If we can anticipate some of the effects that parenting out of control might have when it takes the form of pressure under a microscope, we still want to explore the roots of these new controlling designs. Where have they come from, and why have they become so central? I have argued that an interest in “flexibility” derives from current concerns about economic uncertainty, the declining fortunes of the middle class, and a desire to ensure that children have unique abilities that will smooth the way into elite colleges.
I now suggest that in addition to practical concerns about economic and educational success, the interest in this new complex set of goals of passion, satisfaction, and fun might have a source in more underlying approaches to life framed in the generational history of the professional middle-class parents. This latter interpretation does not replace the first one but, rather, builds on it. With a median age of forty-eight, many of these trend-setting adults were in formative years during the era known as “the sixties” (which extended
well into the literal 1970s).26 Even if they didn’t participate directly in the protest activities of the time, they were surrounded by a counterculture that proclaimed nonmaterialist values and extolled a commitment to social justice. The counterculture also urged people to “do your own thing” and to “question authority.” The legacies of that time are echoed in the urging of these parents to their children to go beyond “mere” success, to follow their passions into a life worth living. The feminist movement, which overlapped with and continued after the antiwar movement, was also clearly a shaping force: all the professional middle-class women made investments in their own educations, and many leveraged their degrees to significant professional careers. This personal history probably helps to explain why neither the mothers nor their husbands make distinctions between the goals they hold out for their sons and those they hold out for their daughters.
Eve Todd, the mother of the budding rock star, explicitly linked her perception that she was trying to accomplish something different from what her parents had with her, not just to new “tools” for parenting, but to a new sense of what was possible. In turn, she located the source of this new sense of possibilities in the radical shifts during the historical era of her adolescence:
I think. . . awareness, knowledge, education, what’s out in the world is so different than 1950, and I think that what happened through the 1960s gave people a wider range of how to be, rather than “this is what you do, and then you stay home, and then you take care of your parents.” And the world got bigger, and then with the technology and everything it just keeps expanding. So I think that the model [of adulthood] isn’t the same, whereas it was very much the same for my parents as it was for their parents before them. I just think that the awareness of how we are as people and what we want is more readily available for people to find out about if they want to—almost to an extreme about kids and everything—but even though there was some stuff [in the generation before], it was very limited.
Eve locates “a wider range of how to be” in the ideas of the sixties. At the same time, like others, she must see that many of the social transformations promised during that time period have not been secured. And like her peers, she knows well that the vision of gender equity promised by the feminist movement has a long way yet to become a reality. Parents such as Eve hold tight to their dreams even as they experience disappointment with the pattern of their own lives.
Of course, these lives are not entirely disappointing. Eve enjoys her job as a guidance counselor. Beth takes pride in, even as she downplays, both her own and her husband’s successes. But these women are aware of the costs of these achievements. And these costs are considerable. Not only are more of these women part of dual-earner couples than was true for their own parents, but as the sociologists Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson report in The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality, the substantial “growth in working time has been concentrated among couples with the most education.”27 However, this same group of adults has not necessarily reaped the economic rewards of this hard work. Since the 1970s, income inequality has increased; the truly rich have gotten considerably richer, and, relatively speaking, other groups have lost ground. Indeed, disillusionment with hard work alone might be especially the case among women who have found themselves staring up at glass ceilings and who have found that their efforts were not sufficiently rewarded.