Rather than worrying only about the media images and their own actions as parents, less privileged parents often view the real world directly outside their homes as being a very concrete threat to the safety and well-being of their children. The concerns they identify are thus neither imaginary nor distant. They are more central to the lives of the working-class (and some middle — class) parents because, in contrast to the vast majority of professional middle — class parents, these less privileged adults cannot always move their children to environments with adequate police protection and lower crime rates.21 Indeed, the differences in crime rates in communities in which different social classes reside are striking.22
Wanda Jackson, a married, African American, working-class mother of four children who has moved her family from Philadelphia to a nearby suburb, is one of the lucky ones. She explained that even though her children
prefer the city (“its a little closer to get to the corner store”), she is relieved to be away from the “violence, the drugs, the shootings, and the killings” that had characterized their previous neighborhood and into a place that is “a little bit safer.” Another parent, this one a white, working-class, married mother of two, also recently moved from an unsafe neighborhood to a safer one in Charlotte, North Carolina:
The neighborhood were living in now is better; the one we were living in before, you could hear gunshots. … I let them do very little when they came home. I am very protective of my kids. I almost got picked up as a child myself by a stranger, so I was very aware of stranger danger. . . . I’m pretty comfortable [now] with the neighbors we have. I don’t hear gunfire every month or so, you know. I’m more comfortable in this neighborhood.
Other parents have not been so lucky. As Virginia Williams, the African American mother of five children, said of living in San Antonio, the dangers threatening her children seem very immediate:
I worry the most because the violence is so bad now. You’re leaving your kids to just have a good time, and then someone may steal your kids, or they’re killed just because of jealousy or envy or whatever. Someone [might] just kill them, and that’s scary. When we were coming up, it was more or less kids just had fights. You didn’t have weapons and all that stuff. Now, you don’t know. Your kids have to watch their backs. They can’t just be children and enjoy their life. They have to look over their shoulder. I tell them that you can’t be a total—I don’t want to say—free spirit, that not everybody’s going to have the same reaction towards you because maybe someone’s just mean for no reason, you know, and it’s scary.
Martin Sanchez is a divorced, Hispanic, middle-class father of a seventeen — year-old daughter and a thirteen-year-old son. His job as a police officer (in the city where Virginia lives) exposes him to crime on a daily basis. Like Virginia, Martin suggested that the dangers facing children today are more intense than those of a generation before. And like Virginia, Martin is less concerned about protecting childhood innocence than in making certain that his children understand, and are prepared to deal with, life-threatening dangers:
Being the profession that I am—a police officer—you see society has changed greatly. So yes, I think that there are many great concerns and problems that are facing our children today, . . . and these problems are concerns for our parents also if they care about their kids. We have gangs, drugs, things that are much more prevalent than they were when I was growing up. So in answer to your question, yes, there are a great many more problems in my opinion. … I think society’s changing. I can’t tell you why. … I try to expose them and let them know what’s out there, what’s in the real world. I try to shelter them from it but at the same time let them know what’s going on rather than completely blind them from it, so that they’re aware when they get out there in the real world these are the issues you’re going to face and things you need to prepare yourself for.
Although a white, working-class mother with one teenage daughter might not have the professional expertise of Martin, Linda Casey also believes that she has to guard against dangers that did not concern her parents:
I think the uprise of drug use, gangs—I think these are all problems. … I think a lot of it didn’t exist [when I was a child]. Times were different, bottom line—just times have changed. I think we’re in a society that crime’s on the uprise, sexual predators are on the uprise, gang violence is on the uprise, things that didn’t exist back [when I was a child].
Even when middle — and working-class parents talked about issues that overlap with those discussed by the professional middle-class parents, that talk had a different resonance. For example, although professional middle-class parents are concerned about sexualized images disrupting childhood innocence, they often implied that their young teenage children are not themselves actively involved in sexual activity. However, working-class and middle-class parents worry about sexualized images and about what they see as the likelihood that their children could become involved in the sexual activity that they believe occurs regularly in their children’s schools. For example, Charlene Black, the white mother of two who lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania, spoke about her fourteen-year — old daughter. Charlene openly acknowledges that her children’s peer group is involved in sexual activities and that her daughter is interested in presenting a sexy image and in competing with her peers for the most daring dress:
They just seem so much more mature than we were at their age. When I was her age I could have cared less what I looked like, and she’s into makeup, trying this, trying that. I think the peer pressure on the kids is very great. . . . We didn’t seem to have all that stuff, as far as even sex and what you hear is going on in these kids’ schools, I didn’t even think of when I was in eighth grade. And that’s the biggest thing because these eighth graders are doing it, right in my kids’ schools. … I think it’s just they seem to be so much more mature now than they were before, and there’s so much out there. You’ve got the computers and you’ve got the TVs, and it all dramatizes it. And that’s a big part of it. And with the girls especially, the shortest skirt that you can wear—they try to compete with each other in how you look.
Similarly, an African American mother of four children, ranging in age from seven to fifteen, worries about these influences on her oldest daughter:
[I worry about] what happens next. I say “what happens next” because you never know what’s coming through that door. I don’t know if Tessa’s going to become a teenage mother. I don’t know if she’s going to want to drop out of school. I say “what happens next” ’cause I don’t know what’s coming. Not knowing what’s coming is the biggest challenge. . . . I’m really afraid for my kids. I’m afraid that they may get swept up in the wrong stuff. There’s always that possibility. I mean, you can’t step outside without seeing someone getting high. I’m afraid that—my daughter [who is fifteen] has a friend who’s already had an abortion. She doesn’t know that. I would never tell her that—they’re the same age—but I can’t control what goes on outside.
