Dear Kindergarten Parents and Guardians,
We hope this letter serves to help you better understand how the demands of the 21st century are changing schools and, more specifically, to clarify misperceptions about the Kindergarten show. It is most important to keep in mind that this issue is not unique to Elwood. Although the movement toward more rigorous learning standards has been in the national news for more than a decade, the changing face of education is beginning to feel unsettling for some people. What and how we teach is changing to meet the demands of a changing world.
The reason for eliminating the Kindergarten show is simple. We are responsible for preparing children for college and career with valuable lifelong skills and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers, and problem solvers. Please do not fault us for making professional decisions that we know will never be able to please everyone. But know that we are making these decisions with the interests of all children in mind.
The above letter was sent to parents of kindergarteners at Harley Avenue Primary School in Elwood, New York, in April of 2014 to confirm rumors that the school would not be going ahead with its annual play.1 The reason: These kids could not spare the two days off from their regularly scheduled work. The changing face of education is beginning to feel unsettling for some people. What and how we teach is changing to meet the demands of a changing world. Changes, changes, changes: It appears the kindergarten training of yesteryear isn’t good enough. The implication is that the very children themselves aren’t good enough without some serious improvement.
The “changes” are well known enough that the administrators at Harley Avenue felt comfortable using them to justify themselves without elaborating much. But what are these differences, exactly? Why and how are twenty-first-century American kids required to undergo more training than their predecessors? And what are the consequences for a generation raised on problem-solving to the exclusion of play? These questions are almost never at the center of popular discussions about contemporary childhood. Instead, authorities from the Brookings Institution2 to Time magazine3 to Matt Yglesias4 have called for an end to summer vacation and the imposition of year-round compulsory schooling.
These drastic changes in the character of childhood are having and will continue to have a corresponding effect on society as the kids age. If America is going to reap what it sows, so far we seem only interested in how much we can count on producing, rather than what the hell it is we’re growing. To adopt the scholastic euphemism “enrichment,” America is trying to refine our kids to full capacity, trying to engineer a generation of hyperenriched “readers, writers, coworkers, and problem solvers.” Parents, teachers, policymakers, and employers are all so worried that their children won’t “meet the demands of a changing world” that they don’t bother asking what kind of kids can meet those demands, and what historical problems they’re really being equipped to solve. The anxious frenzy that surrounds the future has come to function as an excuse for the choices adults make for kids on the uncertain road there. As the Harley Avenue administrators put it, “We are making these decisions with the interests of all children in mind.” How did we get to this place where we all agree that our kids need upgrading?
It behooves us then to begin with kids themselves, and the nature of American childhood around the turn of the twenty-first century. The work that kids do is going to play a major role in this book, and rather than start with, say, college students—whose workload is more obvious—and generalizing backward, I want to start with schoolkids, who are not generally considered workers at all. It’s only by looking at children’s work that we can understand the true reach of the changes in the past few decades.
In America, unlike in much of the world, kids do not perform work. In this country, “child labor” evokes British industrialism, coal, and all things Dickensian. And though some American children have always worked—especially on farms—the dominant US view of childhood is as a time liberated from labor. Because children are legally excluded from the wage relation except under exceptional circumstances, children’s work was reclassified as “learning.” Jürgen Zinnecker, a sociologist of childhood, calls this process “pedagogical masking”:
The working activities during childhood moratorium are disguised by pedagogical ideologies….Learning is not understood as a type of work, whereby children contribute productively to the future social and economic development of the society. Only the adult work of teachers is emphasized as productive contribution to the development of human capital. The corresponding learning activities of pupils are thus defined, not as work but as a form of intellectual consumption.5
Removing the pedagogical mask is central to understanding the American economy because even if we don’t see children’s labor, the whole system rests on its unsteady foundation. It takes a lot of work to prepare yourself to compete for twenty-first-century employment, and adults are happy to remind kids of this when it comes to “putting your nose to the grindstone” or “staying on the right path.” Kids are told, “Treat school like your job.” But when it comes to the right to organize, the dignity of labor, or minimum wage laws, down come the pedagogical masks, and students go back to being students rather than workers. It’s a precarious position: America can no more afford to recognize children’s work than it can afford for them not to do it. Meanwhile, disregarded and unregulated, the intensity and duration of this work have accelerated out of control.
