“I started to feel busy at age seven.” That’s what Caitlin, who identifies as biracial and grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, in the 1980s, told me. At first, there were all sorts of activities—swimming, T-ball, art class—at least one every day after school. By the time she got to middle school, she had more say in her extracurriculars, and dedicated herself to dance and theater. Both of her parents worked full-time, and her dad was often traveling, so an au pair would bring her to and from her activities and supervise homework time after school. Her mom cared a lot about grades—As and Bs only—and wanted to make sure she was always hanging out with the “right” crowd.
“As an adult, I’ve realized I get stressed when I’m not doing something,” Caitlin says. “I feel guilty just relaxing. Even in college, I found myself needing to take eighteen to nineteen units a semester, have a campus job, join clubs, volunteer, work on the plays and musicals, and I’d still feel like I wasn’t doing enough.”
Stefanie, who is white, was born in 1982 and grew up in North Idaho, just miles from the Canadian border. Her father was a logger, working from three a.m. until dark; her mother stayed home with her and her four siblings. All of her grandparents and several aunts and uncles lived nearby, and she was close with all of them. Even as a young child, she and her siblings were given wide range to roam on their bikes; during the summer, they’d go to a nearby elementary school and play unsupervised for hours. Along with her cousins, they’d play kick the can, capture the flag, cops and robbers—again, unsupervised—outside, late into the night.
In middle school, Stefanie’s family moved out of town onto a five-acre spread of land. “We built a lot of forts, started fires, and basically had free run,” she told me. Her mom helped teach her to read, but after that was pretty hands-off when it came to school and homework. There was no family “schedule” to speak of, save church on Sundays, and, once a month, a big family get-together at her grandparents’ house to celebrate whoever had a birthday.
Caitlin’s and Stefanie’s childhoods took place thousands of miles away from each other, against different socioeconomic backgrounds, and at different ends of the millennial age span. They represent two paradigms of parenting, and ideas of what “preparation” for adulthood should look like—one of which, over the course of our millennial childhoods, increasingly superseded the other. People knew this shift was happening, but it had hardly been studied, at length, with any sort of nuance. At least not until Annette Lareau.
Between 1990 and 1995, Lareau, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, followed eighty-eight children, beginning in the third grade. Like Caitlin and Stefanie, these children came from different economic and racial backgrounds; they attended different schools and had very different expectations of what they should be doing outside of school hours.
For the study, Lareau and her research assistants spent long hours with the children and their families, in and around their homes, blending in as much as possible. The goal: observe, in granular detail, how parenting, and the expectations of childhood that attend it, changed across the socioeconomic spectrum. They met “Little Billy” Yanelli, a white boy who lived in a small, neat home with his parents, both of whom had dropped out of high school. His mother worked as a house cleaner for rich families in the suburbs; his father painted houses. He managed Bs in school but regularly acted out; his teacher called him a “goofball.” Apart from one organized sport, Little Billy spent most of his out-of-school time playing with neighborhood kids, or with relatives, the vast majority of whom lived nearby.
Then there was Stacy Marshall, a Black girl who lived in a middle-class suburban neighborhood with her sister and her parents, who both moved from the South to attend college in the area. Her father was a civil servant; their mother worked in what we’d now call “tech.” Stacey took piano lessons and was a skilled gymnast, and spent her summers attending a variety of camps. When she barely missed the cutoff for the Gifted and Talented program at their school, her mother arranged for her to retake it. Even though the Marshalls made good salaries—enough to buy the girls’ the latest in new clothes and toys—they were always worried about money, and fearful of industry downsizing.
And there was Garrett Talinger, one of three brothers growing up in a nearly all-white upper-middle-class neighborhood in the suburbs. His parents graduated from Ivy League schools and worked hard to juggle the necessary travel for their jobs as consultants. They had a pool, regular house cleaners, and membership to an elite private country club. But the parents rarely talked about money—even when Garrett’s mother stepped down from her job to spend more time with the family and finances became tighter.
The Talinger family’s lives rotated around “the calendar,” which overflowed with times for tryouts, practices, and games, many of which required travel. Garrett participated in special leagues and tournaments for three different sports, and took lessons for the piano and the saxophone. He was a good student, and behaved well in class, but he was also often exhausted, “competitive with and hostile towards” his siblings, and resentful that his parents didn’t make enough money to send him back to the expensive private school he used to attend. In many ways, Garrett’s life feels like a bad stereotype of the millennial existence: overscheduled, overprivileged, and, one can easily imagine in the years to come, deeply burnt out.
