A fourth possibility: Convince parents that intensive parenting doesn't deliver results. Parents won't push their kids so hard if they become convinced that doing so doesn't make a difference.
Fortunately this approach might be a little easier than one might think, because there seems to be a lot of truth to it. Intensive parenting isn't what's causing kids to succeed, it's things that are correlated with intensive parenting like high conscientiousness and socioeconomic status.
I find myself reminded of an article I read about politicians in Central Africa who kept hiring witch doctors to cast spells to help their reelection campaigns. Unfortunately, one of the main spell components was the body parts of albino humans. Some of the politicians felt bad about this, but felt intense pressure because they were afraid that if they didn't cast the spells, their rivals would. What they didn't realize was that it wouldn't hurt their chances to not cast the same spells as their rivals, because the spells don't do anything anyway! Intensive parents strike me as similar to this.
That’s a really great point I hadn’t thought of! I think you’re right that it doesn’t work. I think you may be overestimating parents’ willingness to change their behavior in light of new facts. Ime, people change their minds after their feelings change.
I don't think "intensive parenting" is fundamentally bad, but like many things, when people are never taught well enough to reflect and adjust their approach to it, it has several pitfalls. Many such parents are turning towards this style without guidance and, in some cases, any experience whatsoever with the techniques it uses.
That being said, I think you're absolutely right in that many parents feel pushed into parenting this way to secure the future of their kids. We have all sorts of polls and indirect metrics that point out how little potential people see in the future for them and their offspring these days. It ties into the fertility discourse as well. As a broad group, we've collectively learned that the only way to improve one's lot now is to transition to the next socioeconomic class (or higher).
I think it all depends on definitions, of course. If "intensive parenting" just means spending a lot of time, money, and energy on your kids that's great as long as everyone is enjoying themselves. The problem isn't that the parenting is too intense, per se, but rather that it's just incredibly stressful for everyone involved and, as Nicholas pointed out above, doesn't even really work in terms of ROI. Maybe we need a better word. Intensive parenting, helicopter parenting, tiger moming, all have drawbacks as terms. The most accurate way to describe it might be "economic precarity fears fueled very stressful parenting" but that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue lol.
The thing is, I'm not convinced the ROI is poor as much as that we have a bunch of really poorly resourced people attempting to raise children that way. I know of quite a few successful professionals who had some form of intensive parenting growing up, but those families were very well off and had the resources to professionally (and more healthily) address any problems arising from it. I've seen it go awry as well, but the same could be said of a very large portion of my religious-upbringing peers.
I'm just going to hold onto my prior that most kids facing abusive parenting are less victims of the style of parenting itself and more-so victims of parents being unable to successfully navigate parenting against harsh resource constraints.
I wouldn't go as far as to describe this style of parenting as "abusive." It's more misguided and unpleasant. I'd agree that most straightforward child abuse is perpetrated by parents facing harsh resource constraints.
Curious how this would intersect with other cultures. South Korea is pretty famous for the absolutely brutal schooling schedules most kids have. China seems to have a lot of this.
Would your ideas also hold up under those situations (genuinely don't know and curious)?
I think the paper only looked at Europe and the US, unfortunately. But I think from what I know of China and South Korea (very little, unfortunately), they're probably perfect examples of economic precarity influencing parenting styles. From what I understand, they have high levels of economic mobility, high inequality, and woeful social safety nets. Not super great places to end up in the bottom half, as far as I can tell.
There are status dimensions of success-- things that make parents feel their kids have "made it"-- that aren't fully captured by the economic model, and that have become scarcer relative to the population competing for them in the last few decades. This probably exacerbates intensive parenting beyond what you'd expect from pure fear of poverty.
One example is the status value of living in a "good" neighborhood of a "good" city. I don't need to tell you how housing supply restrictions have made this scarcer.
Another is getting into a high-name-recognition, elite educational institution. I was explaining to my parents the other day that I don't think my son would have a very good chance of getting into the fancy prep school I went to, not because he's not qualified in an absolute sense, but because the bar has gotten so much higher since I went there that I'm not sure *I* would have gotten in now. First, due to neoliberal globalization (yay!) there is now a much larger worldwide pool of super-smart kids who have the information and resources to apply. And despite that globalization and general population increase, the school is still about the same size it was 30 years ago. I think the failure of Harvard and its ilk to scale themselves with the relevant population is one of the most underappreciated major elite failures of our generation.
To generalize: things that don't have to be positional goods for any physical reason are becoming positional goods for social reasons, so naturally competition gets more grueling.
That’s a really interesting point. I’ve heard a few smart people bring that up and I think it’s important. It’s reminding me of The Power Elite, which I’m listening to now.
"There’s just no way to fully fix parenting without abundance."