One story from the early days of modern children’s work is extraordinarily prescient about the way pedagogical masking is now used to hide more and more labor. Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine is an enduring children’s book from 1958 by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin about a boy named Danny and his efforts to cheat on his homework. Danny is a whiz kid who lives with his mother, who keeps house for an absent-minded science professor, and Danny has a habit of dragging his friend Joe into half-baked schemes. The book opens with Danny, who has set up two pens linked by a board and attached to pulleys and a weight so that he can write his and Joe’s math homework at the same time. He laments, “If only we could save even more time. You’d think six hours of school would be enough for them, without making us take school home. If only I could build some kind of a robot to do all our homework for us…”6
Danny and his friends use the professor’s cutting-edge computer to do their homework quickly, leaving more time for baseball and their other fun hobbies—like measuring wind speeds with weather balloons. These kids aren’t slackers; they just have better, more self-directed things to do with their time than homework. When a jealous kid (appropriately nicknamed Snitcher) rats out the crew, Danny has to explain to their teacher, Miss Arnold, what they’ve been doing. Rather than concede that he’s been cheating, Danny argues that all workers use tools to do their work better and faster and that students should not be prevented from doing the same. Miss Arnold, stuck in a corner, reframes the situation under the pedagogical mask: “Danny, I must admit you’ve got a serious point. I won’t force you to stop using the computer. But I’m asking you for your own good not to use it. Children learn through practice. You’ll have to take my word for it that it would be better for you to do your homework the old-fashioned way.”7 But Danny is too smart for that, and he counters that if modern things are not to be trusted he probably shouldn’t study atomic theory. It’s a contradiction: Kids have to be taught how to use tools that will help them reduce their work-time, without it actually reducing their work-time.
Although it’s just a children’s book, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine sets up one of the huge conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century: whether laborsaving technology would benefit workers or owners. Will the computer lead to the kids working less or working more? Danny’s situation is different from ours because he gets his hands on the computer before the adults in his life do, and if he had used it like a good Millennial—keeping it to himself, freeing up his time to improve his résumé—he would have been on the fast track to Harvard. Instead, he’s out to increase his playtime, which means liberating his friends as well. (It’s no fun playing catch with yourself.) Miss Arnold has to find a way to contain Danny’s discovery before this clunky proto-Wikipedia permanently ends homework. With the help of Danny’s mother, Miss Arnold not only develops a plan—she develops the plan that would determine the character of American childhood a half century later: She increases Danny’s workload.
There are two basic things you can do with technologies that make work faster: reduce work-time or intensify work. If a widget maker makes 100 widgets a day full-time, and a new machine allows the worker to make them twice as fast, they can either make 200 widgets a day or knock off at noon. It’s not hard to see which way it has gone in America. Some of the same technologies that make traditional office workers efficient are even better for primary and secondary school students. Writing essays, doing research, communicating for a group project: There’s almost no part of being a student that hasn’t been made easier by technology. But computers don’t do work for you, something Danny and his friends learn when Miss Arnold gives them additional homework assignments. The computer makes the work more efficient—it eliminates or reduces the extraneous tasks, like flipping through books or blotting out typos with Wite-Out—but what it leaves is still arduous. It’s the irreducible mental work computers can’t do. Instead of being liberated to play baseball, Danny and Co. are up late into the night programming. At the end of the semester, Miss Arnold reveals that they have won special homework awards—light compensation for so many evenings lost. The Luddites who smashed laborsaving machines two centuries ago don’t look so crazy now. The kids would have been better off if they had never learned to code.
The story of the homework machine not only gives us insight into the way schoolwork has followed the same intensification trend as other forms of labor, it also shows us how children’s labor differs from waged work. The only compensation Danny gets for his extra effort and accomplishment is the nontransferable award from his teacher—one that costs only the price of a shiny sticker. On the micro level, this looks like one educator’s clever effort to maintain the pedagogical mask and trick a student into learning more than he meant to. But in the half century that followed, computers got exponentially faster, cheaper, and more connected. In the intervening years, teachers, parents, and policymakers spread the intensification strategy far and wide. Stickers and other cheap rewards proliferated. Danny is no longer a lone precocious child. American kids now find themselves in his situation: overworked, underplayed, gold-starred, and tired, wondering where all their time went.
When it comes to primary and secondary schooling, American adults are able to hold a few conflicting stereotypes in their minds at the same time. On one hand, it’s generally acknowledged that students are doing historically anomalous amounts of homework and that competition for desirable college slots is stiffer. On the other, these same kids are depicted as slackers who are unable to sustain focused attention, entitled brats who need to be congratulated for their every routine accomplishment, and devolved cretins who can’t form a full sentence without lapsing into textspeak. But the best way to observe the character of Millennial childhood isn’t to make guesses about how they spend their time, it’s to actually check and see.
Social scientist Sandra L. Hofferth studies how American children pass their days, using twenty-four-hour diaries completed by kids and their parents between 1981 and 2003. When it comes to school, technological advances haven’t freed up any time for American kids. Between 1981 and 1997, elementary schoolers between the ages of six and eight recorded a whopping 146 percent gain in time spent studying, and another 32 percent between 1997 and 2003, making it a threefold increase over the time surveyed, in addition to a 19 percent increase in time at school.8, 9 Kids age nine to twelve, like Danny, have sustained near 30 percent growth in homework, while their class time has increased by 14 percent.