Lareau discerned a divide between parents who practiced what she called “concerted cultivation” and those, generally of lower-class status, who refused or didn’t have time to orient their lives entirely around children’s activities and future resume-building. It’s not as if these lower-class parents were “bad” parents—it’s just that the skills they cultivated in their children, including independence and imagination, are not the ones valued by the bourgeois workplace. To be valued there, you need plans, lengthy resumes, ease and confidence interacting with authority figures, and innate understandings of how the job ladder works. You need connections, and a willingness to multitask, and an eagerness to overschedule.
Some millennials were raised this way, alternately resisting and reconciling themselves to their parents’ best intentions. Others have struggled their entire lives to adopt and approximate behaviors they were never taught. So much depends on when and where and how you were raised: whether your parents were married or divorced, whether you lived in the city or amidst wide-open spaces, and what “activities” were even available, let alone affordable. But the common denominator between experiences remains the same: to “succeed,” as a millennial kid, at least according to middle-class societal standards, was to build yourself for burnout.
The tenets of concerted cultivation will sound familiar, because they’re what have been represented, and tacitly agreed upon, as “good” parenting for the last three decades. The child’s schedule—beginning with naptimes and continuing through competitive dance, or music, or sports—takes precedence over the parent’s; the child’s well-being, and, more importantly, their future capacity for success, is paramount. Baby food should be homemade; toddler play should be enriching; private tutors should be enlisted if necessary.
Within the framework of concerted cultivation, a child should develop a large vocabulary, feel capable of questioning people in authority and advocating for their own needs, and learn how to negotiate and plan for the demands of their schedule at a young age. They should be trained to become good networkers, good employees, good multitaskers. Every part of a child’s life, in other words, can be optimized to better prepare them for their eventual entry into the working world. They become mini-adults, with the attendant anxiety and expectations, years before adulthood hits.
Concerted cultivation is, at its heart, a middle-class practice. But over the last thirty years, its ideals have transcended class lines, becoming the foundation of “good parenting,” especially for those who’d fallen, or were anxious about falling, out of the middle class. And while no one outside of academia called it “concerted cultivation,” boomers from across the United States told me about aspiring to whatever iteration of the ideal they could make work.
When Sue and her husband were raising their millennial children in the Philadelphia area, for example, they were both blue-collar workers, living paycheck to paycheck. Her version of concerted cultivation was scrimping every month to cover tuition at the local Catholic school. From 1983 to 1987, Rita found herself a single parent to two kids, moving to various cities across the United States. She knew that volunteering at her children’s school was important, but her work schedule made it difficult, even though the school was just a block away. And while the family lived below the poverty line, she still put aside ten dollars a month in order to provide the sort of “enrichment” she could afford: a camping trip every summer.
For Cindi, a Hispanic mother from South Texas, money was always tight, especially after both she and her husband were laid off. The experience brought them closer together as a family, she told me, and made them stronger in their faith. Despite financial pressures, the children remained central. She helped their teachers with laborious tasks, chaperoned field trips and events, and fundraised. “We lived and sacrificed for our children,” she said. “Children first, marriage second.”
Because of my age (old millennial) and location (like Stefanie, a small town in North Idaho), my parents either missed, felt less pressure to embrace, rejected, or just didn’t have access to many of the tenets of concerted cultivation. But that didn’t mean my mom, as the primary caregiver, didn’t end up incorporating elements of it in my childhood, purposefully or not.
Most of my mom’s parenting philosophy, she told me, was largely derived from what she had learned in her teacher ed classes, especially developmental psychology. “I sought experiences that would shape your thinking from a very early age,” she told me, like reading two books every night, “both to begin a love of reading but also to establish a routine that made clear when you were supposed to sleep,” and making three healthy meals a day with limited snacking.
I went to preschool, which I remember loving, in the basement of our church, for three hours a day. Because my mom didn’t work outside of the home, she was able to pick me up, drop me off, and supervise me for the rest of the time. There was no competition for my preschool, not even a waiting list. When I started elementary school, I walked the five minutes to the bus stop and rode the bus thirty minutes in either direction. Starting around fourth grade, when my mom had returned to work, I was allowed to be home alone after school—a time I cherished, and filled with Bagel Bites and episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Unlike many middle-class millennials, I didn’t start organized activities of any kind until I was in the second grade, when I began taking piano lessons. My mother had played, and thought learning to read music and knowing “what it takes to make music” was important. “I didn’t think about the other benefits, such as the discipline to remember to practice, or the importance of learning to play in public,” she told me recently.
