for your own "stuff". I am my most anxious as a parent the closer the kids edge to the times of my childhood/teen years that were hardest for me or when I see them starting to grapple with stuff that took me years to figure out. Stopping and recognizing my stuff versus their actual lived experience is really, really helpful.
That rings completely true to me.
My first child was born in 2004 when I was 30, so we're close to the same age. I have often expressed gratitude that I began parenting before Pinterest and Facebook so that some parenting patterns could be set before social media. I also think that highly-educated moms who stay at home can feel an extra pressure to professionalize motherhood - and monetize it.
I can so relate to this! My oldest was also born in 2000. I really felt a TON of peer pressure, but as a working mom in a community where at the time that wasn’t the norm, I felt I was damned no matter what I did out of the gate.
I was also lucky: I had friends who didn’t work and were very cavalier so the judgement never felt universal, and a partner who did more than almost any others I knew (and who had been raised by a powerhouse of a working mom). And the older the kids got, the more I appreciated hearing about all the different experiences, and the less I felt like taking on anyone’s judgement about me as a parent.
I don’t know if I have had time to really reflect on my deeper motivations, but I can say that i find it impossible to reflect on my experience without ALSO reflecting on the ginormous role gender role expectations play. Which I think we feel most acutely when we bump into the edges that make others uncomfortable.
Darn right about the “ginormous role gender role expectations play.” Ginormous is the perfect descriptor!
As a white woman who has chosen not to have children, I’m seeing my decision somewhat differently now than simply not being wired to be a mom or too anxiety prone to adequately manage the stress and pressure of parenting, much less performative, intensive parenting.
For so many reasons, I would very likely not be able to reproduce the socioeconomic position and privilege that I grew up. And that as a white mom, I would be “expected” to provide. As the breadwinner in my relationship, that pressure on me would be even more amplified.
Maybe my decision to not have children is at least partly influenced by wanting to avoid the “ordeal” of “going backwards.”
I am also a white woman who is not having kids and I too would not have been able to give a child the upper middle class upbringing I had. I have never really thought about that as a conscious part of my decision (other than being sad when I was still considering it that I would not be able to provide a college education for a kid the way my parents provided one for me). I am the youngest by a bit of 3 siblings and I would have been the only one “going backwards” as my siblings have much higher means.
Was the an unconscious part of my choice, I don’t know.
It’s a strange and vulnerable thing to reflect on.
Insert emoji for loud applause.
I really appreciated the last line of this piece for its acknowledgement of the role of fear (deep fear) as the lifeline for a great deal of suffering in the present and for its perpetuation by validating oppressive systems, all for the "good" of "my" children, "my family." It is truly a myopic perspective that needs calling out. Everyone's children deserve better. (Even if we are not all parents, we have all been children.)
I've been thinking a lot lately about people who say they need to prioritize their families about all others. My MIL says often, "You have to do what's right for your family," to justify what her children sometimes do that is not right for others. It's also the ethos that has so many more SUVs on the road, making people in non-SUVs less safe in an accident and contributing to much more climate cost and wear and tear to the roads. Etc. etc. We live in an interconnected world.
Agree with many points you’re making here, and always a fan of Pew research for the reasons you outlined. But I do have a few points that I’d like to share based on my experience raising three boys.
First, the general argument about families wanting to preserve privilege for their kids? Still 90% socially acceptable, and largely understandable—but I don’t think I’d link so tightly to parents assuming that there’s a zero sum game afoot. In my experience there are sub-currents and a lot of regional variations that make this way less of a monolith. (I would love to see the data broken out by region and party affiliation as well.) I have so many friends who are excited for their kids to pursue jobs in the trades, including many who are doing so after completing college degrees. Similarly, the get-into-the-best-college game seems to be waning (thank all the deities for that one!) in part because of the very real challenges of student debt, and in part because I think there’s a growing understanding that pushing kids in a particular direction is generally a bad idea and leads to… depression and anxiety. The kids will get where they’re going to go on their own timelines. Sure, there are some kids who are driven by their own desires in that direction ON THE RIGHT TIMELINE to achieve that outcome. But there are also way more kids who aren’t, and that’s fine. I think the pandemic is also softening this particular pressure point: so many kids are dealing with aftershocks educationally, socially and emotionally—who would add pressure under those circumstances?? Finally, as a transplanted east coaster, the pressure here in the Pacific Northwest may be more than it was a generation ago, but it’s still pale in comparison to the east coast, where college-related status (for kids AND parents—ugh!) is generally a much more explicit deal.
