Are the Good Times Gone?
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s Sarah Johnson and I sat in her sunny North Carolina kitchen on an unseasonably warm April day, Sarah jokingly warned me that if I continued to occupy my seat, her daughter might include me in the mural she was painting. All joking aside, Sarah, an Asian American, professional middle — class mother of two, is quite proud of the contrast between her encouragement of her daughter’s artistic talents and what she believes to have been her parents’ narrow interest in seeing their children become doctors. Yet, at the same time as she celebrates her own attitude, Sarah regrets changes between her parents’ generation and her own. Most notably she mourns the disappearance of a community that she believes supported individual families and the simultaneous emergence of a new form of busyness that she believes makes it almost impossible to reach beyond the nuclear family. Even though she is married, she thinks she faces the task of raising her children from a position of greater isolation than did her parents. She described for me what factors she thinks have been responsible for the change between the present and the past:
Th ere was an extended family [before], and now you don’t have that extended family. So when you have two parents working outside the home, you don’t have any support. And in order to raise a child effectively, that old proverb about a community raising a child, it’s so true. … It could be anything—a neighborhood coffee klatch, the local Democratic or Republican Party, the bridge group—but you’ve got to have these connections in your community. You’ve got to have a support network of friends, both the wife and the husband, and I think that’s harder now, because we have these really extravagant lifestyles that require two people to wo rk outside the home.
Sarah illustrates a set of attitudes toward the past found among many professional middle-class parents. On the one hand, Sarah holds dear a nostalgic
memory of a time when parenting was perceived to have been easier than it is today because parents were more supported, only one adult worked outside the home, and life was lived at a slower pace. On the other hand, she retains a critical sense that even in those earlier times parents muffed the challenge of raising teens. In response to these perceived changes, Sarah both feels a greater sense of individual responsibility for raising her children than she believes her parents did and wants to approach the task differently.
Sarah’s conviction about the shift in responsibility and the increasing challenge of child rearing is shared by many parents less privileged than herself. They too believe that the task of raising adolescents today has become far more difficult than it was in the past, and they too attribute that change, at least in part, to greater degrees of busyness and isolation experienced by individual families. The less privileged parents, however, diverge from their more privileged peers on attitudes toward the generation before them: they have less uniform views about whether their parents made mistakes.[2] When asked about their parenting style, some of these less privileged parents explicitly stated that they modeled themselves on the parenting of those who raised them. For example, one working-class, Hispanic father said, in reference to the manner in which he was raising his fifteen-year-old son, “Were continuing what our parents have instilled in us, and were trying to do the same thing with him.” As a group, these parents speak less of forging a new path and more of adapting older ways to more difficult contemporary challenges. Theirs is often a voice of continuity that contrasts with the discontinuity in child-rearing styles that the professional middle-class parents proclaim.
Of course, we have no reason to believe that recollections of the past— whether affirmative or critical—accurately reflect lived experiences. Nor should we assume that even the most nostalgic recollections represent a desire to return to the conditions of an earlier time. Even so, respondents’ recollections are revealing about how the past enters into rationales for child-rearing strategies.
And, of course, we can’t answer a question about whether parenting was actually easier in the past. Even so, what is clear, as we listen to parents— across the social spectrum—is that they perceive it to be more difficult today. What is clear as well is that the parents’ responses to that perception vary with socioeconomic standing. Elite parents respond with hovering and the intensive practice of parenting out of control. The less elite respond with an intensification of more traditional disciplinary practices of imposing limits in order to be aware of where their children are and what they are doing, whether or not those were the techniques used by their own parents.