Because my mom had left behind a teaching job at an elite private school in Minnesota when she moved to Idaho, she felt strongly that she “owed something” to me and brother:
She became president of the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) and was elected to the school board. There weren’t a lot of “enrichment” activities in town, but she enrolled me in what was available, usually with my enthusiastic consent: I was a Girl Scout, I continued to play piano. I loved writing, which she encouraged by having me do free-writes with one of her adult friends who taught high school English. I loved reading, but the agreement was that I had to alternate each Baby-Sitter’s Club book (easy, comforting reads) with a non–Baby-Sitter’s Club book.
“I wanted you to be educated,” my mother told me. What’s interesting, then, is all the ways, some of them highly camouflaged, that education took shape outside of the classroom. She was preparing me for adult life, but specifically preparing me for middle class, professional, cultured adult life. My brother and I accompanied our parents to sit-down restaurants, where we learned manners, and were exposed to “different” types of foods (one of my most vivid sensory memories of childhood is tasting escargot, an incredibly ’80s version of “sophisticated” food). We received a “fancy” good grades dinner to reward, in my mom’s words “an accomplishment that took a long time to achieve.” My parents also brought us to places outside of our small town—to Seattle, or Spokane—and took us to museums to learn about how to behave in public.
And yet all of my parents’ concerted cultivation took place against a backdrop of extended, almost entirely unsupervised play. We lived on a cul-de-sac in a relatively new development. There were no parks within walking distance, but there was a massive swath of undeveloped land behind our house, known colloquially as “the weeds,” which gave my childhood a feeling, if not reality, of unrestricted wildness.
The neighborhood was filled with kids, and I played with them—in my backyard, in their backyards and then, as we grew older, in the streets and in “the weeds”—for large expanses of time. My first childhood friend lived next door, and the boundaries between his house and mine felt fluid. We rode bikes together, made forts out of fallen locust trees, caught grasshoppers for hours. Summers always felt like a wild, endless expanse, dotted with swimming lessons, camping trips, and a week of Vacation Bible School. Mostly, though, it was just endless hours of trying to entertain myself: outside, biking on my own, at the pool, in my room.
My brother and I enjoyed a largely unstructured childhood that, like many millennials, we periodically haul out to contrast ourselves with what feels like the overly supervised lives of kids today. Other older millennials recall similar freedoms: Ryan, who grew up in a middle-class suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, remembers endless afternoons at home with his brothers while his parents were at work in the ’80s and early ’90s. “We mostly stuck around our home, often terrorizing each other,” he said. “I would climb the tree in our backyard to escape my brothers and they would get the hose and spray me until I came down. When at least one of my parents was home, we had more range to play in our entire neighborhood, unsupervised.”
Mary, who was born in 1985, grew up “almost totally unsupervised” in rural Virginia—her father was the priest of a wealthy congregation, but they were almost always broke. “I would play and read alone in the acres of woods behind our house,” she recalled, “wander alone around the church campus across the street, teach myself to cook weird stuff in the kitchen, and go for long, solo walks around the neighborhood.” Emily grew up on a farm in Illinois, five miles from the closest small town. “I could hop on a horse bareback whenever I wanted,” she said, “and swing on ropes into the hay piles and go look for crawfish under the bridge and build our fake town out in the woods.”
But most of the millennials I talked to who had such freedoms were either older or grew up in rural areas where crime was not a concern. As the ideals of concerted cultivation continued to spread, they consolidated into behaviors we now think of as “helicopter parenting,” which could also just be described as more parenting, and particularly more time spent with children, especially during the afterschool and weekend times when those children were previously on their own.
In “The Overprotected Kid,” published in the Atlantic in 2014, Hanna Rosin’s husband realizes that their own daughter, then ten, had probably experienced no more than ten minutes of unsupervised time in her entire life.1 Rosin traces the shift toward increased supervision—and the concurrent attempt to eliminate risk in children’s play—back to two major events in the late ’70s. First, in 1978, a toddler seriously injured himself on a twelve-foot-long slide in Chicago. His mother, who’d been right behind him before he fell through a gap at the top of the slide, sued the Chicago Park District and the companies responsible for constructing and installing the slide.
