What Are We Actually Talking About When We Talk About Intensive Parenting?
What does "child-centered, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive" look like today?
First: This week’s episode of The Culture Study Podcast is so FUN. The topic (fan fiction) is fun, the co-hosts (longtime fanfic readers and writers and hosts of the podcast Mind the Tags) are hilarious, and we managed to talk extensively about taste hierarchies AND a Hermione/Draco Malfoy fanfic. We worked hard to make this one accessible to newbies *and* compelling to longtime practitioners/readers, so click the magic link to listen wherever you get your podcasts….or you can find it here.
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Last week, when I was outlining the tenets of millennial hobby energy, I couldn’t shake the feeling that so many of its impulses — to optimize, to aestheticize, to buy a bunch of stuff to feel like you’re doing it right, the performance of the hobby on social media, the tendency to make your hobby your entire personality, to equate “doing it on hard mode” as doing it right — also describe the set of bourgeois parenting practices identified as “intensive parenting.”
I dropped that observation very casually in the piece, wondering if/whether readers would take it anywhere. The first comment to engage with that idea went in that direction surprised me:
I would like to unpack the idea of intensive parenting as a hobby and as a concept. I feel like it's often used with negative connotations, i.e. for parents who are just hovering and constantly engaged and thinking about their kids and have no other interests etc. I recognize this might apply with older kids. But I can't see how parenting very young kids is anything but intensive! They need constant supervision so they don't destroy themselves or the stuff around them, or both.
I can do the supervision myself or I can ask someone else to do it, so maybe the idea is that I'm not willing to ask someone else to do it, but asking someone else to do it costs money or social capital. (And honestly the amount of time you usually get in exchange for what feels like a lot of money or social capital is so meager.) I guess I just feel like intensive parenting is often positioned as a choice, but it doesn't feel like one with kids under 4-ish (increase that age by whatever for kids who are neurodiverse or have other special/medical needs). So hobby feels like not the right thing...
You can read the conversation that followed here, but it made me think there’s more thinking to do here when it comes to what “intensive parenting” actually describes, and how we wield the term in conversation and in pieces like this one. As other commenters pointed out, you can understand that it’s grounded in sociology — and also understand the ways in which it’s now wielded to disparage a set of parenting practices that can feel difficult if not impossible to disengage, depending on your race/class/education/location.
I’ll start with some basics of how I understand it — and will be very curious to hear yours.
I was not trained as a sociologist, so I didn’t come across the term “intensive parenting” until I started really digging into the literature about parenting practices from the period when millennials were growing up. I was lucky to have a bunch of sociologists directing me towards various texts on Old Twitter (RIP), including Sharon Hays’ The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (hall of fame ‘90s cover, see below) and Annette Laureu’s Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life.
Hays observed the norms of college-educated, upwardly mobile middle-class professionals that were calcifying in the ‘90s and grouped them together under the umbrella term “intensive parenting.” Her definition is, quite frankly, a banger: intensive parenting is “child-centered, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive.” Just spot fucking on.
The only thing I’d update, if there was possibly room in such an already packed and otherwise perfect list, is that intensive parenting is also performance-oriented, unequally distributed [in heterosexual partnerships], and anxiety-producing.
Worrying about preschool placement is intensive parenting. Endlessly researching johnny jump-ups — or any number of other implements that aren’t necessary but feel necessary — also intensive parenting. Reading Emily Oster is meant to make you feel like less of an intensive parent but data-based childrearing practices has a real Intensive Parenting vibe. Those apps that tell you exactly how much your kid ate at preschool snack, re-orienting your life around a kid’s travel sports schedule, exclusively buying wooden toys — all components of intensive parenting.
But asking what your kid wants to watch on TV and then watching it with them and having a conversation afterwards — that’s also intensive parenting. So is asking their input on big family decisions, planning and executing ongoing conversations about gender identity and fluidity, and giving kids a lot of space for grief. Intensive parenting isn’t harsh, or regimented, or (explicitly) obsessed with outcomes. Gentle parenting is intensive parenting, for example. But intensive parenting also has implicit expectations about where all this parenting will lead: better outcomes.
I realize that you can make a case for the benefit of each of these shifts, even the creepy surveillance cameras that make your kid in their crib look like they’re on a gas station closed-circuit feed. I’m not here to argue about any of that (truly, you have the rest of the internet to stoke those arguments). I’m just underlining the shift: this style of parenting focuses on the child’s needs above the parent’s, is obsessed with “expertise” (data-based or vibes-based), dominates the parent’s mental and physical space, and requires tremendous capital to execute.