When an African American mother of two biological children and three foster children talks about teaching them about sex, weapons, and drugs, it is because she knows that these are present in her children’s daily lives:
[The biggest problem is] society. There’s so much crap out there. Like, if you have a kid, you’re not ready to teach him about sex, but you better ’cause somebody outside’s gonna tell ’em. Or you don’twant them exposed to knives and guns—you better, because somebody outside’s gonna tell ’em. You don’t want ’em exposed to drugs—no matter what it is, it’s out there in society, in the classroom, sitting on the steps, wherever. You’ve gotta tell ’em so much. [My oldest daughter], Candy was very sheltered. Candy’s world, she was very spoiled. She wasn’t allowed to do anything. I would ask Candy when she was like fifteen, sixteen, “What happens when a girl gets pregnant?” “Oh, she gets married!” Yeah … so I was like, “Okay, gotta take you outside.” . . . You had to let her know, yeah, maybe it should be like that, but that’s not how it is.
Among those who are less privileged, too much protection can carry as many risks as too little.23
Significant social class differences emerged when parents were asked what challenges they face in the new configuration of daily life and what they do in response to those challenges. The elite parents hold to a vision of an essential childhood (similar to the one they nostalgically recall), which they believe is under threat from both outside and inside forces. From the outside they identify sexualized and violent images as disrupting and undermining childhood innocence.24 In the face of this perceived threat, one of their jobs, as they conceive of it, is to protect their children—or, more accurately, the childhoods of their children. These elite parents also believe that the very lives that they have chosen—the pressures to achieve, the material wealth, the psychological indulgence, and the overscheduling—threaten their children’s happiness. Ironically, then, they worry precisely about what it is they are doing to ensure economic, educational, and occupational successes—phenomena that they disparage even as they make serious efforts to (re-)create them. These contradictory and complex concerns require a new form of parental vigilance.
Middle-class and working-class parents share some of these concerns about media influences. They also worry about some very concrete dangers in a violent world. In the face of these dangers, they are not particularly interested in ensuring that their children have a prolonged and “pure” childhood; in fact, they recognize that they have to assist their children in maturing sufficiently so that they understand and can resist the dangers that are a significant part of the environments in which they live. Hence, they focus on concrete, physical, and imminent dangers that threaten not just some notion of an essentialized childhood but real children whose lives occur in neighborhoods where guns, violence, drug use, gangs, and sex may well be present.
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Styles, Satisfactions, and Tensions
The Elite Approach
Paula Brown works full-time as a high-level administrator at a university near the southern suburb in which she lives with her two teenage children. When asked to describe her approach to parenting, she indicated that she aims for honesty and flexibility even if doing so sometimes leaves her in an awkward position vis-a-vis her teenage daughter: “I’m really honest with Emily [who is fifteen]. You know, ‘IVe never done this before. I’m not an expert.’ You know, not to feel like I’m jeopardizing my authority but at the same time I guess I’m just humanly presenting it and saying, ‘We’re gonna try this, . . . and we can always come back and reexamine.’”
In chapter i we met Eve Todd, another white, professional middle-class mother of two teens, both daughters, who lives in cold northern New England. She insists that she and her husband each make an effort to maintain authority without inculcating fear. And she identified the effort involved in this approach as being constituted not of love—which she believed comes easily—but of finding the right balance between encouragement and discipline. As Eve described her approach, she, like Paula, acknowledged that she does not have hard and fast rules that are applied in all situations but, rather, that she adapts her rules to fit events as they arise. She was also explicit about reversing her parents’ model as she enacts parenting with her children:
Well, I think that [my husband and I] both have tried to not have the kids be afraid of us, because I think that, you know, we both came from situations where the parents were “you do it because we said so,” and there was retribution if you didn’t. There was fear. There was hitting. . . . With our kids… we wanted to be encouraging and supportive in what their views were. . . and still maintain that we’re the parents and they’re the kids and sometimes it isn’t fair and you have to do it. . . . But generally speaking we
have tried to be encouraging. . . . We don’t “ground” the kids. And it’s basically taking it incident by incident or time by time and trying to deal with it that way.
Paula and Eve represent the parenting approach taken by the professional middle-class parents who were interviewed. Like these two women, most privileged adults emphasize the importance of honest communication, minimizing the generational gap, and responding with flexibility. These are all aspects of parenting that they feel had been neglected in their own upbringing. Although many of these parents—like Eve—were quick to point out that they know the difference between being a parent and being a friend, and insisted that they do not abdicate the parental role, they also acknowledged that they occasionally come very close to undermining their own authority. In upholding a nonauthoritarian approach to raising children, these parents line up well with what decades of research and much casual observation suggest: the higher one’s class status, the more likely one is to rely on discussion and negotiation rather than clear rules and physical punishment.1
The flexibility that Paula and Eve describe is associated with three additional and distinctive components of parenting out of control among the professional middle class: belief in their children’s boundless potential, a reliance on what they call “trust,” and a strategy of ongoing availability.