Because of all the changes in the way we do labor over the time in question, it’s hard to describe how big this accumulation of schoolwork actually is. Whereas the labor of classically employed workers is measured in both total output and wages, we don’t measure a student’s educational product except in arbitrary and comparative ways, like grades, standardized tests, and school awards. Pedagogical masking disguises the work kids are doing every day and discourages researchers and policymakers from bothering to measure it at all. At the same time, we know labor productivity has increased markedly during the time in question, and we know kids are among the most avid users of popular productivity-enhancing tools. Besides all that, common sense says it’s easier to do almost every element of schoolwork than it was a few decades ago. For all these reasons, I feel justified in saying American children’s educational output has grown steeply over the past thirty years. But what does educational output even mean, and how might we try to measure it? When kids do work under the pedagogical mask, where does the product go?
Waged workers receive money to mark their expended effort-time—even though it only represents a fraction of their total output. The student equivalent is the grade: We say a student has “worked for” or “earned” her marks; the return of graded papers or report cards resembles the passing out of paychecks; etc. In theory, a grade in a class in a semester represents a student’s work and skill exercised over time, but grades are comparative. Still, postsecondary grades have been rising nationwide, in a phenomenon that frustrated commentators have dubbed “grade inflation.” But inflation is the wrong economic metaphor: Nongrade measures of educational output—like students taking Advanced Placement classes or tests, or kids applying to college—have trended upward, along with labor productivity in other sectors. It’s a twisted system that aspires to train every student for “A” work, then calls it a crisis when the distribution shifts in that direction.
The idea that underlies contemporary schooling is that grades, eventually, turn into money, or if not money, into choice, or what social scientists sometimes call “better life outcomes.” The pedagogical mask is incomplete, insofar as everyone involved in education—not least of all students—recognizes that the work they do (or don’t do) has an impact on their future wellbeing. In waged work we have the concept of valorization, which is the process by which laborers produce value above and beyond their wages and increase the mass of invested capital. But if no one is profiting off kids’ scholastic work—teachers definitely don’t count—where does their product go? In the quoted passage above, Zinnecker makes reference to “the development of human capital” as the sink for students’ hidden labor.10 What this means in the simplest terms is what the kindergarten administrators said in the letter at the beginning of this chapter: When students are working, what they’re working on is their own ability to work. Human capital’s rough paper analog is the résumé: a summary of past training for future labor. At its most technical, human capital is the present value of a person’s future earnings, or a person’s imagined price at sale, if you could buy and sell free laborers—minus upkeep.
The “capital” part of “human capital” means that, when we use this term, we’re thinking of people as tools in a larger production process. We can track increased competition on the labor market with indicators like wages (stagnant) and participation (decreased)—it’s cheaper than it used to be to hire most workers, and extraordinarily hard to find the kind of well-paying and stable jobs that can provide the basis for a comfortable life. The arms race that results pits kids and their families against each other in an ever-escalating battle for a competitive edge, in which adults try to stuff kids full of work now in the hope that it might serve as a life jacket when they’re older. If they track into the right classes, and do their homework, and study, and succeed in the right extracurriculars, and stay out of trouble, and score well on standardized tests, and if they keep doing all that from age five to age eighteen, they’ll have a good chance at a spot in a decent college, which is, as far as you can plan such things, a prerequisite to “better life outcomes.” Of course, the more kids who can do all that, the harder everyone has to work to stay on top.
When it comes to the primary and secondary education pool, the “high-achieving” end has become a lot more crowded. Between the 1984–85 and 2011–12 school years, there was an increase of 921 percent in the number of high school students taking Advanced Placement courses, as well as an increase in the number of tests per student, from 1.37 to 1.76.11 While you might expect that such an expansion would have a negative effect on scores, the percentage of students scoring the top marks of 4 or 5 on their tests stayed constant.12 A passing score on a high school AP exam counts for credit at over four thousand institutions of higher education, and many of the schools that don’t count them for credit still de facto require them for admission. They are supposed to have the rigor of college classes. The rate of AP class expansion is both example and index of the larger trend: A lot more kids are working a lot harder.
For a more micro example, see what happens when a grown man tries to do his high-achieving thirteen-year-old daughter’s homework. For his 2013 Atlantic article “My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me,” Karl Taro Greenfeld attempted to complete his eighth grader’s homework from her selective New York public school in an effort to discover the exact nature of the labor that was keeping her awake every night. He quickly discovered that he wasn’t prepared to keep up: “Imagine if after putting in a full day at the office—and school is pretty much what our children do for a job—you had to come home and do another four or so hours of office work….If your job required that kind of work after work, how long would you last?”13 By Thursday, Greenfeld was using Google Translate in classic homework machine fashion (and in clear contravention of the rules) to complete a Spanish assignment. Of course, he tinkered with the results a little to avoid overt plagiarism. When he asked his daughter’s teachers why they assigned so much homework, they either rejected responsibility or cited the importance of time-management skills.