The suit, which was later settled for $9.5 million, was one of several that ushered in a wave of “playground reform” across the United States, as thousands of playgrounds across the United States exchanged fixtures newly conceived of as “dangerous” for ostensibly safer, and almost always standardized, new equipment. (At my elementary school, teeter-totters and a merry-go-rounds were replaced with slides made of that hard, static-producing yellow plastic; if you’re an older millennial, you might recall something similar.)
The second event took place in Manhattan in 1979, when a six-year-old named Etan Patz, who’d pleaded with his mother to let him walk to the school bus stop by himself, was finally granted his request—and disappeared. The story became national news and, along with the abduction and murder of a four-year-old Florida boy, Adam Walsh, helped incite a national panic over missing children, “stranger danger,” and the omnipresent threat of child molesters. Photos of missing children first began showing up on milk cartons in the early ’80s; 38 million people watched a dramatization of Walsh’s abduction, simply named Adam, when it aired in 1983; Ronald Reagan declared the day of Patz’s disappearance National Missing Children’s Day.
For all of the anxiety, “crimes against children” did not, in fact, spike in the early ’80s, and since the early ’90s, they’ve actually been in decline. “A child from a happy, intact family who walks to the bus stop and never comes home is still a national tragedy,” Rosin writes, “not a national epidemic.” But the perception of increased danger to children, whether on the playground or in public, compelled parents (with the ability and time to do so) to prevent or decrease exposure to those spaces.
The anxiety over “stranger danger” was, in many ways, a displacement of other anxieties about the shifting understanding of family, of the increase in working mothers, of a weakening of community and the cohesion that accompanied it. There was so much that seemed out of a parents’ control, but where and how a child played, whether or not they were supervised at all times—that could be closely monitored.
As millennials hit high school and college over the course of the 2000s, this type of helicopter parenting became widespread—readily identifiable and derided. But back in 1996, the sociologist Sharon Hays had described the phenomenon in her book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. “In sum,” she wrote, “the methods of appropriate child rearing are construed as child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive.”2
The crucial word here is construed—just because middle-class parents decided that a certain style of parenting is superior doesn’t mean it empirically is. For example, as Lareau shows, there are elements of the lower- and working-class parenting that are incredibly valuable and largely absent from concerted cultivation. One of the most important: “natural growth,” or the conscious or unconscious allotment of un structured time, which allows children to cultivate curiosity, independence, and learn to negotiate peer dynamics on their own.
In practice, this turn to concerted cultivation meant less of the wild, roaming time that Rosin and I remembered so fondly. It meant neighborhood games became adult-coached and supervised competitive league sports. It meant less of a chance to seek and test personal limits, less time spent wholly with other children, developing unsupervised hierarchies, community rules and logic, and the feelings of competence and independence that accompanied completing small tasks (going to the store, walking to the bus stop, coming home to an empty house and making yourself Bagel Bites) on one’s own. “Risk management used to be a business practice,” Malcolm Harris writes in Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. “Now it’s our dominant child-rearing strategy.”
There were developmental consequences to that strategy—but sometimes it’s easiest to see those consequences when we look at what happened in their absence. Danielle, who’s white and grew up in the outskirts of Orlando, remembers her childhood as largely unsupervised, with free rein of the neighborhood. Her family was on the poorer side of her friend group, and periodically on food stamps. The only scheduled activity she recalls was choir, which was free and organized through her school. “My parents never went to college, so I don’t think they had a framework for the ‘fill up your kids’ schedule so their college application looks good’ idea,” she recalled. “I think their focus was on making sure there was a roof over our heads and food on the table.”
In hindsight, she’s grateful for that attitude: “I saw from an early age how work can grind you up and spit you back out, as well as the benefits of leisure time,” she told me. “I have some friends who are just a little younger than me, who take work much more seriously (and personally), and I can’t help but think my semi-feral unscheduled childhood has something to do with it.”
Like Danielle, I’m increasingly convinced that one of the reasons I was able to avoid burnout as long as I did can be directly traced to the amount of “natural growth” I experienced. But so many millennial kids never experienced it at all. As Rosin points out, “a common concern of parents these days is that children grow up too fast. But sometimes it seems as if children don’t get the space to grow up at all; they just become adept at mimicking the habits of adulthood.” Middle class kids become mini-adults earlier and earlier—but as the rise of “adulting” rhetoric makes clear, they’re not necessarily prepared for its realities. They’ve spent a ton of time with adults, and learned the external markings of performing adulthood, but lack the independence and strong sense of self that accompanies a less surveilled and protected childhood.
