Brief Overview

I divide this investigation of parenting strategies into two parts. In part I, I demonstrate how parenting out of control emerges from the ways in which professional middle-class parents make sense of their position in the world. I show that although parents from the working and middle classes share some concerns with parents from the professional middle class—especially about safety issues and parental isolation—the more privileged parents have a quite distinctive (and sometimes inconsistent) approach to child rearing. In part II, I begin with a brief discussion of how the family has been ignored in discus­sions of surveillance technologies and then turn to how parents in different social classes enact child rearing in response to the new range of technologies for connecting to, constraining, and spying on their children. Once again, I demonstrate that in spite of some shared interests in new technologies, the professional middle-class parents approach these in ways that are quite dif­ferent from their less privileged peers. The last two chapters offer some final thoughts. In chapter 8, I review the sources and dimensions of the two par­enting styles discussed in the book, and I demonstrate how care can shade into control; in the conclusion, I consider the consequences of different ways to approach the care—and control—of teenagers.