I am fully on board with the pro-abundance agenda. But, how do we explain the fact that the folks who do the most intensive parenting are also the folks who tend to have the most abundance?* This is true on the macro level, as well. Americans earn more, live in bigger houses, own more cars and consumer goods than Europeans. The poorest American states have GDP per capita comparable to the European median.
American middle class life can easily turn into a kind of hedonic treadmill where you're running not to get anywhere, but just to keep up. That said, economics can't full account for this phenomenon. You need a model that accounts for the sociological and the psychological. As other commenters have noted, there is a very big component of status anxiety. Having your kid go to state school does not doom them to a life of poverty, but it might make them (but really you) feel inadequate when compared to the kid who went to HYPSM.
Also, as with most everything else in America, you have to bring housing into the equation. Where you live determines where your kids go to school, which leads people to over-extend themselves to get that house in the right neighborhood, which then turns them into NIMBYs so they can defend their little enclaves.
There's no level of abundance that can make these issues go away. In fact, much of this is probably caused by abundance in the first place.
*Although, the correlation probably breaks down once you reach the ultra-wealthy, who often purposefully neglect their kids in particular ways, like having nannies do most of the parenting and sending them to boarding school.
I'm not sure everyone would agree on the meaning of "neoliberal" (an unfortunate term.) It typically has not meant a strong safety net. I like and don't like the way my badly neglectful family let us kids find our own way. I tried many things and grew into adulthood slowly. It was a dangerous childhood in some ways-- my architect dad was a drunk who worked as a draftsman and we lived in a lower middle class neighborhood where you had to learn to fistfight. I did two hitches in the Army. Later got a practical nursing license. Would up as a PhD sociologist at 51 finally after teaching economics, being a student radical, doing meeting planning and a number of other things. My sister is a successful writer. These guided childhoods seem like hell.
Have you considered the possibility that intensive parenting has become more intensive because of 1. a disappearance of support and 2. an overabundance of online people to feel sorry for kids who seem to have it bad? Like we are going down this road where AI is going to fix all our problems, are we just going to get a continuation of handholding which could just make kids all the more stressed out? Do kids these days appear more stressed out because they are being coddled more?
A fourth possibility: Convince parents that intensive parenting doesn't deliver results. Parents won't push their kids so hard if they become convinced that doing so doesn't make a difference.
Fortunately this approach might be a little easier than one might think, because there seems to be a lot of truth to it. Intensive parenting isn't what's causing kids to succeed, it's things that are correlated with intensive parenting like high conscientiousness and socioeconomic status.
I find myself reminded of an article I read about politicians in Central Africa who kept hiring witch doctors to cast spells to help their reelection campaigns. Unfortunately, one of the main spell components was the body parts of albino humans. Some of the politicians felt bad about this, but felt intense pressure because they were afraid that if they didn't cast the spells, their rivals would. What they didn't realize was that it wouldn't hurt their chances to not cast the same spells as their rivals, because the spells don't do anything anyway! Intensive parents strike me as similar to this.
That’s a really great point I hadn’t thought of! I think you’re right that it doesn’t work. I think you may be overestimating parents’ willingness to change their behavior in light of new facts. Ime, people change their minds after their feelings change.
I don't think "intensive parenting" is fundamentally bad, but like many things, when people are never taught well enough to reflect and adjust their approach to it, it has several pitfalls. Many such parents are turning towards this style without guidance and, in some cases, any experience whatsoever with the techniques it uses.
That being said, I think you're absolutely right in that many parents feel pushed into parenting this way to secure the future of their kids. We have all sorts of polls and indirect metrics that point out how little potential people see in the future for them and their offspring these days. It ties into the fertility discourse as well. As a broad group, we've collectively learned that the only way to improve one's lot now is to transition to the next socioeconomic class (or higher).
I think it all depends on definitions, of course. If "intensive parenting" just means spending a lot of time, money, and energy on your kids that's great as long as everyone is enjoying themselves. The problem isn't that the parenting is too intense, per se, but rather that it's just incredibly stressful for everyone involved and, as Nicholas pointed out above, doesn't even really work in terms of ROI. Maybe we need a better word. Intensive parenting, helicopter parenting, tiger moming, all have drawbacks as terms. The most accurate way to describe it might be "economic precarity fears fueled very stressful parenting" but that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue lol.
The thing is, I'm not convinced the ROI is poor as much as that we have a bunch of really poorly resourced people attempting to raise children that way. I know of quite a few successful professionals who had some form of intensive parenting growing up, but those families were very well off and had the resources to professionally (and more healthily) address any problems arising from it. I've seen it go awry as well, but the same could be said of a very large portion of my religious-upbringing peers.
I'm just going to hold onto my prior that most kids facing abusive parenting are less victims of the style of parenting itself and more-so victims of parents being unable to successfully navigate parenting against harsh resource constraints.