Take, for example, the story of Maya. She’s white, and was born in 1996—the tail end of the millennial generation—and grew up middle class, in the suburbs of Chicago, with both parents working. Her neighborhood was “nice,” and filled with kids her age, but she never saw anyone: “There was no sense of closeness, no united feeling that we could play together or meet up,” she recalls. All the kids were already siloed into activities away from the neighborhood, including her. “I always felt like I had ‘consigned’ time more than a ‘schedule.’ Consigned time at daycare, consigned time at afterschool programs, consigned time after high school activities and my car-less self waited until my parents could pick me up. I felt like I was forced to live at school.”
She recalls her parents as focused entirely on grades and extracurriculars “but not as much on teaching me how to make friends” or “how to spend unstructured time.” Her mom taught her to give every teacher a gift, she wrote every adult a holiday card, she took notes at every conference or public speaking event. Maya calls those tendencies—which she still practices, in slightly modified form—“insanely anal teacher’s pet behaviors,” but they could also be called preparation for the upwardly mobile workplace.
Maya’s mother was extremely conscientious and knew the language of good parenting, often repeating the refrain of “You can tell me anything.” But when Maya wanted to talk about body issues, or negative thoughts, or obsessive fears, her mother quickly became frustrated. She took Maya to a therapist, but seemed unwilling to directly engage with the messiness of parenting. Today, Maya draws a straight line between the cultivated busyness of her childhood to her feelings of exhaustion, shame, and burnout. “I look back on my five hours of sleep, my roster of activities I cared about, the thesis I poured my soul into, and I know there’s no way I could have stretched myself further without hurting myself and hating what I was doing,” she told me. “But then my practical brain is like, You should have hurt yourself. You’re playing catch-up now.”
The stereotype of the oversurveilled, overprotected kid is that they grow up to be weak and lazy. But in my experience, the millennial trait of “laziness” has a lot more to do with economic security—either the family’s actual security, or total insulation from precarity as a child or in adulthood. The laziest millennials I know are the ones who’ve been saved from the consequences, economic or otherwise, of every mistake they’ve made. But that’s still just a small sliver of the actual millennial population. Most who grew up middle class and overprotected also grew up to be hypervigilant about maintaining or obtaining class status: hustling harder, as Maya puts it, networking more aggressively, interning more, sleeping less. So many millennials end up defining themselves exclusively by their ability to work hard, and succeed, and play it safe—instead of their actual personal tastes, or their willingness to take risks, or experiment and even fail.
Amanda, who grew up in a suburb of Detroit, still struggles with unstructured free time. When she arrived at college in the early 2000s, she no longer had a chock-full schedule of activities around which to orient her life. “Any down time began to feel like I was being lazy and unproductive,” she recalls, “which in turn made me question my self-worth.” Today, if she’s not doing something, she feels like she’s wasting time. She started going to therapy after an anxiety attack landed her in the ER, but finds it difficult to heed her therapist’s suggestion that she shouldn’t feel guilty about taking a day to do whatever she wants—even if that is a day of Netflix bingeing, or a day of rest—because she doesn’t really know what she might want to do if it’s not work.
For some millennials, helicopter parenting wasn’t an over-reaction to class anxiety. It was the appropriate, measured reaction to real, not perceived, threat—and systemic racism. Rhiann, who spent her early childhood in Gary, Indiana, recalls a childhood of locks and forbidden areas. There were iron bars on her windows, and her backyard was enclosed with cinderblocks. Her garage had been broken in to several times, and there had been attempts to do the same to her home. “I grew up knowing that the world is a scary place and people sometimes did terrible things and there was no such thing as being ‘too careful,’” she told me. “We went nowhere alone. We could not play outside without immediate supervision.”
That changed, somewhat, when she moved out of Gary and into a suburban subdivision outside the city, where they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. There was less threat in the form of break-ins and recognized crime, but her family had to deal with constant harassment, especially from the golfers who passed through the course that shared a border with her backyard. “There were loud, tipsy white men who asked my brother and I if my parents were hired help,” she recalled, “and would interrogate us about our parents’ jobs and incomes.”