My second point is about the gender breakdown. Our family is in the minority where I am the breadwinner (and have been since our second kid was born) and my husband is the primary at-home parent with a more flexible work schedule. I would have loved to see the data about mothers’ and fathers’ perceptions split by work status as well as kids’ age. I suspect that would be revealing (I haven’t dug to see if that is avail). I also think it’s worth noting that a lot of the pressure I experienced around parenting was feedback from other mothers, especially when the kids were little. Communities have parenting norms, and I didn’t fit within mine—and wowza did some other moms make some really memorably strong negative judgements about me as a mother (usually without having any context). I think there’s some really interesting work happening around the deconstruction of momfluencers, but gender in parenting generally is an under-explored area. Dads don’t seem to experience the cultural weight of other dads’ perceptions; moms definitely do. That’s worth discussion. I also can say from experience that as kids get older, the limitations of parenting to drive particular outcomes (part of what sucks about the little kids stage is an assumption that you CAN control outcomes!) become increasingly clear, and the peer pressure to be a certain way—or have your kids be a certain way—drops precipitously. Which, frankly, is a blessing.
The final point (if anyone is still reading! I know this is going on and on) I would like to make is that while the “all of the time” and “most of the time” had dramatic differences by race, there was surprising uniformity if you add the two top box scores together. I think that’s worth noting. I also wonder how the data changes if you sort by work status (full time vs part time vs other including stay at home) and age of kids. Little kids are darling! And also I can barely remember anything from that stage? And had anyone asked me these questions at that stage, I would likely have been in “most of the time” or worse, depending on the week.
All of this is hugely complicated, and the deeply established cultural patterns around parenting are confounding. In an era where the cultural power of evangelicalism and “traditional family values” are on the rise, I have a hard time seeing how we work for change outside of electing people who can see more paths (vote blue, friends). Or by being the contrarian family who sets things up in a different way. Finally, every kid is different—with often radically different needs and desires, so whatever theories you have as a parent are probably going to get jettisoned anyhow, especially when they don’t serve your particular kid. I guess my sense is that we all want the kids to be alright, and that can happen in an almost infinite number of ways.
I see the 'best college at any cost" thing push varied across region too. We have lots of friends in both California (bay area) and the Northwest and when our kids were high school seniors the experiences were very different despite almost all being upper-middle-class families with high-achieving, AP-taking, multiple-extracurricular-participating kids. The NorCal kids had a lot of pressure to get into highly competitive UCs and other top schools and they had so much stress and, ultimately, disappointment. The PNW kids almost all got into their first choice schools because those schools were, like, Seattle U or U of Montana. At least in this pandemic era I am encouraged to see a growing awareness of the importance of mental health and the danger of debt lead to a moderating of the college acceptance game pressures.
Love your points here - especially looking at age ranges of children and yes, the fact that every child is different! I was thinking about that while reading this: I have children with autism and other diagnoses. It is all much more complex when you figure these things in.
Same, and wow does it change your perspective! Solidarity. ❤️
Yes, this!
Yes! I mentioned this in another comment but I agree that the tide is changing a bit due to the rise of mental health issues like depression and anxiety.
I'm a millennial parent and unsurprisingly some of my white middle class peers (including me) are sending their kids to Montessori school or homeschooling them to avoid the toxic competition in public schools. Undergrad and grad school were mental health nightmares for me. I don't want that for my daughter. I want her to love learning for learning's sake and to internalize that her value and worth is not tied to her productivity/grades/athletic ability/physical appearance.
However, I realize there's a lot of privilege in these mindsets. Private school is a lot of money, and having a parent stay at home to homeschool requires financial security, too.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the big anxieties (jobs, education) and how they show up in the little anxieties (signing up for stuff). A lot of this has shown up in the “first-come-first-serve” race for summer camp/swim lessons/afterschool care, where the demand and supply are just nowhere close to being in sync, and the loss of this one thing can spiral out into much bigger consequences (e.g. no afterschool or summer care requires some combination of more money or more time, neither of which anyone really has!) There’s also a weird “locked-in” effect, where if you get in in time a, you are able to hold on to that spot for as long as you want it but which also has the consequence of shutting people out who literally missed a memo, or just moved to town, or had something in the background change. I’ve been quietly advocating for more things to be lottery based, just to take away the need to be at a computer at x time on x day otherwise your entire summer or school year is borked. It would likely create other anxieties, but it feels like a way to just turn the volume down a little bit.
Was talking with some mom friends about how a lot of the Seattle camps have moved to the lottery system, and how a certain set of parents are UP IN ARMS about no longer being able to totally master/dominate the system.
This is a huge topic in my community right now. We’re registering - or attempting to register - for after-school care for the first time this year. They just changed it from a Monday at 8am signup to a lottery. I think either way creates a lot of anxiety, but the lottery is more fair.
Our local baseball program just opened up the boundaries, and didn’t do staggered registration, leading to tons of people from the immediate area being shut out after years of participation. (Of course the gossip is that the new president of the org lives outside the former boundaries.)
