THE PRACTICES OF America’s recent parental generations have been described, analyzed, and criticized by social scientists, journalists, and parents since the 1990s. These observers claim that contemporary middle-class parents have greatly expanded the demands they put on themselves for parenting, even while they are busier than ever at work outside the home. They criticize the priorities of parents and their excessive, self-defeating practices, using terms like “helicopter parenting,” “intensive parenting,” “defensive parenting,” “paranoid parenting,” the “enslavement” of parents to their children, and finally, “the collapse of parenting.”1 Their practices are said to produce “entitled” and “disrespectful” children who may insult their parents and refuse to assume minimal responsibilities at home.
This literature includes systematic studies by sociologists (Sharon Hays, Annette Lareau, and Suzanne Bianchi), an anthropologist (Elinor Ochs), and a psychologist (Marie-Anne Suizzo).2 A psychotherapist (Polly Young-Eisendrath) and a physician-psychologist (Leonard Sax) have also made informed analyses.3 There have been insightful accounts by journalists (Jennifer Senior and Pamela Druckerman) as well.4 Their conclusions and critiques cannot be ignored. Their portraits of middle-class parenting are in stark contrast with those of the American working class, Parisians, and the rest of the world. Yet the child-rearing patterns they portray are rooted in a moral ideology of the loving egalitarian parent that has taken hold in the last thirty years.
Intensive Parenting in America
American middle-class parents, compared with parents elsewhere, feel burdened and anxious, not only about their children but about the effectiveness of their parenting. Ironically, the risk faced by our ancestors, of children dying before the age of five, has been reduced in the United States to a small fraction of what it was in 1900 or even 1950, owing primarily to public health and drug improvements, which require little of parents. Yet middle-class parents, facing this unprecedented assurance about their children’s survival, seem more concerned about risks than ever. More educated and better informed than their forebears even a generation ago, they operate with a consciousness of the risks (quantified through published epidemiological findings) their children face, however low the probability of any harm coming to them. They have become susceptible to public scares about child molesters, playground accidents, and “harmful” vaccines and medicines.
In addition to being risk-averse, American middle-class parents impose burdens on themselves that seem unnecessary from a global perspective:
• Sleeplessness during the infant’s first year, occasioned by putting the child in a separate room rather than in the parental bed, as discussed in Chapter 3.
• Presenting toddlers with choices about almost everything—food, activities, even where to cross the street—to avoid imposing parental authority as earlier generations of parents did. Parents want to be their children’s best friend. Negotiating about which way to do something takes a lot more time and effort than following a script.
• Relieving school-age children of household responsibilities, as busy parents do for their children what children once did for themselves.
• Supplementing the school with tutoring by parents or lessons to which the child must be taken by the mother, regarded as essential for the child’s development—what Annette Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.” Although the New York Times headline “Is Your First Grader College Ready?” may be a joke, can parents resist the worry?5
At every stage from infancy to college, parenting has been redefined to require more attention, thought, and energy from parents, and young couples either embrace child-rearing as massively burdensome or reject it entirely to remain childless. Why?
Part of the answer is that many couples intend to have only one or two children, and they are older and more affluent when they start, so they are inclined to idealize their burdens as treasured contributions to their own and their children’s lives. Moreover, many parents emphasize the competitiveness of the world into which they’re bringing their children, so they see the intensity of their parenting as necessary as well as rewarding. And they also tend to feel guilty that, given their commitments to jobs outside the home, they can’t spend more time with their children. Contemporary parents are convinced that parenting is not only a major job itself but also a sacred trust requiring their investment of expertise, awareness of risks, and limitless time and effort. With this mind-set, they can hardly resist advice to do more for their children.
If you want to see how strange this can seem, follow an American mother named Pamela Druckerman to Paris, where she asks:
Why is it . . . that in the hundreds of hours I’ve clocked at French playgrounds, I’ve never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why don’t my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids are demanding something? Why haven’t their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours has?
When American families visit our home, the parents usually spend much of the visit refereeing their kids’ spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build LEGO villages. There are always a few rounds of crying and consoling. When French friends visit, however, we grown-ups have coffee and the children play happily by themselves.6
When the psychologist Marie-Anne Suizzo conducted interviews with thirty-two mothers in Paris, she found them seeking to avoid becoming “enslaved” to their toddlers, who would otherwise become “child kings.” French parents clearly have different goals and practices, though their culture is in many ways similar to that of Americans. What about the rest of the world?
