Most distinctly, the professional middle-class parents seek out extracurricular activities for their children to nurture the talents that will help them get into good schools down the road. They enroll children in music lessons if they show the slightest ability (and sometimes even if they don’t); they sign them up for soccer leagues; they encourage particular interests in areas such as rock climbing and dance. When they describe their children, they enumerate the many activities in which their children are engaged on a weekly—and often daily—basis.14
Several parents carefully explained that discovering and nurturing a child’s unique talents were significant aspects of a new style of parenting and part of what differentiated them from their own parents. Eve Todd is a white mother living in an essentially rural area in northern Vermont; with a master’s degree in counseling in hand, she holds a professional position in a local public school system. Eve suggests that her parents had high goals for their children but that those goals were considerably narrower than what she wants for her two daughters now. Seeing her parents as being without the “tools” to opt for more than the “basics,” Eve wants to be more fully supportive of her children’s full range of ambitions and interests than her parents were with her, even if, as she herself notes, it might be “silly” to think that her younger, fourteen-year-old daughter will someday be a rock star.
eve: And I think what we’ve done so far and what we do now is really important about how she perceives herself. interviewer: Do you think your parents were concerned about those
things?
eve: Not at all, no. I don’t think they were. I think that they were worried about much more basic things. I think they wanted us to have an education. They wanted us to have food, they wanted us to have a house, they wanted us to have enough stuff, and they wanted to have us be good so that people could see that they were good parents. … I think it’s because thev didn’t have the tools to do more than
J
that. And I know it’s different. … I always make sure to stop and think, “What would it have been nice to have my mother do in that circumstance?” Some silly things like. . . Kara said recently, “Oh, I think I’ll be in a band and be a rock star.” And do I think it’s likely? No. Do I think that [it’s right] for me to say, “Well, that’s stupid.” No. So I say [instead], “Well, you know, if that’s what you want to do.”
Sarah Johnson is an Asian American with a master’s degree in special education; she and her husband and two daughters live in Charlotte, North Carolina. Like Eve, Sarah described the way in which she differed from her parents. Her parents held specific expectations for their children; Sarah holds broad ones. And like Eve, Sarah contrasted her parents’ narrow view with a positive appraisal of the ways in which she encourages the development of her daughter’s interests, whatever they may be:
It was my parents’ dream that their children all be doctors, [and] not a single one of us is. That’s pointless to hope for your children. They have to find that on their own, whatever that is. And I know for my daughter it’s, like, painting all day. I know last week she spent all week solid on [this mural], and to her that’s very affirming, that we’ve just let it sit. … To her, this is her territory and her space, and she will paint. Ifyou sit still long enough, you will be painted on.
Eve’s and Sarah’s demurrals about a concern with basic success need to be taken with a grain of salt: both women, like the vast majority of their professional middle-class peers, report that they have oriented their lives to ensure their children’s “basic” educational achievements. At the same time, the close attention to a flight of fancy is perceived as being a new form of parenting, as is the nurturance and encouragement of budding talents.