Professional middle-class parents are also aware that they are extending their own engagement in their children and that doing so represents a significant break from the practices of the past. Maria Ascoli is a stay-at-home mother of two; her husband has a degree in engineering, which he has parlayed into
a position with a major construction firm. Maria is sometimes torn between professional middle-class aspirations (stemming from the milieu in which her husbands position has landed her) and the more middle-class commitments and concerns that emerge from her own education, which ended with a bachelors degree from a state college. However, with respect to the issue of slow maturity on the part of her children, necessitating an extended period of parental oversight, Maria is firmly in tune with other elite parents. She is dismissive of her own parents, who she now believes failed to apply themselves seriously to the task of raising children; she anticipates carrying her own more intensive approach to parenting into the foreseeable future:
I don’t know if [my parents] gave [parenting] a whole lot of thought actually, to tell the truth. I just think that they were from that generation [where] you had your kids and you raised them, and they went out and did whatever they did and they didn’t really—beyond the age of eighteen they weren’t really all that worried about you. I think parents [today] are way more involved longer with their kids.
Like Maria, Lisa Thomas, the white mother of two teenage daughters, implicitly anticipates a longer period of parenting than what she herself received: “When we turned twenty-one. . . [our parents felt], finally our jobs are done.” And Elizabeth Blake, who is also a member of the professional middle class, thinks it won’t be until several years after college—when the older of her two children, her daughter, is twenty-five—that she might anticipate that child’s being even partially settled: “Right now I’m thinking about colleges [for my daughter], . . . and you want to say to her, ‘Between now and twenty-five your life will click.’”
Parents such as Maria, Lisa, and Elizabeth do not appear to view a prolonged adolescence as a problem. However, the personnel of some colleges and universities today link troublesome behaviors (e. g., binge drinking and reliance on parents for help with academic work) and troublesome signs of distress on the part of students (e. g., rising rates of depression) directly to delayed maturity engendered by intensive parental involvement and to the pressures on youngsters.23 These concerns were not often mentioned by the interviewed parents. But when they were raised, parents then found reason to hold on tighter, rather than to loosen the reins of control. Susan Chase, the
Berkeley attorney, learned from a friend that she should not become lax even ifh er children should achieve that much desired admission to elite colleges:
[I worry], Will [my sixteen-year-old son] get into college? Will he get into a good college? Will he be happy at college? I mean, one thing, you’ve got this big focus on, you know, getting them into college, and then it’s like, “you’re done,” right? That’s ’cause I think if they get into a good college, it’s an affirmation of you as a parent. But a friend of mine, her daughter went to a good college, and she came home at Christmas and she weighed like eighty pounds.
Even without the threat of having an anorexic child, professional middle-class parents embrace a conviction that their children will need them for many years to come; they also relish the prospect that they will remain actively engaged in those children’s lives.