Before the move, Rhiann and her brother mostly played indoors, or in the backyard, and were isolated from other kids and always, always supervised. Afterward, they could bike and roller-skate in the far more open space, so long as they stayed within the reception area of the walkie-talkies their dad had purchased for them.
As they grew up, Rhiann took pleasure in studying, and her mother, who was a teacher, was “exceptionally attentive” to her schoolwork. But her parents’ priority was safety, then education. For white parents, that might seem like helicopter parenting; for a Black family, it was just common sense. She internalized the idea that the world was a fickle place, and nothing, certainly not their class stability, was guaranteed. “We often talked about how the overall systems that people rely on really weren’t made to work for everyone,” Rhiann recalled. “My parents were also clear about how there will likely always be someone who is offended by who we were, and the spaces we were in. They taught us that education was the way to freedom, and we had to work doggedly hard to get there.”
In sixth grade, Rhiann began attending a school that was predominantly white. She found herself continually underestimated by her teachers and her peers. “The adage ‘You will have to work twice as hard for half of the results’ really resonated with me,” she told me, “and I haven’t slowed down since then.” She was top of her class, in every club, on every committee. “Being busy used to feel like ‘home’ because that ‘hustle’ attitude was prominent in my home,” she explained. “Always moving, always improving, always learning something. In a way, it was like the darkness in the world can’t win so long as you don’t stop running.” Rhiann’s parents practiced concerted cultivation—but with a very conscious modification for what it takes to succeed as a Black woman in a white world.
That strategy—well, it worked. Today, Rhiann is almost thirty. She has multiple degrees and a family of her own. “I have high career aspirations and my heart still beats to the rhythm of productivity,” she told me. “But I am also so very tired.”
Boomer parents were worried about all the things parents are always worried about. But they were also deeply anxious about creating, sustaining, or “passing down” middle-class status amidst a period of widespread downward mobility—priming a generation of children to work, no matter the cost, until they achieved it. That anxiety consolidated into a new set of parenting ideals, behaviors, and standards regarded as the building blocks of “good,” aspirational parenting.3 Whether or not you agree with the actual effectiveness of those practices matters far less than the pressure many boomer parents felt to perform them.
And as parents worked hard to be “good” parents, the children in these households internalized ideas about what work itself could and could not provide. As Katherine S. Newman puts it in Falling from Grace, one of the primary messages gleaned from a family’s downward mobility was that “one can play by the rules, pay one’s dues, and still be evicted from the American Dream. There is no guarantee that one’s best efforts will be rewarded in the end.”4
For Brenna, who grew up in Marin County, California, in the ’80s and ’90s, the message of her childhood was that her status as a “smart kid” was the only way her family would regain financial security. Her parents had fallen out of the middle class when her father, a television executive, was diagnosed with brain tumors. Her mother, who had stayed home with the family, was forced to go back to work. They still maintained their “identity” as middle class, finagling a way for Brenna to attend an exclusive private school, even though their finances were never stable.
As a teen, Brenna took on an increasingly demanding schedule, mostly focused on grades—she thought, and her parents reinforced the belief, that grades would help restore the family’s middle-class stability. “I didn’t realize until after college,” she admitted, “that these things weren’t what actually made people rich.” By then, her posture toward work was already in place, modeled after her mom, who supported the family on her own after Brenna’s father passed away when she was sixteen. “My mom works from home these days, and I have a hard time convincing her to leave the house, or take vacations,” Brenna told me. “I see myself repeating these behaviors, and have to make an effort to make time for things like seeing a movie with my husband, or cooking dinner.”
Amy spent her childhood in the Midwest and told me that when her dad got laid off from his factory job in the early ’80s, “it changed the whole trajectory” of her family. Her mom went to work full-time; her dad didn’t find full-time “good” work for years. She went on reduced lunch at school, and her parents simply could not pay for many of the activities and experiences that they wanted for her—going to camp, traveling. “The words ‘We can’t afford it’ should have been on a monogrammed pillow in our house,” she said.
“It absolutely changed me,” Amy explained. “I knew early on that employment was not guaranteed.” When she started thinking about career paths, she only considered those that would offer complete financial security. She was the first person in her family to go to college, and the only things she understood as financially secure were law and medicine. “I just knew that lawyers and doctors had a lot of money,” she said.