All of this of course reinforces your point that there is an imbalance between the supply (of teachers, space, public facilities) and demand.
Isn’t all of it missing the point a little though? If 50% of kids need after school/camp/whatever why do we make enough slots for 25%? We don’t run public schools that way. There should just be sufficient access for whoever needs it.
I agree 100%. Our kids go to public school, and the after school care is a service of the district, but isn’t funded by the govt in the way that school is. It’s all part of the bigger issue that we don’t see childcare as a public good, which ends up disproportionately affecting women, and especially single moms.
Absolutely this — I didn't get into it in the piece, but all of these failures affect single parents the most. There's a reason it's so much easier and more attractive to become a single parent outside in, say, Sweden!
Right. I am financially relatively privileged and paying for childcare is still a major strain for us and still something I am always barely holding together - like why is there a half day every month in our district? For me the anxiety about camp signups is really just about the fact that there aren’t enough slots and I have no backup plan because our family is far away and not reliably helpful even when they are nearby. I used to kind of laugh at the crazy mom stereotypes but then I had a kid and realized the system makes you crazy.
In many districts, those half days exist to allow for meetings and planning time. This is in lieu of keeping teachers late into the evening for these things.
I think this is actually a pretty great distillation of what makes things feel untenable (and also creates animus between parents and the school district). If we have accessible and affordable afterschool and break care *as infrastructure* — aka, funded in a way that makes it available to all, like other countries with our wealth level — then a half day for teachers to have additional prep and meetings would be celebrated.
I mean, whether lottery is more fair than first come first serve. Either way someone is going to get screwed. One may be marginally more “fair” but we need to treat childcare at hours that match work hours like more than just something nice to have.
Definitely don't think lottery is the solution — more like it takes away a small amount of power from those privileged parents who've figured out how to "master" the system. The real solution is affordable, high-quality after-school and summer care for all, and because child care is a "market failure" (it cannot be supported by the market, similar to, say, road maintenance, and public schooling) it must be funded publicly (again, like every other country of a similar GDP as the U.S.)
I'll be honest, I don't see a lot of parents who are gaming the system where I am. Granted, I am far west enough of Boston that there is not the level of cutthroat competition that I am told exists in the fancier suburbs. I just see desperate, exhausted parents who can't afford $400+ a week of camp all summer long refreshing their rec department account on the day camp opens.
I don’t think the idea of “mastering” the system is gaming it at all. There is just an acknowledgement that to be “good” at successfully enrolling amidst these circumstances often requires job flexibility, and the wherewithal to plan for all the possible outcomes (easier in a two-parent, middle to upper-middle class household with reasonable work schedules etc etc).
I think there is a fine line between acknowledging there is privilege at issue here, but also that the system is fucked for most of us due to a lack of infrastructure.
I’ve worked in the public elementary education sector in various roles for almost two decades and I can offer some insight into this.
First of all, the reason why after care slots are in short supply has a lot to do with staffing. It’s hard to find people who can and want to work 3-4 hours a day in the late afternoon for fairly menial pay. Considering childcare infrastructure and having funds to pay these workers more would help.
Staffing shortages are also hitting public schools for similar reasons. However, aftercare and public schools are governed by two different sets of regulations in many states. Public schools are expected to accommodate all students who enroll, staffing shortage or not. Legal maximums for students per adult don’t exist in many places. Aftercare programs are often licensed as child care facilities. Most states actually have more stringent rules for adult to child ratios in child care settings. My state even has legal ratios for square footage per child for child care centers. For example, the aftercare program at my school uses a classroom as a licensed space. The state says that classroom can accommodate 24 children as a child care setting. However, during the school day, the same classroom holds 33 children and that is perfectly legal.
I want to scream about the summer camp scramble. Nightmares.
I know that Anne Helen knows this, but just to be clear: the reason that Pew doesn't show even more breakdowns by race and class is likely that their sample size wasn't large enough to estimate responses that precisely. The sample size required for small group estimation is very very large.
Thank you for making this clear!
I would love to see a question that asks, “What role does family play in your children’s upbringing?” In my cultural background, family played an enormous role, across multiple generations. It provided certainty and stability, two things that are so valuable in any household. My parents were not stressed out by having to pay for and manage child care, which is an enormous worry for so many people, especially single parents.
Ever since Jessica Calarco pointed me to the data on the correlation between education level and distance from family members, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it — that would've been a great additional question (I want a Pew survey all about who and how parents find care for their kids!)
It’s not just childcare, either, it’s other domestic care tasks like meals, laundry, housekeeping. Who is making dinner every night/how many dinners per week is an individual parent responsible for?
YEPPPPP. My mom does our laundry for us every week. That alone is a huge help in helping our family function.
That’s where there have to be honest conversations between couples about tasks and finances. The kids can participate, too and I think they might enjoy being involved. My friends who grew up in restaurants all had responsibilities as soon as they were old enough to write and make change.
