Professional middle-class parents find it necessary to indulge their childrens material desires as a means of supporting their children’s enthusiasms and interests, as well as a way of enabling them to keep up with and, as the sociologist Allison Pugh suggests, join in conversation with their peers.18 At the same time, they worry about the effects of doing so.
As they discussed the issue of material indulgence, the parents once again made reference to a kind of innocence—a less materialistic childhood—that they imagine could be available to their children, even as they find themselves making moves that undermine that vision.19 Some parents acknowledge that material indulgence is part of a competitive practice, an effort to ensure that their children do not get left behind. On these grounds, they believe it is impossible to stop what they are doing. Anna Benton, for example, is critical of the interest in consumer goods that she finds prevalent among her children and her children’s friends. Yet, she acknowledges, the lifestyle she and her husband have chosen—which includes living in Berkeley, California, in a lovely house overlooking the Bay—is a source of those values:
[The greatest problem is] just the world of glamour and glitz. You know, when I was a kid the TV shows weren’t these reality shows, and there wasn’t just instant feedback and get online and talk to seven of your friends about “what’s the best shoes to wear,” that kind of thing, the materialism. Also, [my children are] being raised more affluent than I was.
Kevin Hansen, a white physician from University City, Missouri, and the widowed father of three children, even more explicitly noted that the affluence of his lifestyle creates its own separate pressures to indulge children. At the same time, however, he believes that indulgence undermines other values he holds dear: [5]
you know, going out to eat lunch on the weekend. They don’t have to think about those things, the cost of those things as I did when I was growing up, and I think. . . for [my own peers] that’s a problem.
And Susan Chase, having already noted her concerns about a “toxic culture,” added a thought about how a materialist culture might inhibit the development of alternative ways of viewing the world: “I think, well, for middle — class parents, I think there’s a pretty material overabundance, which I actually think is kind of stifling and, you know, very materialistic.”