Human Parenting
The varieties of human parenting examined in the foregoing chapters indicate that there is no single pattern of parenting provided by evolution or historical necessity. Parents’ practices for infant care, training toddlers, and managing older children vary widely across the world and also over the generations in each particular place. These variations are no more predictable, nor even imaginable, from the infrastructure that makes them possible—the human genome, brain, and reproductive anatomy—than are the thousands of languages in the world made possible by our universal speech anatomy. Parental practices, like languages, cannot be discovered by theory or laboratory experiments; you must get out in the field to observe parents in context—more like Darwin than Pasteur. We now have observations of parenting from many, though not all, parts of the world, and the evidence is increasing in geographic coverage and developmental depth.
Premature attempts to build a general theory of human parenting have tended to oversimplify the evidence, ignore exceptions, and use fallacious analogies about adaptation or progress. At its extreme, the adaptationist approach reduces parenting to rational responses to current environmental pressures, leaving out the moral ideas passed on from previous generations. But it’s the combination of that cultural legacy with environmental responsiveness that makes standards of parenting as complex—and surprising—as other aspects of culture. Regional traditions differentiate child-rearing in India from that in Thailand, for example, and parenting in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania) from that of West Africa (Nigeria, Ivory Coast). There are also broad ecological conditions, such as family-based agriculture, that make agrarian peoples as a whole different from hunter-gatherers and modern societies, but we have shown that there are variations within each of these three categories. And each generation in a particular community has its own standards, much like the dialects of a language.
Furthermore, history shows that parenting is not a ladder-like progression with the most “developed” societies at the top. On the contrary, parental practices in modern societies like our own, whatever their advantages, have problems aplenty. Nor is parenting simply a function of technological advance. Remember that synthetic milk formula, which was invented in 1867 and spread widely in Western countries, is now regarded as inferior to the breast-feeding practices of earlier times, which we share with other mammals. And caesarean surgery for childbirth is now overused in the United States, according to the World Health Organization and other medical authorities. Technological advances in reproduction and parenting have a tendency to become more popular than is good for us.
Pathways for the Development of Young Children
Parents provide culturally distinctive pathways for the development of their young children. The home, in its physical structure, social density, and daily routines, is the setting for care and early childhood learning and partly shapes what goes on there. Rather than improvising the care and training of offspring in that setting, parents follow a local, generation-specific code of parental conduct with scripts for the mother and other caregivers in guiding children’s participation in domestic routines. Here are some examples:
• In the Indian joint family, there are not only more people sharing domestic resources than in middle-class America but also a much wider variety of adults and older children caring for, and in social contact with, every child.
• A similarly sharp contrast exists between the face-to-face communication—including mutual gaze, smiling, and talking—of Western middle-class parents with their babies and the skin-to-skin interactions of mother and infant in Africa and much of the agrarian world. On the one side, there is a mother seeking to excite her baby in an emotionally positive and highly verbal exchange across a physical distance, and on the other, a mother seeking to keep her child calm at all times. Such soothing may seem like “maternal deprivation” to us, but observations show that it not only doesn’t harm the infant but actually prepares her for a future as a compliant and respectful toddler.
• In some of the Pacific Islands, parents play with their young toddlers, postponing demands for their compliance in tasks until they are five to six years old and (possibly) encountering tantrums during the transition.
• In many agrarian societies, learning can be gradual, as the growing child at home is able to observe others performing tasks—ranging from shucking corn and making tortillas to carrying water, caring for infants, and cultivating crops—before actually carrying them out. Parents may not teach but “guide” the child’s participation in a production team.
As schooling spread in the transition to a modern or urban-industrial society, it changed the developmental pathways for agrarian children in terms of parents’ goals for their children and the setting, curriculum, and relationships of the school. Urbanization, with parents employed outside the home, also changed the child’s learning environment, toward school and away from the home. Yet parents who have recently come to the city may continue the agrarian pattern of training their children in responsibility, enlisting them in household tasks. The spread of schooling to rural communities around the world after 1950 blurred the divide between agrarian and modern societies in the predicament of parents and children. But it has not homogenized the ways in which parents train their young children, as the cross-cultural evidence on precocity shows.
Precocious Children and Parental Influence
The behavior of toddlers is highly responsive to their parents’ priorities. In Chapter 8, we gave examples of young children showing proficiencies ranging from talking to compliance to agricultural tasks to infant care—at an age that would be considered precocious in a different culture—because their mothers had facilitated that early development. This seems to suggest powerful parental influence.
