Concerns about the future are reflected in the somewhat contradictory language with which the professional middle-class parents discussed the aspirations they hold out for their children. They spoke about their kids “finding a path that interests them.” Theoretically, the parents suggest, this path can go in a number of different directions. Eve Todd’s daughter might decide, for example, to explore her love for music and her dream of becoming a rock star, and Sarah Johnson’s daughter might become a painter. But no professional middle-class parent implied that she or he would joyfully accept a child’s abandonment of higher education even while speaking about the delight of seeing a child’s interest in rock music or painting. Moreover, professional middle-class parents imply that they will know when their children abandon an acceptable path. That is, professional middle-class parents accept twists and turns and a range of different directions. They do not, however, accept deviations from the broad outline of the life plan they have imagined for their children. College is imperative; postgraduate education is strongly, and routinely, encouraged. And if parents focus on the enjoyment of the journey, on the pleasures of “mucking around” in college, or on exploring one’s passions, they make it clear that not all types of enjoyment, mucking around, or exploration are equally acceptable. Hence, they talked with concern about their children’s not staying on track—likening it not just to wandering off but to something far more dire—even when the indications of wandering were quite mild. As one white, professional middle-class mother of two children said, “The long view is that you want your kid to be happy. You worry about whether they’re going to be happy, whether something terrible is going to befall them, and day to day you worry that they stay on track, that they don’t go over the cliff, where all of a sudden they say, ‘I’m not doing my homework. I’m not going to soccer.’” For this mother, the “terrible” was the danger that her children would fail to excel in the schoolhouse and on the athletic field.
Less privileged parents, by way of comparison, spoke less about the journey and more about the achievements and accomplishments that are the signposts of successful progress (as many professional middle-class parents imply their parents did). They want their children to finish high school, then graduate from college, and perhaps go farther. By then they want their children to have achieved self-sufficiency through the commitment to, and engagement in, a career. Individual development, excitement, and adventure may be part of the picture, but the end product—and not the journey itself—is what is important. Moreover, the goals set out by the middle-class and working-class parents are considerably clearer than those set out by the professional middle- class parents who have as an ambition for their children not just economic success but also the existential goals of passion and self-confidence.
Professional middle-class parents introduce new variables into the child-rearing project. First, they lengthen the period during which they might be concerned about the direction their children take. Professional middle-class parents anticipate a long period of having dependent children, and they are reluctant to “launch” their children once they enter college (or even once they graduate from college); instead they are prepared to stand by, ready with advice, encouragement, and consolation.28 The engaged, professional middle-class parent views a child in her or his late teens or early “adult” years as unformed and, quite possibly, as lacking an internal compass pointing in a clear direction.
By way of contrast, most of their less privileged peers see that their job as parents will be completed when their children have graduated from college,
if not before then. At that point a child should have “realistic goals” and the “necessary tools” to support oneself and to live on one’s own. To be sure, like all parents, those in the middle and working class want decent—even excellent—jobs for their children. Like all parents, they want their children to be happy. But they also want their young adult children to be financially self-sufficient and not to have to struggle making ends meet (as many of them did and many of them still are doing). Knowing that they will not be able to continue to support children forever, they hope and anticipate that college will bring about the necessary transformation to prepare their children for independent adult life. Less privileged parents raise their children with more constraining limits on their own time and money. Children of the same age, then, are viewed quite differently depending on the class position of their families. Professional middle-class adolescents have barely taken a first step on the road to maturity; their less privileged peers are much closer to the finish line.
In addition to lengthening the age of dependence for their children, the more privileged parents position their children to explore their own potential; they simultaneously have higher and more amorphous expectations for those children. All parents want their children to be decent human beings and to be happy in their life choices. The professional middle-class parents also want their children to be passionate, confident, and prepared to take advantage of opportunities that might shift and change with the times. The task of creating such children might feel like a particularly unknown and unknowable one. That is, if the professional middle-class parents know from the activities of their parents what it takes to produce successful children en route to being a doctor or a corporate executive, and if they do intervene in their children’s daily and educational activities to ensure that success, they may not know what they need to do to ensure these complex, existential goals of self-confidence, passion, and flexibility. The close attention they pay to their children, as is discussed further in subsequent chapters, may reflect precisely this uncertainty: as their children veer—or are perceived as veering—too far in one direction or another off the route to self-fulfillment and self confidence, the parents might actively respond with what they believe to be appropriate midcourse corrections.
Moreover, these privileged parents may well be sending some mixed messages emerging out of their own ambivalence about the sacrifices they have made to ensure their own economic and professional success. That is, we need not take them at face value—that they don’t care about economic success— but accept these protestations as the expression of some yearning (for themselves as much as for their children) and of a hope for something more fulfilling in a very uncertain world. As a result, control might be confusing—both for those at the helm and for those subject to a constantly changing course.