These professional middle-class parents ensure that this nudging and discussion will occur by being constantly available. The physician quoted earlier, after talking about trust and giving advice, continued, “And I think [good parenting is] being available for them and letting them know that you’re always available.” In claiming the necessity for constant availability, parents indicate that their children’s needs and concerns are significant and should have a central place in family life. Being available also ensures that children can receive appropriate redirection, should trust fail.
Annette Lareau’s phrase “concerted cultivation” has become commonplace in discussions of middle-class approaches to child care.2 The elite parents who were interviewed might not use the same gardening imagery, and they talk less about pruning and shaping than they do about providing the right environment to help children become the best, about trusting their children to do the right thing, and about hovering. But like the parents Lareau described, in action, rather than as an abstract position on the chosen way to parent, the ever-present guidance parents provide can reach deep into their children’s hearts and minds. A reliance on discussion rather than external constraint and on negotiation rather than clear punishment have as a shared aim the eventual internalization of parental norms and values. This is why these strat-
egies are aligned with “trust.” A constant presence is the safety net to ensure that parental values can be inserted into each decision (“they need advice even if they don’t ask for it”) and to pick up where trust leaves off—or fails.
These are practices that demand much of both parents and children. Parents have to provide the context in which children can learn what it is their parents expect of them, and parents have to make case-by-case decisions about the nature of that context as well as about whether a specific child has transgressed their expectations. This is yet another way that parenting out of control becomes time-consuming parenting. And children have to discern just what it is their parents expect within the “latitude” provided and which of their actions violate those unstated rules and venture into untrustworthy territory.1 In this context, children may learn that parental trust turns out to be less a practice than a hope.