And then there’s Pam, who grew up in Flint, Michigan. Her parents were teachers, so she wasn’t directly affected by GM plant closures that in some years would scatter half of her class. They’d go “from Michigan to Tennessee, to follow the factories,” she explained, “from houses to trailers, from trailers to apartments.” Because of the fluctuation in population, her parents and other teachers were regularly pink-slipped—laid off at the end of the school year, then rehired, contingent on population, for the new school year. Their teachers’ union went on strike, adding further insecurity; both of her older sisters had to leave the state to find work when their husbands were laid off from their manufacturing jobs.
“I internalized the insecurity,” Pam said. “And when I found out what tenure was, it sounded like the only secure job in the world, so I decided to become a college professor.” What she didn’t understand: how entering the job market in 2008 would torpedo her job prospects. As we’ll see, the disconnect between the seemingly “most secure jobs in the world,” whether in academia, medicine, or the law, and the reality of the post-recession economy, is a major contributing factor to millennial burnout: If working hard to achieve those jobs can’t offer security, what can?
Growing up, I knew that if your parent was a doctor your family got nice things, and that there were other children whose parents were different kinds of doctors, who got nicer things. But that’s often the extent of the upper-class hierarchy in a small town: slight variations on upper-middle-class professionals, who practiced a diluted version of the “yuppie strategy.” One of the reasons my dad went into medicine was because he knew it was a means to achieve the middle-class lifestyle his parents were always hovering just above and below.
As a child, I had little sense that my family had financial struggles, that my dad was barely making enough to cover his student loans and the mortgage in those early years, or that my mom felt out of place at events where every other doctor’s wife was wearing a Nordstrom dress and she was wearing something she’d sewn herself the year before. But that’s the thing about the upper middle class: They rarely talk about money, at least not the precariousness of money. Not with each other, and rarely with their children. One of the behaviors of middle-class-ness, after all, is avoiding talking about the crude specifics of how it’s maintained—or masking them in the simple rhetoric of “hard work.”
As a result, until I reached tenth grade, I had sensed little, if any, class precariousness—even as my town underwent seismic changes, first with the state’s passage of right-to-work laws, which gutted the power of the unions that helped maintain the blue-collar middle class, and then with litigation over forest management, which gradually eliminated high-wage logging and sawmill jobs across the area. I have memories of homes all over town with THIS HOUSEHOLD SUPPORTED BY TIMBER DOLLARS signs in their window, but because kids are taught not to talk with each other about financial matters, and my family wasn’t experiencing it directly, I thought of it as a community crisis, not a financial one.
In my town, most of the parents I knew were the middle-class workers with “good jobs” who over the course of the ’80s and ’90s, experienced bouts of joblessness, as the timber industry collapsed, or general precarity, after right-to-work legislation passed in 1986 and the unions began to disappear. Some were farmers, who increasingly had to find additional work to supplement the unpredictable income from the land. And then there were the people who never had “good” jobs or fell from those good jobs into double shifts or two jobs. People who worked in retail, people pulling double shifts to support a family as a single mom. People whose parents didn’t speak English. People who worked as house cleaners, hairdressers, bartenders, nurses’ aides, or any number of other jobs that weren’t unionized. People who remained largely invisible. Some weren’t working; some were what’s come to be known as the working poor: barely, barely making ends meet.
As millennials grew up in towns like mine all over America, our families were experiencing—or cognizant and scared of—downward mobility. Divorced women were some of the most affected—if understudied—by this trend. Pre-divorce, the men in these families had been the primary or only breadwinner. Post-divorce, mothers “made do” with 29 to 39 percent of the income they had before.5 Lenore Weitzman, author of The Divorce Revolution, points out that while men’s standard of living often improves following divorce (with an average increase of 42 percent in the first year), the standard of living for women and their minor children declines sharply (an average decline of 73 percent). If you’ve been through a divorce, either your own or your family’s, you likely understand this math on a visceral level.
For those who haven’t been intimate to a divorce, or only to an incredibly copacetic one, it might be hard to understand these metrics: Wouldn’t the father still be contributing the same financial support to the family as before? Of course not: Child support payments may only cover the basic expenses of caring for a child; they are very rarely enough to bring the “household income” back to the same level as before the divorce. (What’s more, in the 1980s, the average child support award was also in decline—and fewer than half were able to collect the child support owed them.)