This shift and its justification were foreshadowed once again by Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine: When the class groans about how much homework they’re given, Miss Arnold answers, “You all know that the class has grown a good deal in the last couple of years. That means I can’t work with each one of you as much as I used to. It means high school will be overcrowded, too. It also means that there will be more competition for college admissions. It’s not easy to get into college these days.”14 The fact that there are more of them doing more work doesn’t reduce the collective burden the way division of labor does in a group project. Rather, it increases the work each of them must do to keep up with each other and avoid being left behind. Danny Dunn was published over fifty years ago, in 1958, and things have gotten worse.
This sort of intensive training isn’t just for the children of intellectuals; the theory behind the rhetoric advocating universal college attendance is that any and all kids should aspire to this level of work. College admissions have become the focus not only of secondary schooling but of contemporary American childhood writ large. The sad truth, however, is that college admission is designed to separate young adults from each other, not to validate hard work. A jump in the number of students with Harvard-caliber skills doesn’t have a corresponding effect on the size of the school’s freshman class. Instead, it allows universities to become even more selective and to raise prices, to populate their schools with rich kids and geniuses on scholarships. This is the central problem with an education system designed to create the most human capital possible: An en masse increase in ability within a competitive system doesn’t advantage all individuals. Instead, more competition weakens each individual’s bargaining position within the larger structure. The White House’s own 2014 report on increasing college opportunity for low-income students noted, “Colleges have grown more competitive, restricting access. While the number of applicants to four-year colleges and universities has doubled since the early 1970s, available slots have changed little.”15 Still, the Obama administration remained undaunted and continued to champion universal college enrollment, as if we even had the facilities to handle that.
Human capital, from its midcentury retheorization by a group of economists at the University of Chicago, has always been about investment. If you’re a manager who only sees employees as wage earners—they lend you their labor, you pay them for it afterward—you’re ignoring a whole other set of relations. The logic of human capital, on the other hand, splits decision, action, and result into three aspects of the same person so as to quantify and scientifically manage life outcomes. First a kid decides to invest her time in math homework; then she spends the hours running through equations; the next morning she wakes up a more valuable future employee. Her investment at thirteen will bear fruit when, at her job years later, she’ll be able to work herself more productively, generating more value for her employer than if she had spent that night in eighth grade getting stoned in her room listening to glitchstep and texting with her friends instead of doing math.
It’s an elegant accounting, and one that can depict the real economic value of children’s schoolwork. It also accords with our national rhetoric about effort, and about childhood as the time to accumulate the skills and abilities necessary to compete in a tough adult job market. The logic of human capital is now the basis for the American education system, which means it’s the code that governs the day-to-day lives of America’s children. This regime of universal measurement lends new meaning to the generic life advice we give kids about being their best and reaching their potential. In a world where every choice is an investment, growing up becomes a very complex exercise in risk management. The next question is how exactly society divides those risks—and the profits. Over time, firms have an incentive, as economist Gary Becker (a member of the University of Chicago group) put it in his landmark 1975 study “Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education,” to “shift training costs to trainees.”16 If an employer pays to train workers, what’s to stop another company from luring them away once they’re skilled? The second firm could offer a signing bonus that costs them less than the training and still make out like bandits. Paying to train a worker is risky, and risk costs money. The more capital new employees already have built in when they enter the labor market, the less risky for their employer, whoever that ends up being. As American capitalism advanced, the training burden fell to the state, and then to families and kids themselves.
Widening inequality means that the consequences of being caught on the wrong side of the social divide are larger, and parents are understandably anxious about their children’s future prospects. Policymakers, employers, and teachers—not to mention various salespeople working their own angles—have parents convinced that the proper way to manifest care and affection for their progeny is to treat them like precious appreciating assets. Under these conditions, every child is a capital project. Rationalization—the tendency for firms to reduce every interaction to a number so that they’ll be easier to optimize—has come to apply more and more to people themselves as productive tools. Risk management used to be a business practice; now it’s our dominant child-rearing strategy.
In her study The Playdate: Parents, Children, and the New Expectations of Play, sociologist Tamara R. Mose details how parents of young children in New York City have turned child’s play into anything but. The image of kids running around the streets of New York playing stickball and whatnot is ingrained in our national subconscious as perhaps the image of happy, independent childhood. But in a trend elapsing over the past twenty to thirty years, Mose sees parents holding their children in the home, exposing them only to screened peers, vetted activities, and even approved snacks. As a social phenomenon, playdates are something like private schools. Wealthier parents remove their kids from public and sequester them somewhere with a guest list and a cover charge. Mose uses the term “enclosure”—which is when a public or common resource is fenced and privatized. The territory of kids’ play used to be a commons, and now it’s been divided up into tiny, guarded pieces.