As someone who lives 9 hours away from the closest family member, yes to this point! I'm always a little jealous of the "dropped the kids off with their grandparents for the weekend" crowd, to be honest.
Yes!!! I also lived 6+ hours away from family from the time my oldest was 6mos until he was 8-9? And when we did move back around my family, we had been out of the picture for so long, and my family hated my ex... so, basically even when we were around family, I had zero help/support from them. That was the most challenging aspect for me.
That sounds so hard. I’m sorry your family wasn’t kinder.
I'm curious about this - we've always lived near my in-laws, who have been very caring but are older and less able to engage than my parents. I have a friend who has had no family nearby, and she's so resentful. What I'm curious about is how found family and other adoptive communities function to replace biological family. I know that I'm lucky to have family who watches my kids, but I'm frustrated with my friend's unwillingness to acknowledge the help she receives from her friends.
Agreed, especially given how the presence of an extended family/neighborhood community can intersect with race and class demographics. I think that’s a major piece missing from the Pew research.
I wonder what answers would have come up if they asked about financial stress related to parenting? like, I wonder if the reason lower income parents report more positive emotions about parenting is that they see the stress they're feeling about money as financial stress, not part of parenting their kid. even if they are worried about being able to provide for their kid, the phrasing of the questions may have made people not consider financial stress when answering some of them. ex: my mom experienced struggling to pay rent as a single parent and getting legal action for child support as issues with money and my dad, not issues with us, even though we were the main thing she was spending money on. I mean, it's pretty obvious that lower income people would be more worried about finances but I do think it's a missing piece here.
I’m not a parent, but I’ve worked in elementary education for 18 years as a teacher and administrator. I’ve seen much of the anxious style of American parenting play out from varied vantage points. I’ve worked in urban, suburban, and rural schools in three different states. I’ve also served schools at a wide variety of socioeconomic levels.
I currently work as an elementary school assistant principal in a large urban school district. We were one of the few large urban districts in the country to offer in-person schooling to elementary students for the entire 2020-2021 school year. The reactions of families to this plan seems to mirror some of the insight in this survey.
During the 2020-2021 school year, elementary families in my district could elect to enroll in in-person or online classes provided through their neighborhood school. Despite the fact that many advocates of opening in-person school pushed a narrative that schools had to reopen to protect vulnerable students living in poverty.
When school opened, it actually turned out that schools in the more affluent neighborhoods saw a higher percentage of their students return to in-person learning. At my school, which primarily serves lower income families, more than 60% of students were enrolled in remote instruction. Families cited various reasons for these decisions, but an overwhelming theme is that many of these families experienced COVID personally due to employment outside the home in the early days of the pandemic. These experiences led to fear for the safety of their children.
Parents in the more affluent areas were more likely to be working remotely or in jobs where they saw less exposure to COVID and probably had fewer personal experiences with severe outcomes from the virus. I would also guess that some of the comments about trying to maintain positions of privilege also impacted the decisions of more affluent families to send their children to in-person school.
The data on "the most important" vs "one of the most important" aspects of identity is really interesting. I feel like I know many white, wealthy moms who would say "the most important" as part of the performance/the gendered expectations around motherhood (note: I'm the mother of a toddler, so most moms I know are, too). I find myself often grappling with my own feelings - not wanting parenthood to be "the most important" part of me for fear of losing other aspects of myself (not just my ability to be human capital) and not wanting to subscribe to such performance/expectations, though also fearing discussing how important it is to me for being perceived/judged as "just a mom," which is its own performance and buying into sexist notions of motherhood being lesser than? It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't feeling (which also betrays my own socioeconomic status related anxieties!)
Bookmarking this to revisit annually if I have kids. Also highly recommend Courtney Martin’s substack and book on this topic:
https://courtney.substack.com/
This new data casts light on how much of a perceptual gap there is between older Americans who set and control social policy in the country vs. the younger end who are tearing kids. The greater emphasis on family values among Hispanic and Black parents today is not something older Americans can understand easily. 82% of Americans aged 45-74 are white, for example. They live in a 1980s world, racially speaking, while the country’s ethnic mix and approach to family have moved on.
What a great conversation, thank you so much for this! I'm so interested in the group dynamics that make any kind of opting-out feel so impossible for these white bourgeois families. I know a lot of it has to do with "I want to do what's best for my kid" but at this point, there is so much mounting evidence that stress and anxiety are major problems for these kids. So at what point are the returns sufficiently diminished where opting out feels like a smart choice? Rhetorical question obvi, but one that I hope we all learn more about.
The "streaker" link did not appear in my email, so I'm appending it here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/06/what-became-of-the-oscar-streaker
ugh typo *Anne Helen said (sorry!!!)
this happens all the time, truly no worries!