Some of the parents—and these were often those who had grown up in comfortable surroundings—described their childhoods in the language of a magic idyll replete with steadfast stability, safety, and security. These parents did not exclusively characterize the contemporary problems they face in terms of the array of external dangers—predators, child abusers, kidnappers—that are now part of what has been labeled a “culture of fear.”7 Even so, as they recalled their youth, they added the bliss of childhood freedom to the nostalgic image of extended families and institutional support. Consider Marcia Caldwell, a white, middle-class mother of one eighteen-year-old daughter. She is a resident of rural Pennsylvania and works as an admissions associate in a private high school. When recalling her own youth, Marcia spoke about days spent outside parental control and astonished herself as she thought about swimming in the river without any adult supervision:
1 mean my parents would say to me, “Okay go outside, don’t come back till lunch, go outside,” and we’d get together with all our friends, and we’d be outside all day, baseball, football. . . . [We’d] go down to the river, jump in, swim—seriously!—come back for lunch. . . . My mother worked, but she was right across the street from our house, [and] we would check in with her. We would be out until dark, and there was no worry—my god!— [that] a sexual predator is going to come by and abduct you. We didn’t lock our doors.
Jeff Wright, a white educator who is raising his child on his own now that his wife has died, spoke about being home alone at age ten and feeling entirely safe: “When I was ten I was home alone often during the summer and could wander around the neighborhood and could wander around the back yard, and my parents didn’t know specifically where I was. But my parents thought I was safe, and I felt safe.” And Dave Townsend, a white lawyer and now the father of three teenagers, recalled as well that when he was a kid, he “ran around the neighborhood wherever [he] wanted to go, whenever [he] wanted to go.”
To be sure, these adults recognized that the past held challenges and even dangers. Some of the older respondents had parents who had grown up during the Depression and who could recall serious hardships in their own childhoods. Some respondents remembered that the Cold War was an ongoing issue of concern during their own childhoods. But as Sarah Johnson, the Asian American mother of the mural painter, discussed those times, she used the words of a child—’big scary guy”—to diminish the fear she might have felt. She also insisted that life is a lot more fraught with anxiety today than it was in the past, even though it was quite conceivable then that the world could be utterly destroyed:
I have the same concerns [my parents did], but there is a difference in setting. I think kind of the post-9/11 aspect of the project. I suppose these days th ere are additional worries because there are worries [about] taking your shoes off, the Anthrax, and, you know, the terrorism and the war. They had wars that they had to worry about too. . . . We had the bomb shelters because of the whole bomb threat from Russia. I grew up with all that. Tliere was a big scary guy out there that could come blow us to smithereens.
I think again the technology has impacted—again these are useful things, they’re helpful things—but because they’re there and people are using them it puts it more into your face that there’s a lot of scary things.
Like Sarah, many parents believe that because dangers outside the home have become closer and more immediate, children can no longer be left free to roam as they did in the past.8 In some cases it is hard to tell whether the anxiety parents feel is about local dangers (the neighbor who might be a sexual predator) or about something more amorphous (the fears of terrorism striking anywhere and at any time). Most often, the vague sense that the world is more threatening has no concrete location even as it is expressed as a desire to maintain a greater awareness of what their children are doing. Ibis sense could be heard when parents talked about taking care not to allow their children to be exposed to what they perceived as being dangers (both real and imaginary). Parents spoke about walking with or driving their children to school (often until the children could drive themselves), about supervising their children’s play, and about checking out their children’s friends.9 These are routine, taken-for-granted activities that adults view as part of the responsibility of good parenting, especially in a moment when the perception of risk has been heightened and when parents assume that they alone have responsibility for helping their children evade those risks.10 Many of these routine activities were described similarly by working-class, middle-class, and professional middle-class parents: contemporary forms of parenting with limits and the more recent shift to parenting out of control have some common roots.
Taken as a whole, then, whether or not the characterizations of the past are accurate, today’s parents believe that the good times are gone. Most notably they feel that they lack support for the difficult project of raising their children. And this sense of being on one’s own, of having individual rather than communal responsibility for the care of children, extends across social group
ings and is found among parents in a range of types of communities, from cities to suburbs to small towns. But if the heightened vigilance that results from these perceptions of how the present differs from the past is part and parcel of parenting within all social classes, the form, range, and extent of that vigilance is different within the professional middle class than it is among the working class and middle class.