Playdates are also part of adult professional networking. Even children’s birthday parties are a competition:
The birthday party becomes a display of economic advantage and thus class advantage. By holding elaborate festivities for young children, parents are able to demonstrate their affluence, their sense of quality and quantity, their class worth. If a mother can put on an event that is considered “playground-worthy,” her children will be considered worthy of holding playdates with, or their parents considered worthy of getting to know better. This angst creates a competition among groups of parents, thereby producing even more elaborate birthday parties.17
According to Mose, the biggest difference between simple play and an official playdate is that playdates are work. Playdates aren’t just scheduled, they’re prepared. They have expenses, and they can succeed or fail. A parent who serves the wrong kind of savory snack could be jeopardizing their family’s place in the social hierarchy. Kids play, adults—or, more accurately, moms—make playdates. And not just any moms; playdates are an upper-middle-class practice, but it’s that group that sets the national standards. As we’ll see in the rest of this chapter, Millennial childhood norms weren’t crafted for average or “normal” families. Now, up and down the class ladder, hands-off parenting is likely to attract glares and possibly even the attention of authorities. What kind of parent would risk their child’s safety like that?
Playing in public isn’t actually dangerous, at least not compared to the golden days. Death by unintentional injury for children under fifteen has fallen by more than half since the early 1970s.18 The distinctions between good and bad playdate foods are, in Mose’s analysis, mostly about branding. Whether or not something is organic is more important than its nutritional value. The real value is elsewhere, in the allusion to a certain kind of “good” parenting that lets others know that you’re the right type of family, what Mose calls “People Like Us.” Companies can charge for that.
Millennials grew up during this norm change, and it has shaped us as individuals and as a cohort. Children develop understandings of dynamics that they can’t describe, and the idea that they don’t know when they’re being used to further their parents’ professional networks (for example) is naive. All the class baggage around playdates sinks through their malleable skulls and into their growing brains. A cohort of kids has absorbed all the ambient nervousness around safety, even though it has never been particularly well founded in real danger.
“Safety” is a broad, nebulous concept, even as it’s anxiously central to child-rearing. And kids could always be safer. “The ultimate question then becomes,” Mose writes, “how do parents choose ‘safe’ people with whom to hold a playdate? ‘Safe’ in this context really means people/parents who are selected based on potential social and cultural capital.”19 The true risk of nonorganic food isn’t that it’s going to poison anyone, it’s that the kids whose parents are buying it might not make for the best professional connections down the line, which means if your child plays with them, your child is less likely to get a crucial future promotion than they would be if they had played with peers who ate fancier corn puffs. This may or may not be an accurate analysis, but it must be confusing for young kids at first. That is, until they absorb the attention to class hierarchy. Childhood risk is less and less about death, illness, or grievous bodily harm, and more and more about future prospects for success.
To gain insight into the contemporary idea of childhood risk, British researcher Tim Gill focused on the changing composition of playgrounds. In his survey (although Gill focused on the UK, his research suggests that “risk aversion appears to be even more acute in the USA”20), he found that unwarranted fears about safety have led adults to cushion and overstructure their children’s relations with the physical and social world. As he puts it in a disturbing and concise summary:
Activities and experiences that previous generations of children enjoyed without a second thought have been relabeled as troubling or dangerous, while the adults who still permit them are branded as irresponsible. At the extreme…society appears to have become unable to cope with any adverse outcomes whatsoever, no matter how trivial or improbable. While such episodes may be rare, they fit a pattern of growing adult intervention to minimize risk at the expense of childhood experience.21
Over the final quarter of the twentieth century, parental time spent on child care increased dramatically for both women and men, single and married, across three different modes of measurement.22 Combined with the growing time kids spend on academics and extracurricular activities, as well as time producing and consuming digital media, they are more watched than ever. This leads Gill to conclude, against the stereotypes of youth run amok, “Their lives are marked not by chaos and moral vacuum, but by structure, supervision, and control.”23
Gill found that a fog of fear has enveloped the playground, from the exacting safety codes that have replaced wood chips with ouchie-proof rubber floors, to totally unjustified propaganda about interacting with strangers and an overreliance on “bullying” rhetoric to reduce the complexity of childhood conflict. The generalization of these fears “reinforces a norm of parenting that equates being a good parent with being a controlling parent, and that sees the granting of independence as a sign of indifference if not outright neglect, even though the benefits of giving children a degree of freedom to play, especially outside, are increasingly well documented.”24
Researchers whose overriding concern is the welfare of children see this trend as unwelcome and even dangerous. In an article for the American Journal of Play on the decline in American children’s free time, Peter Gray described what kids miss out on developmentally when they aren’t allowed the space to self-direct:
Even casual observations of children playing outdoors confirm that these youngsters, like other young mammals, deliberately put themselves into moderately fear-inducing conditions in play. Their swinging, sliding, and twirling on playground equipment; their climbing on monkey bars or trees; their risky skateboarding down banisters—all such activities are fun to the degree that they are moderately frightening. If too little fear is induced, the activity is boring; if too much is induced, it becomes no longer play but terror. Nobody but the child himself or herself knows the right dose, which is why all such play must be self-directed and self-controlled. Beyond the physically challenging situations, children also put themselves into socially challenging situations in their social play. All varieties of social play can generate conflict as well as cooperation; and to keep playing, children must learn to control the emotions, especially anger and fear, that such conflict can induce.25
There probably aren’t many parents, teachers, or even politicians who consciously decide they want to raise bored children and young adults who have trouble controlling their emotions. Yet these are the consequences of their actions. The problem is that risk management usually applies—as far as the managers are concerned—to piles of money, not people. Rationalization is called just that because, since everything is boiled down to the qualitatively equivalent dollar, there are no sentimental concerns to impede fully rational decision-making. There’s no way to eliminate risk altogether, and assessing it rationally always means accepting a certain amount—ideally the exact right amount. But for a loving parent, a parent who has been told over and over that they should be willing to die for their children, what’s the right amount of risk to accept when it comes to their son’s or daughter’s future wellbeing?