But does it last? There is reason to question long-term parental influence. In the early years—say, the first five years of a child’s life—mothers and others in the home have an exceptional degree of control over the child’s routine environment. But as the child gets older that control is likely to diminish as he or she is exposed to a wider world of environmental influences. Even some agrarian societies that have no schools and practice domestic food production also have initiation ceremonies, secret societies, or craft workshops that wrest control from parents over five- to ten-year-old children and provide indoctrination that might counter or dilute the early parental influence.
During adolescence, beginning at eleven to fourteen years of age, there are changes in the brain and the environment that could eradicate early parental influence. The influence of a social identity, in which the adolescent becomes attached to an ideal self-concept, might become more powerful than residues of early childhood experience. Our skepticism about long-term parental influence could only be dispelled by better evidence than we now have demonstrating that psychological dispositions shown in infancy and childhood are preserved into the mature years.
Resilience
Children change in their behavior and psychological development into their teen years, and whether they are harmed by early experiences remains a question. We have reviewed in this book many parental practices that are standard in one or more cultures around the world but that Western experts tell us are “traumatic,” “abusive,” or at least “adverse.” Comparative observations lead us to question what an adverse experience is and what its consequences are likely to be. When mothers avoid looking at their infants and send them away to kin in the second year of life, are they inflicting trauma on their children? And if the children who had those experiences seem to be “normal” in adulthood to Western observers, what do we make of it?
Our conclusion is that, at the very least, the expectations generated by terms such as “adverse,” “traumatic,” and “abusive” have been exaggerated, and the resilience of children underestimated, in using Western psychiatry as a guide to human development in general. In other words, children are not as sensitive as the experts have told us, and parents in other cultures are not as insensitive to the welfare of their children as they might appear at first sight. We don’t have all the evidence needed to settle the question of whether the parental practices described in this book inflict harm on adult mental health. But we do know that all too often when their practices depart from our standards, experts jump to the conclusion that the result will be psychopathology.
Trade-offs
Adults everywhere have multiple commitments. Even the German stay-at-home wife of old, the Hausfrau famously devoted to Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church), had to balance child care with housework and church activities. In sub-Saharan Africa, as we have seen, women were often responsible for growing the household’s food while bearing a dozen children, breast-feeding each one and supervising their work. They conformed to a routine established before they became mothers, not only for each day’s activities but also for defined periods of intensive breast-feeding, followed by weaning and the toddler’s involvement with a sibling group or “granny.” In an agrarian society with such routines standardized, a mother had little choice in organizing the trade-offs involved. The routine was a constraint but also a comfort that prevented the anxiety of choice.
In our society, by contrast, mothers and fathers are on their own when it comes to balancing child care with work and other activities. There is no one else in the household to guide them, and furthermore, they define work and family as a set of personally motivated decisions, not formal obligations. Yet in the agrarian families of Africa, Mexico, and Nepal, where parenting is regarded as a matter of formal obligation, we were awed by the unambivalent dedication of mothers to the welfare of their children. These women were indeed the “ordinary devoted mothers” of which the British pediatrician D. W. Winnicott wrote many years ago, and those with sick or disabled children showed how devoted they were as they departed from their routines to tend them. Their formal parental roles proved at least as motivating as personally chosen goals are for parents in our own society.
Modern parents seek above all to optimize their children’s life chances and exert a virtuous influence on their children’s development. But as we have seen, the influence of parenting on child development has been grossly exaggerated in the mass media, which inflates its predictability beyond the evidence and underestimates the resilience of children and the likelihood of change in later childhood and adolescence. The time has come for American parents to reconsider the burdens they place on themselves for dubious ends.
In this reconsideration, parents need to look at evidence from other modern societies. In Japan, for example, parent-child co-sleeping is the norm, yet Japanese parents, in retaining that agrarian custom, can enjoy the benefits of being able to sleep through the night with their babies without endangering them. In fact, the Japanese rates of infant mortality and SIDS are much lower than ours. Chinese mothers are as concerned with their children’s futures as we are, but they freely criticize their toddlers and encourage a level of compliance that permits them to be far less labor-intensive in their parenting than the negotiating American parent who offers choices to the youngest of toddlers.
These are a few examples from the evidence reviewed in this book. Once American parents free themselves from the expert warnings that any deviations from current American practices will constitute trauma, abuse, or adversity for their children’s development—warnings that we have shown are largely groundless—then it will be possible to learn from other cultures and reduce parental burdens to a more sensible level.