There are similarities between intensive parenting and a hobby — only it’s a hobby you don’t get to choose, other than deciding to become a parent, because depending on where you live, there is an understanding that failing to follow the spoken and unspoken norms of intensive parenting are tantamount to neglect. In some locales, not supervising your kids at all times isn’t just “bad parenting,” it’s illegal — and all the more dangerous if you’re a parent whose race or immigration status makes them far more likely to be targeted by child services.
Intensive parenting, in other words, has been not just normalized, but naturalized: the (best) way to raise a kid, regardless of whether or not its norms are attainable for you.
Some people argue that intensive parenting should be the norm: if you have the time and resources available to intensively parent your kids, then why not do it? Why not give and get your kids “the best”? Why not maximize how many non-work hours you can spend enriching their lives? You had the kid — shouldn’t it be normal to orient your life around their needs?
And this is where the thinking begins to splinter:
If only people with abundant resources (time, money, mobility, social capital) can intensive parent the “right” way, then other parents without those resources are understood as “worse” parents
“Doing everything right” parenting-wise leaves little room to think about less tangible components of parenting, just generally, like how to be incredibly present, exploring failure and its rewards, etc.
Part of children’s developmental process relies on figuring out limits, social hierarchies, and safety outside of direct supervision — so how do you foster independence, curiosity, adventure, bravery, confidence, etc., when less supervision = bad parenting?
Because parents are exhausted from the norms of constant supervision, they rely on screens to give them a break — but screentime becomes pathologized (another way to be a bad parent) while also not exactly providing the same developmental experiences as being “un” supervised
And are you even intensive parenting correctly if others don’t observe and acknowledge your parenting? Performing parenthood becomes yet another form of labor on top of the parenting itself.
Because intensive parenting is so emotionally absorbing and time consuming, its discussion — how you’re doing it, how you should be doing it — becomes the center of your relationship with your co-parent and your other parent friends (I know this seems utterly natural, but it wasn’t always)
If a kid is high-needs, however you want to understand that adjective — do you even have an option not to intensive parent?
The denigration of intensive parenting leads to the fetishization of free-range and/or “1950s style” parenting (or before; see: “when I was a kid, I came home to an empty house five days a week and ended up fine”) which sucked in its own ways (and often involved parentification of older siblings)
Because of the, well, intense demands of intensive parenting, it also creates a tremendous amount of anxiety amongst those equipped to pursue it, because there’s always a sense that you’re not doing it intensively enough (or, depending on your perspective, that you’re doing it too intensely)
Intensive parenting is highly individualistic — it’s all about “what’s best for our kid,” not “what’s best for all the kids,” an ideological position that contributes to the gutting of public services in favor of private, expensive, and highly controllable options (schools, after-school programs, camps, summer care)
But what if “what’s best for all kids” is truly shit for your kid?
If you’re striving for “the best,” that means that some people will always be excluded from the services that facilitate it — which often transforms parenting into a competitive, antagonistic process, instead of a collaborative, community-based one
“Ideal” intensive parenting requires men to parent significantly more than previous generations, but because intensive parenting is so time and labor intensive, the majority of that labor still falls on women (see especially: mental load/planning components which are central to intensive parenting, like summer camp registrations)
Intensive parenting norms implicitly position children as a product that can be successfully optimized — you don’t have to say that aloud for the kid to start to understand as much (best evidence: millennials who were intensively parented!)
But again: what’s the alternative?
Going through these arguments, I find myself returning to the title of Hays’ book: intensive norms transform parenting into a practice constantly at odds with itself. It is a cultural contradiction. It makes pretty much everyone feel like shit — not just because it makes parenting hard, but because it makes it more difficult to access (or normalize accessing) the resources that would make it easier. It also doesn’t make kids happier, even if evidence does show it makes them “more successful” and wealthier, which are often equated with “happier.”
I’ve tried to peel back the layers of intensive parenting to consider what parenting is even for: we want kids who grow up feeling cared for, safe in the spaces they call home, and free to be who they are. I think most parents would also agree that they want their kids to be kind, empathetic, and curious. How do we cultivate those norms? You can’t optimize a kid’s kindness. You can’t buy into a zipcode that makes your kid curious. In fact, trying to do either will often make them the opposite.