Ironically, part of the reason for this type of downward mobility was the rise of “no fault divorce,” first adopted by the state of California in 1969, which allowed both parties to file for divorce without evidence of wrongdoing on either part. This made it easier for women in unhappy and/or abusive marriages to leave their husbands, but there was little societal attention to what would happen to those women once divorced.
For most divorced women, it was incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to make the sort of money that would render them financially independent. It’s not that these women weren’t hard workers—but many had quit their jobs in order to raise children. When the marriage ended, they often found it difficult or impossible to reestablish themselves on the career track or even find work. Their ex-husbands, by contrast, still had the same job or career they had before the divorce, as well as what Newman calls “job mobility”—the ability, if laid off, to chase job opportunities or find employment at the same level.
The psychological impact of post-divorce downward mobility, and the feeling of precarity that accompanies it, is multilayered: Children are not only confronted with the dissolution of the family unit, but of their understanding of their family’s financial situation, their class position, what they can and cannot afford. In previously middle-class families, it also often sets up a dynamic in which children are put in the position to ask, beg, or negotiate with one parent for “extras” not explicitly covered by child support: car repairs, glasses, camp tuition, or assistance with college.
This is precisely what happened when my parents divorced when I was sixteen. My mom, working as a teacher, had helped put my dad through medical school—and then had quit her job to take care of my brother and me, largely in deference to my father’s much higher earning potential. When my parents divorced, my mom hired a good lawyer to advocate for financial acknowledgment of what she’d lose in the divorce, otherwise known as alimony.
In this, my mom’s situation—and, by extension, my family’s—was unique. She was able to complete her master’s degree, which she had opted not to pursue back when my dad was in medical school. Payment for many of the activities that were part of my larger “education” were stipulated as a part of the divorce decree. But there were other financial realities—quite small, in the grand scheme of economic deprivation, that nevertheless deeply destabilized me. That’s what downward mobility does, whether the cause is divorce or a lost job: It moves the ground beneath your feet. For the first time in my life, I was acutely aware of money—not my own, but how much each parent had at their disposal on a monthly basis. I knew we couldn’t afford the mortgage on the home we’d lived in as a family, and, as we looked for new homes, exactly what kind of house, in what kind of neighborhood, we could afford. I knew what it felt like to ask, plead, and harass a parent for repairs on the car I drove to school, even as I did my best to avoid any indicators of class instability to my friends and the rest of the world.
To be clear, even after the divorce, my family was still able to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. But to do so—and to try to decrease reliance on my father, especially when the alimony ended—my mom adopted a rigorous posture toward work that I’d later adopt. Specifically, a mentality of working all the time. I don’t begrudge her this—she was scared, and mad, and desperate for a modicum of economic security. But I watched her work spread, like a spilled glass of water, into all corners of our lives. She graded while we watched television; she wrote in the evenings after we’d gone to bed. In an attempt to make extra money to supplement the small amount she was paid to adjunct at the local college, she started writing math textbooks, which took up more of her time on weekends and during the summer.
I’ve had conversations with my mom about this time—and what it took, many years later, for her to develop a different, far less militaristic attitude toward work. It wasn’t her fault I reacted to our family’s economic anxiety in a way that would harden my resolve to avoid a similar situation in my own life. For example, I would not, and have still not, put myself in a situation where my career and financial well-being could be jeopardized through a breakup. I attended grad school when I wanted to attend grad school; I was skeptical and remain so of the need for marriage. And I internalized that working all the time was the surest way to make yourself feel less panicked about the things you couldn’t control. This might feel like a logical coping mechanism, but as so many of the millennial generation can attest, it is rarely a healthy or manageable one.
In the conclusion to Falling from Grace, Newman’s take on the effects of widespread downward mobility is bleak—but also, in some ways, revolutionary: “Downward mobility is not merely a matter of accepting a menial job, enduring the loss of stability, or witnessing with dismay the evaporation of one’s hold on material comfort; it is also a broken covenant,” she writes. “It is so profound a reversal of middle-class expectations that it calls into question the assumptions on which their lives have been predicated.”
Most burnt-out millennials I know have arrived at that point of calling those expectations into question, but it didn’t happen right away. Instead, it’s taken decades: Even after watching our parents get shut out, fall from, or simply struggle anxiously to maintain the American Dream, we didn’t reject it. We tried to work harder, and better, more efficiently, with more credentials, to achieve it. And everyone, including our parents, seemed to agree on the first and most necessary stop on that journey: college, the best one possible, no matter the cost.