Parenting across the social classes is perceived as being more difficult today than it was in the past for yet another reason: many parents believe that children’s deference has given way to what they view as a culture of disrespect. Patsy Doria, a white, working-class mother of three, noted that because her parents could count on an authoritarian approach, raising children went more easily for them:21 “I don’t think we [children] were as hard to parent [as are children today].” Similarly, Anna Benton, a PhD-educated economist in Berkeley, California, said that raising children went more smoothly when parents controlled the reins of authority: “I don’t think [my parents] found anything particularly difficult. I mean, they were the authority figures, and we [children] weren’t all that much trouble.”
Tfie response to this new difficulty, however, is entirely different among the Patsy Dorias of the world than it is among the Anna Bentons. Like Patsy, Charlene Black, a white, working-class mother of two teenaged children, shook her head with dismay when she said, “When we were growing up I would have thought twice of yelling at my parents, [but my] kids don’t think twice about yelling at me.” Clearly, Charlene is troubled by what she understands to be children’s new attitudes toward their parents. In contrast, many professional middle-class parents, while they also view their parents as having been seen as sources of authority in the past, generally reject both authoritativeness and authoritarianism for themselves. Indeed, Anna’s social class peer Marian English had a different response from Charlene’s to this shift. Although she acknowledged that her parents had an easier time with authority, because in her family it was “my way or the highway,” Marian added this proviso: “They’ve also produced a society of people that aren’t necessarily the best balanced people either.”
Class is key to parenting; class is also key to the interpretation of, and the lessons taken from, the past. As we have seen, professional middle-class parents understand their mission to be entirely different from that of their
parents. Secure in the assumption that their children will have at least some essential modicum of achievement, these parents want to guide their children to be flexible, sefl-confident, and passionately engaged with the world. And they view their children as having boundless potential. Thus, we should not be surprised to find that they speak with disdain about the focused ambitions their parents held. Nor, perhaps, should we be surprised to find that they also believe that their parents approached children—and especially adolescents— in the wrong way. But among the middle — and working-class parents, a group whose childrens achievements cannot be so easily secured and who focus on a narrower set of goals, we find more appreciation of their own parents’ emphasis on similarly constricted achievements. And they more often believe that the approach taken by their parents was appropriate, even if it sometimes failed.