It is worth noting that the average American parent likely has fewer backup children than at any time in the nation’s history. Family size shrank rapidly between the mid-1960s and the 1990s, so much so that by 2001 average family size (3.14) was where average household size (which included single people and couples) was in 1970.26 Between 1976 and 2014, the number of women in their early forties with four or more children nose-dived, from over a third down to 12 percent.27 This is in accord with Americans’ wishes: Before the 1970s, the plurality of surveyed Americans said the ideal family had four or more children, but ever since, the dominant answer has been two kids. But even if that is what parents want, a perhaps unanticipated consequence has been more parental attention (and investment) concentrated on fewer children.
If it is every parent’s task to raise at least one successful American by America’s own standards, then the system is rigged so that most of them will fail. The ranks of the American elite not only aren’t infinitely expandable, they’re shrinking. Given that reality, parents are told—and then communicate to their children—that their choices, actions, and accomplishments have lasting consequences, and the consequences grow by the year. The letter at the beginning of this chapter is merely one of the more dramatic and unintentionally public examples of this fearmongering. Risk management combined with parental love has turned to risk elimination.
Childhood risk elimination takes two complementary forms: helicopter parents and zero-tolerance policies. The helicopter parent is the archetypically protective upper-class mom—sometimes dad—who takes direct personal responsibility for her child’s schedule and time. Helicopter parents always know where their child is, what they’re doing, and how whatever it is they’re doing will help them get into college—always a good one, and sometimes even a particular college chosen in advance. In their study for UC Davis Law Review on overparenting, Gaia Bernstein and Zvi Triger tracked the growth in what they call “intensive parenting.” The authors break the practice into three stages:
First, parents acquire sophisticated knowledge of what experts consider proper child development in order to recognize and respond to every stage of the child’s emotional and intellectual development. Second, parents engage in “Concerted Cultivation”: parents actively foster and assess the child’s talents, orchestrate multiple child leisure activities, and regularly intervene in institutional settings on the child’s behalf. Third, to fulfill the same goals, parents closely monitor many aspects of the child’s life.28
Bernstein and Triger track intensive parenting through its beginning at conception, to hand sanitizer for toddlers, an overabundance of field trip chaperones, and the emergence of school-to-parent digital telecommunications technologies. In both informal codes of conduct and formal statutes of law, intensive parenting has become the American standard. As the authors write after reviewing the relevant literature, “Many parents are increasingly incorporating defensive practices into their child rearing routines, often over-estimating risks and over-protecting their children.”29
The intensive parent attempts total control for the same reason we don’t have wooden playgrounds anymore: so nothing bad happens. Bad things that could happen include but are not limited to: the child getting hurt outside, the child being kidnapped, the child being placed in a lower academic lane, the child contracting a chronic illness, the child developing a drug addiction, the child using drugs, the child getting a bad grade, the child getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant, the child having sex and contracting an STI, the child getting in a fight, the child being disciplined by the school, the child being disciplined by the police, the child being killed by the police, the child dropping out of school, the child not getting into a good college, and the child not getting into college at all. These are hazards any parent might worry about, but they’re also things any investor might worry about. The easy slippage between these roles makes intensive parents ideal managers for budding capital, whether they think of it that way or not.
Mothers in particular tend to be responsible for the care of children in the first and last instances. When we consider all the work mothers do to keep children ready to succeed at school, it’s clear their work gets hidden under the pedagogical mask as well; the education system could never survive a mom strike, and without the education system, American industry would be lost. When an individual child happens to be slow or just falls behind, it’s usually up to the mother to make sure the child gets back on track and stays there. Teachers and guidance counselors can only provide so much individual attention, and navigating the school bureaucracy can be a full-time parent’s job, depending on the child and the family.
