Lets begin with the shared perception of the increased difficulty of parenting today. Paula Brown, a white, professional middle-class mother to two teenagers, lives in the suburb of a southern city, where she holds an administrative position at the local university and her husband is employed as an executive in an insurance company. As she reminisced about her childhood, Paula recalled the comfort that was part and parcel of having an extended family. Even though she currently lives in a place where the resident population is almost exclusively white and the crime rate is well below the national average, Paula draws on the emergence of a new variety of family forms (including more single parents and more stepparents) as evidence that communities have changed since she was a young girl. Paula is convinced that in the absence of commonality, each individual now has to do the hard work of finding and sustaining her or his own approach to raising children:
I was raised where brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins—you know, there was this intergenerational [family], this small community. So as you have more families that—maybe it is single parenting, there’s stepparents. And I just think that brings in all different styles and values, and they get more challenging. It’s not that they’re any better or worse, but I just think that is a challenge. And I just think that’s a huge [difference].
When pressed to discuss the difficulties she believes her own parents faced during the years they were raising her and her siblings, Paula is stumped. Because her parents had broad support and were able to meet basic needs, she “can’t imagine” what problems they experienced. In her memory, a large family provided both a challenge—and a solution—to the task of child rearing: I
wanted to without even having to take out loans. And I can’t imagine what they thought was challenging—maybe too many [children]. But I think that was even a solution more than a challenge—you know, that older person can take care of that younger person.
Martha Mackenzie is a white college professor and the married mother of two young children. Like Paula, she lives in a community that is predominantly white and has an extremely low crime rate.2 Even so, Martha also is convinced that parents like herself can no longer rely on others in the community to share her values or to fill in for her. In spite of a strong network of colleagues and friends, and even though her home is located in a very cohesive neighborhood in a small town, she feels very alone in the task of raising her children:
The neighborhood I grew up in all the parents had shared values. . . . That meant as a child you got the same messages reinforced. But it takes more effort [to sustain your values when] there are very different messages. I think the world is more dangerous. As we live more with strangers, you don’t have the people to look after the kids. My parents knew more people. One [issue] is knowing and being around strangers; another is parents being afraid to talk to children they don’t know. And I think it makes it more dangerous.
From suburban Pennsylvania, Wanda Jackson is a working-class, married mother of four. This thirty-three-year-old African American woman also bemoaned what she sees as increased dangers and the loss of a supportive community. She said that although her parents faced issues of “violence,” it wasn’t as “bad as it is now,” and she listed the reasons: “You have younger parents being parents, you don’t have people being older being parents, you have kids raising themselves, [and] you have a lot of teenage parents. . . . When I was growing up, [if she saw] misbehavior, my mom would always yell; now they just turn their heads. It’s not the same any more; nobody wants to be held accountable.”
Gail Albert was born and raised in Philadelphia; she still lives there today. At thirty-seven, this highly educated, single, African American mother of three struggles to support her children on disability payments of less than twenty — five thousand dollars a year. But rather than focusing on her economic difficulties, Gail responded quite similarly to Paula, Martha, and Wanda when asked what she thinks are the biggest problems facing parents today. Like her peers living in suburbs, small towns, and rural areas, she focused on the rising number of single parents and on the loss of a community in which other adults took care of one’s children and kept an eye out for the neighborhood as a whole.3
There are so many—there’s just so many [problems]. The greatest problem [she hesitates] is the downfall of marriage, the separation of family, that you don’t have families growing up in the same house any more. And then the next thing would be the downfall of community, you know. . . . [The father of my sons] lives in West Philly, and he lives in the house that he grew up in. And all the neighbors are the neighbors that grew him up, and now they’re growing my sons up. This block [where I live]—not a soul. The communities are just so different. It’s amazing how different they are. And I’m glad that they’re having that experience [of spending time in West Philly]. . . . You know, personally, I try to keep an ear out. … I keep an ear out. That’s what communities are all about, looking out for the kids when they are coming home from school. I mean, I just really believe that that is something that helps people raise kids up.