I think we may be talking about two different things. The style of parenting I'm mostly addressing is what Thompson described in his article (https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/03/teen-anxiety-elite-schools-sat-act-paradox-wealthy-nations/673307/). This style is primarily practiced by families in the upper-half of income.
I wouldn't go as far as to describe this style of parenting as "abusive." It's more misguided and unpleasant. I'd agree that most straightforward child abuse is perpetrated by parents facing harsh resource constraints.
To Gatanathath too!
Curious how this would intersect with other cultures. South Korea is pretty famous for the absolutely brutal schooling schedules most kids have. China seems to have a lot of this.
Would your ideas also hold up under those situations (genuinely don't know and curious)?
I think the paper only looked at Europe and the US, unfortunately. But I think from what I know of China and South Korea (very little, unfortunately), they're probably perfect examples of economic precarity influencing parenting styles. From what I understand, they have high levels of economic mobility, high inequality, and woeful social safety nets. Not super great places to end up in the bottom half, as far as I can tell.
There are status dimensions of success-- things that make parents feel their kids have "made it"-- that aren't fully captured by the economic model, and that have become scarcer relative to the population competing for them in the last few decades. This probably exacerbates intensive parenting beyond what you'd expect from pure fear of poverty.
One example is the status value of living in a "good" neighborhood of a "good" city. I don't need to tell you how housing supply restrictions have made this scarcer.
Another is getting into a high-name-recognition, elite educational institution. I was explaining to my parents the other day that I don't think my son would have a very good chance of getting into the fancy prep school I went to, not because he's not qualified in an absolute sense, but because the bar has gotten so much higher since I went there that I'm not sure *I* would have gotten in now. First, due to neoliberal globalization (yay!) there is now a much larger worldwide pool of super-smart kids who have the information and resources to apply. And despite that globalization and general population increase, the school is still about the same size it was 30 years ago. I think the failure of Harvard and its ilk to scale themselves with the relevant population is one of the most underappreciated major elite failures of our generation.
To generalize: things that don't have to be positional goods for any physical reason are becoming positional goods for social reasons, so naturally competition gets more grueling.
That’s a really interesting point. I’ve heard a few smart people bring that up and I think it’s important. It’s reminding me of The Power Elite, which I’m listening to now.
Yes as a professor, yes to this 1000 times
"There’s just no way to fully fix parenting without abundance."
I am fully on board with the pro-abundance agenda. But, how do we explain the fact that the folks who do the most intensive parenting are also the folks who tend to have the most abundance?* This is true on the macro level, as well. Americans earn more, live in bigger houses, own more cars and consumer goods than Europeans. The poorest American states have GDP per capita comparable to the European median.
American middle class life can easily turn into a kind of hedonic treadmill where you're running not to get anywhere, but just to keep up. That said, economics can't full account for this phenomenon. You need a model that accounts for the sociological and the psychological. As other commenters have noted, there is a very big component of status anxiety. Having your kid go to state school does not doom them to a life of poverty, but it might make them (but really you) feel inadequate when compared to the kid who went to HYPSM.
Also, as with most everything else in America, you have to bring housing into the equation. Where you live determines where your kids go to school, which leads people to over-extend themselves to get that house in the right neighborhood, which then turns them into NIMBYs so they can defend their little enclaves.
There's no level of abundance that can make these issues go away. In fact, much of this is probably caused by abundance in the first place.
*Although, the correlation probably breaks down once you reach the ultra-wealthy, who often purposefully neglect their kids in particular ways, like having nannies do most of the parenting and sending them to boarding school.
I'm not sure everyone would agree on the meaning of "neoliberal" (an unfortunate term.) It typically has not meant a strong safety net. I like and don't like the way my badly neglectful family let us kids find our own way. I tried many things and grew into adulthood slowly. It was a dangerous childhood in some ways-- my architect dad was a drunk who worked as a draftsman and we lived in a lower middle class neighborhood where you had to learn to fistfight. I did two hitches in the Army. Later got a practical nursing license. Would up as a PhD sociologist at 51 finally after teaching economics, being a student radical, doing meeting planning and a number of other things. My sister is a successful writer. These guided childhoods seem like hell.
Have you considered the possibility that intensive parenting has become more intensive because of 1. a disappearance of support and 2. an overabundance of online people to feel sorry for kids who seem to have it bad? Like we are going down this road where AI is going to fix all our problems, are we just going to get a continuation of handholding which could just make kids all the more stressed out? Do kids these days appear more stressed out because they are being coddled more?
There is a lot of debate whether the economy is really worse or if it’s just vibes compared to years past Noah Smith and Michael Strain argue this https://www.irp.wisc.edu/resource/michael-strain-the-american-dream-isnt-dead/