In families with “problem children,” mothers are trapped in one hell of a bind. For her study Family Trouble: Middle-Class Parents, Children’s Problems, and the Disruption of Everyday Life, sociologist Ara Francis spoke with mothers of children whose “issues”—like autism, depression, or drug addiction—put them at the margin of mainstream success. She found that first these moms had to deal with self-blame and disappointment. (According to Francis’s research, dads mostly get a pass from society as long as they’re somewhat involved in their children’s lives, which, to their credit, more and more fathers are.) In a culture that increasingly rewards only exceptional accomplishment, any disadvantage or challenge can seem like a disqualification. One mom told Francis that because she had expected her son to star on the football team, his ADD diagnosis made her feel the way a parent who had expected a “normal” child must feel upon hearing a diagnosis of Down syndrome.30 It’s an insensitive comparison, but there’s something revealing in the equation: A hypercompetitive environment sets parents up for dreams of champion children, and then for almost inevitable heartbreak. Millennials of all abilities have grown up in the shadow of these expectations, expectations that by definition only a very few of us can fulfill.
In Francis’s study, mothers blame themselves, but they also get some help. Parents, teachers, counselors, and other community members find moms culpable for their children’s deficiencies by default, and the higher the level of competition, the more restrictive the mold, the higher the population of kids who don’t measure up or fit in. Moms have to work harder to give their kids whatever boost they need to win—or at the very least finish the race—or else they’re stigmatized. In her study Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality, sociologist Linda M. Blum calls these moms “vigilantes” because, although they’re not usually committing crimes, “a mother’s unyielding watchfulness and advocacy for her child took on the imperative of a lone moral quest.”31 These vigilante moms are taking the law (or, rather, the school administrative bureaucracy) into their own hands, but it can’t last forever. Francis writes that the only thing that reduces this kind of maternal stigma once and for all is aging: “It was particularly common for attention deficit disorder to be reframed in terms of character flaws, such as ‘laziness,’ as children grew older.”32
There’s a stereotype that these vigilante moms are all rich, and it’s easy to confuse them with helicopter moms. There is overlap between the categories, which yields some understandable resentment: Do their kids really need more advantages? Do these moms really need to help further rig an already unfair contest? But that’s not what Blum and Francis found in their research; they talked to many working-class mothers who were totally invested in giving struggling children their best shot, even if that just meant keeping them in a mainstream high school program. Being a vigilante is of course easier for moms of means, but they’re a minority. The stereotype further buries the uncompensated labor of those working-class mothers who add full-time child advocacy to their list of jobs. Blum points out that single mothers find a special lack of support and extra judgment in a culture that still treats two-parent families as normal. All types engage in maternal bureaucratic vigilantism, but what happens to kids who don’t luck into having Erin Brockovich for a mom?
Even mothers can’t be there 24/7, and a rational society needs backup institutions and personnel. After all, some parents don’t behave properly. Educational institutions have traditionally served in loco parentis, and their disciplinary philosophy has changed a lot over the past couple of decades. In the 1990s, “zero tolerance” policies swept the nation’s schools. The American Psychological Association’s 2008 task force on zero tolerance defined it as “a philosophy or policy that mandates the application of predetermined consequences, most often severe and punitive in nature, that are intended to be applied regardless of the gravity of behavior, mitigating circumstances, or situational context.”33 These policies—which echo the discriminatory and brutal federal and state mandatory minimum sentencing trends—are unconcerned with fairness by definition. Nor are they effective, the APA’s task force found, at achieving any of their ostensible educational goals. Stemming in-school violence, increasing the consistency of discipline, creating a better learning environment for nondisruptive students, deterring further misbehavior, upping parent and community support for schools: The investigation found mixed or no evidence that zero tolerance has helped at all.
Zero tolerance imagines that kids are at risk of being victimized (violence, drugs, general hooliganism), but it also imagines kids as risks to the school and other students. The APA’s research found that zero-tolerance school policing “affected the delicate balance between the educational and juvenile justice systems, in particular, increasing schools’ use of and reliance on strategies such as security technology, security personnel, and profiling, especially in high-minority, high-poverty school districts.”34 Children—black, indigenous, and Latinx children in particular—are overpoliced, especially within schools (more on this later). When it comes to children’s life chances, zero tolerance is a self-fulfilling prophecy: School authorities warn students that any deviant behavior on a child’s part is irresponsible because it could have severe and long-lasting consequences for their future, and then they enforce unreasonably harsh disciplinary standards that have severe and long-lasting consequences for the child’s future. That’s not a warning, it’s a promise.
Even if parents and the government alike are taking an overactive interest in American children’s progress into adulthood, how can we be sure that this isn’t just affection gone too far? What distinguishes the way a caring family or state institution treats a child from the way an investor would, if they’re both primarily concerned with the child’s future success? An investor may want an asset to achieve its full potential, but the investor doesn’t particularly care whether that kid is happy while they do it. A caring parent, on the other hand, balances an interest in a child’s future achievement with the child’s present wellbeing. If the changes in childhood over the past decades have really been made “with the interests of all children in mind,” as the Harley Avenue letter said, then they should, at the very least, not be actively making children unhappier. Evidence, however, suggests that even this small hope is in vain.