While Gail insists that she is able to provide her children and her neighborhood with some of the experiences she remembers from the past, her bottom line is that child rearing has become more difficult.
Going It Alone
Parents such as Sarah, Paula, Martha, Wanda, and Gail represent a range of locations and life circumstances. Despite these differences, they share similar views of the past. In describing their childhoods, not only do parents across the board speak about a sense that families in the past were more deeply embedded in extended families and caring communities, but they also speak about families having been more deeply embedded in supportive institutions. Peter Chaplin, the middle-class father from Louisville who was so concerned about whether to enroll his son in a competitive soccer program, compared
his confusion about what he thinks is best for his child with the social reinforcement he believes his parents had for their decisions: “I don’t think my parents worried about my education, my spiritual and emotional health. I think they sort of trusted the institutions to provide most of that guidance.” In a similar vein, other parents referred to specific forms of institutional and cultural support that they believe were more forthcoming in the past. Erica Harper is a white, forty-five-year-old, married mother of three who lives in a small Vermont city renowned both for its excellent schools and for being home to a major high-tech industry. Erica, who has parlayed her master’s degree in psychology into a professional position in one of the local schools, mentioned both that her parents worried less about their children’s futures than she does and that they had more community support for enforcing values. She feels she alone carries the burden of ensuring her children’s development in a far broader range of areas: “I think that when I was growing up and my parents were parenting, they were less concerned about how we would make it in the world and contribute to the world; their whole focus was [education]. . . . [Now we] need to develop values and a moral base through the guidance of your parents. It doesn’t just happen in communities [as it used to].”
One Hispanic, working-class mother of three children (all under the age of thirteen) who is employed as an office manager in Simi Valley, California, argued that during her childhood teachers could count on a more united front from parents: “I don’t know, these days [children] get away with a lot more than they used to. Nowadays parents really believe what the kids say [and that] the teachers are always wrong. Kids nowadays are really spoiled. Back then the parents always stood behind the disciplinarian.” From suburban Connecticut, Marian English, a white woman with a master’s degree in business administration who is now a stay-at-home mother of three teenagers, was insistent that mass popular culture has undermined adult authority. She bemoaned the fact that at present parents are often derided in television programs. She recalled (although this memory may or may not be accurate) that in the television of her childhood, parents were upheld as a source of moral authority: “The shows were more. . . family oriented. . . . They didn’t work against the parents. They were much more positive and much more working together. . . . The parents were seen more as helping to [solve problems].” These comments about supportive institutions and a supportive culture in the past are also interesting for what is not mentioned. Many social commentators are quick to demonstrate that the government only minimally supports families in the United States (especially in comparison with other industrialized countries in Western Europe), and some are quick to claim that the state has actually retreated in recent years.4 However, only one interviewed parent linked her sense of being very much alone in the job of raising children to the government’s failure to offer more support. Annemarie Fernandez, a Hispanic, working-class, married mother of three children ranging in age from two to fifteen, lives in a small town in Texas and works as an administrative assistant in a hospital. She made reference to the absence of social services: “[There are] a lot of single-parent households out there. [There is a] lack of support, which can lead to stressed-out mothers, which can lead to bad parenting and things like that. [The biggest problem is a] lack of support from society, for day care and things like that.” With Annemarie as the exception, all other parents assume entirely private responsibility for raising their children, even as they wax nostalgic about a time when they imagine kin, neighbors, friends, and the culture at large shared the burdens.5
This heightened sense of individual responsibility finds resonance in more general cultural trends. As commentators such as the sociologists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck note, even if the world around us today were no more hazardous than it had been in the past, in a “risk society” individuals would perceive themselves to have more control over the fate of those dependent on them and would respond with greater vigilance and heightened surveillance.6 In addition, the commonplace belief that the world has become more dangerous for children and teens lends fuel to this significant shift in perception.