Instead, we group all of those basic desired outcomes into a bucket called “grow up to be happy” — and then interpret “happiness” as “reproducing or surpassing class status.” Which is so very American: when your class status is always in question, when you’re terrified of losing your family’s position or your children falling backwards, you grasp at anything — including and especially parenting norms — that promise security.
To me, the best of intensive parenting is the recognition that kids are humans deserving of care and consideration, not accessories or laborers or afterthoughts. The worst of it is an acute symptom of income inequality that also works to widen the chasm that causes it. Put differently: we intensive parent because being poor in this country is terrifying, but intensive parenting practices also ossify the system in which it is all the more terrifying to be poor.
So now I want to hear from you: what are you talking about when you talk about intensive parenting?
How do you personally understand intensive parenting, outside of Hays’ definition of “child-centered, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive” ?
What does intensive parenting look like, right now, in the spaces you occupy?
How has it changed over the last twenty years — or even the last two?
If you’re parenting a kid with high needs — what do most conversations (including this one) about intensive parenting leave out? What do you wish they’d consider?
If you’ve worked to reject some components of intensive parenting — what privileges allowed you to do it without fear of being labeled a “bad” parent?
If your parents are immigrants, how did their parenting practices deviate from or resemble American intensive parenting practices?
If you’re parenting somewhere where intensive parenting is not the norm — what’s your perspective on how it’s been normalized in places like the U.S.?
If you’re not a parent but are a part of other parents’ lives (aka, all of us)— what’s hard about all of this to understand, and what would you like to understand better?
Or take this an entirely different direction — just know that I wouldn’t pose these questions if I didn’t have abundant evidence that the Culture Study commenting community knows how to handle tough, sensitive shit like parenting norms without this turning into every other discussion of parenting on the internet (aka, a hellscape).
In other words, I’ll be monitoring comments closely. So spend time before commenting, be generous in the grace you extend towards other commenters, and as always: don’t be butts and let’s try really hard to keep this one of the good places on the internet.
And if you want to join this conversation — and all the other ones we have here at Culture Study, where the comments always number in the hundreds if not the thousands, become a paid subscriber today. You can get all manner of advice, suggestions for quick work lunches that require no effort, directions to the best corners of Reddit, a wedding planning concierge, and coming next week: a collection of companies that have provided *exemplary* service, local and national and global.
Finally, some additional reading, if you want to dig in a little more before diving into the comments:
And two hugely influential pieces for me:
Hanna Rosin, “The Overprotected Kid” (and a good follow-up: “The Gravitational Pull of Supervising Kids All the Time”)
Kim Brooks, “The Day I Left My Son in the Car”
I have two kids, 8 and 3. I had always planned to be a very hands-off parent and let them free range and such. What I’ve come to learn is that as a society, we are consistently failing children, and that leaves a huge gap that parents then need to fill. The public schools (at least in my area) are failing, so I spend massive amounts of time researching alternative school options, tutors, etc, to help my child with a learning disability.
Children in the neighborhood aren’t out in front of their homes playing which makes it unsafe for my kids to be the only ones playing unsupervised. We are in a west coast city struggling to manage its mental illness and unhoused populations and my kids see a lot of rough stuff I wish they didn’t.
Everyone is so busy, it’s hard to schedule play dates and when I do, they are highly parent intensive. It’s hard to hang back and chill when the other parent is sitting smack in the middle of the kids playing.
Basically, the norms and institutions that used to support our children are not there anymore, and so parents have to fill the gap. Thus I am learning to do pretend play with my children and engage with them on a level I never thought I would have to.
I realize this sounds bleak, but it isn’t. I truly love spending time with my children and supporting them. I’m just grappling with the reality of parenting not aligning with how I had planned to do it.
So many feelings on this (I'm a young Gen Xer who had a kid late; so I'm parenting alongside almost all millennials in suburban NYC where it is.... something). Expectations are really high for everything related to parents/parenting - to the extent that they hold PTA meetings during the school day; regularly schedule a full month of school events in May/June during the day and expect parents to come; the majority of kids are on a travel team by age 6; and so many people think their kid is the smartest, most athletic and going to get a full ride to X university. The kids are over-scheduled and the expectations are high on them (and on the parenting that goes into them). As I said, it's ... a lot.