A 2003 study by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeremy Hunter published in the Journal of Happiness Studies used what the authors called the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), in which they equipped subjects with electronic pagers that would go off at random times during the subjects’ waking week. At the buzz, the subjects would record their activity and relative happiness, as well as various other qualitative and quantitative information that spoke to what they were doing and their feelings about it. Their sample group was a race-, gender-, and class-diverse group of 828 students spread among the sixth, eighth, tenth, and twelfth grades. The report is filled with observations that probably wouldn’t surprise too many teenagers:
The first part of the day, spent at work or school, tends to be less happy, except for a peak at lunch-time. There is a dip after lunch, followed by higher reports of happiness in the afternoon when one is again free…
Whenever students are involved with school-related activities, their happiness level is below average…
Young people are much happier in the afternoons and evenings of weekdays, when they are free of requirements imposed by adults, and on weekends. But by the end of the weekend, on Sunday afternoons, their happiness decreases in anticipation of the school-day to come.35
There is a solid correlation between the unhappiness teens report experiencing during an activity in the Csikszentmihalyi and Hunter study and the increase in time children reported spending on an activity in the Hoffreth time diaries referenced earlier in this chapter. To put it simply: American kids and teens, across race, gender, and class lines, are spending less time doing things that make them happy (like self-directed play with their friends and eating—pretty much the only two activities they report enjoying) and more time doing things that make them especially unhappy (like homework and listening to lectures).
After an exhaustive study of school shootings, journalist Mark Ames concluded that “Kids are demonstrably more miserable today than they used to be.”36 What Ames found, to his surprise, was that other students expressed sympathy and understanding for shooters. In his investigations into individual incidents in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s collected in the book Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond, Ames found that, contrary to media depictions, kids—including the shooters—understood the target of these attacks to be the immiserating school itself, rather than a particular bully or clique of classmates. It’s this anger and misery at the ever-tightening restrictions on their daily lives that kids can empathize with, and Ames is right to categorize acts of school violence with workplace violence. As we’ll see, trends in youth anxiety and depression support the idea that American kids are significantly less happy than they have been in previous generations, which follows logically from their spending more of their time doing things that make them unhappy and less of it on the few things that even teens enjoy.
In the traditional—though relatively recent—model of modern Western childhood, kids’ activity isn’t work. There’s no surplus from their product for the owners to confiscate, so they can’t possibly be doing labor in the way that wage laborers do. But by looking at children as investments, we can see where the product of children’s labor is stored: in the machine-self, in their human capital. Under this framework, it’s a kid’s job to stay eligible for the labor market (not in jail, not insane, and not dead—which is more work for some than others), and any work product beyond that adds to their résumé. If more human capital automatically led to a higher standard of living, this model could be the foundation for an American meritocracy. But Millennials’ extra work hasn’t earned them the promised higher standard of living. By every metric, this generation is the most educated in American history, yet Millennials are worse off economically than their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Every authority from moms to presidents told Millennials to accumulate as much human capital as we could, and we did, but the market hasn’t held up its side of the bargain. What gives? And why did we make this bargain in the first place?
As it turns out, just because you can produce an unprecedented amount of value doesn’t necessarily mean you can feed yourself under twenty-first-century American capitalism. Kids spend their childhoods investing the only thing they have: their effort, their attention, their days and nights, their labor-time. (And, if they’re lucky, a large chunk of whatever money their parents have.) If the purpose of all this labor, all the lost play, all the hours doing unpleasant tasks isn’t to ensure a good life for the kids doing the work and being invested in, if it isn’t in the “interests of all children,” then what is it for? Whose interests is it in if not our own? To find out, we have to look at what happens to kids when we start growing up.
America doesn’t actually prepare every child for college, but if you pick any individual kid and ask any mainstream adult authority what they should do with the next part of their life, I’d bet $30,000 at 7 percent interest that the advice includes enrolling in higher education of some sort. As the only sanctioned game in town, college admission becomes a well-structured, high-stakes simulation of a worker’s entry into the labor market. Applicants inventory their achievements, careful not to undercount by a drop, and present them in the most attractive package possible. College admissions are the “boss” of aspirational childhood, in the video game sense: They’re the final hard test, the one everything else was a preparation for, the one that determines what comes next. The admissions officers are also the boss, insofar as they are the ones who evaluate kids’ work, who decide how much all their labor, all their self, is worth.
Using the data carefully and anxiously prepared by millions of kids about the human capital they’ve accumulated over the previous eighteen years, higher education institutions make decisions: collectively evaluating, accepting, and cutting hopeful children in tranches like collateralized debt obligations that are then sorted among the institutions according to their own rankings (for which they compete aggressively, of course). It is not the first time children are weighed, but it is the most comprehensive and often the most directly consequential. College admissions offices are the rating agencies for kids, and once the kid-bond is rated, it has four or so years until it’s expected to produce a return. And those four years are expensive.