I spent the first few years of my son's life trying to do all the things: the gentle parenting, the being present at all times, the enriching activities (expensive mommy and me music classes; the top pre-school in the area; the shame for putting him in daycare full-time at 6 months; the sports before he could walk; the no-screens and only enriching materials; etc.). Honestly: it sucked every single moment of free time out of me and I felt like I lost myself in it. It also led to constant worry about whether we were doing enough in this highly-competitive region.
Here's the deal: with some self-reflection and a lot of work = that's not where we've landed.
As upper-middle class parents (so there's a lot of privilege in this), we've kind of tried to take the best of how our Boomer parents raised us and the intensive parenting we see around us. I do not free range parent, but I also have stepped back - intentionally - from the intense parenting rat race.
I like to think of it as "rational parenting." This is what it looks like for us (and it looks different for everyone):
* We've set the expectation that we're the parents and he's the kid. He doesn't get to be included in everything (every conversation is not about him or centered on him). Part of our job is to say "NO" to him and help foster some resilience.
* We try to communicate the WHY of decisions to him, to set boundaries, but to also foster critical thinking and independence
* Our child doesn't get to dictate where we eat, where we vacation, what we do every single weekend, etc. BUT, we also want him to have a voice ( tiny example: each week we plan out meals for the week - the kid gets to choose one a week that goes into our family meal plan - otherwise, he eats what's there - and OMG, I sound like my mom sometimes).
* We are not setting the kid loose in the neighborhood like our parents did with us, but he can play outside unsupervised, he can go around the corner to a friends house without us hovering, etc. Another example: if we're in a store - you bet I will send him up to purchase his own book without me nearby)
* The kid - he's 10 - gets an allowance and gets to decide how to spend it. He wants extra snacks at school? Cool - he eats half his allowance each month to do it. If he then wants a XMen97 figurine that we don't want to buy him ... he has to think about how he can save for it.
* He knows that we will not be at every. single. event. We come when we can, but we both work full-time and it's just not reasonable for us to be that physically present all the time. (Now, do I also co-chair the Scholastic Book Fair at his school - yes, yes I do - so, we're present when we can be and we try to make choices about what we value).
* We do communicate to him that we both work full-time and that we like and value our jobs. He's the most important thing to us, but we also like what we do each day and that with that comes responsibilities. We cannot be at every single school event. We cannot attend every single birthday party. Sometimes we have to work and we have responsibilities toward our co-workers and our students.
* Gentle parenting isn't always possible and that's okay. Frankly, we have a strong-willed kid (cough,because,genetics,cough) and they can be tough cookies to raise. They become great adults, but for us, we had to figure out what worked with our kid and NOT feel guilty that it didn't match the rest of the world's expectations for it and for us.
* We are trying to raise him to understand that he has responsibilities. Right now, that means he studies for tests, he shows up for practices when he's committed to a team (but, we don't force him to sign up for something again once he's completed it).
* By the same token: we do not stand over him doing homework or sweat small stuff. If he gets things wrong on homework = fine. His teacher needs to know when he's not grasping something. I will help if he asks for help (though I get a lot of, "it's not the 1980s mom" lip from him - LOL). If he comes home with an 88 on a test and is mad - he knows he has to study more next time. That personal responsibility is a part of growing up and being self-motivated. I don't want my kid motivated because he's being pushed by us and forced to do things.
* The kid has agency in his activities - we've told him he has to do one thing with his mind (he chose to do cello at school) and one thing with his body (he's swimming on a very local, non-travel swim team). We've told him we do not care if he is good at these things, but that we want him to enjoy them and to do his best. He also knows that we cannot be at everything.
* We have ZERO expectations of a scholarship for college for any of this (and, as college faculty, we know these things are not critical for most students). The kid will go to school based on academics (again, privilege at work - so we recognize this) and we are saving - we hope enough - to send him to an in-state public university. If he wants to go elsewhere - cool. But he'll need to make up the difference through scholarships and loans.
All of this to say: it's so HARD to navigate all of this. We want the best for our kids and I genuinely believe that intensive parenting comes from a good place. And I take the point that all parenting is intensive. However, for us, knowing what we see among the students we teach and the kind of adult we want our kid to be (loving, independent, kind, resourceful), we've had to adapt. And in doing so, we've found what works for the kind of kid we have (which is intensive work in its own way) and for the kind of people we are.