Working-class and middle-class parents view a college education quite differently than do their more privileged peers, and they anticipate that their job as parents will be completed earlier. Not surprisingly, given that college represents a more significant financial sacrifice for these less privileged parents, they insist that by the end of a comparatively short educational career a child should be ready to pick a career, find a job, and begin the next stage of life as a fully formed young adult. For them, active parenting has time limits.
Some parents were quite explicit on this point. One white, middle-class mother of three children was adamant: “We prolong [adolescence] too much. … By the time [they graduate from college], [they should] be able to support themselves, know what they want to do in life.” Another white mother, who also had a BA but no higher degree, was even more determined to be free from responsibilities once her child had reached what she viewed as adulthood: “I hope he’s able to get a full-time job and live on his own [after college]. … If he can get a job and support himself and be clean and healthy, that’s fine because I don’t want him living here anymore. I’m done with that.”
Sometimes much the same sentiment was expressed less as a push or shove out the door and more as an understanding of what would be acceptable for
someone who had graduated from college. For example, Amy Price, a white, working-class mother from Charlotte, North Carolina, would like her three children to attend college and then “to have all the necessary tools to make it in life.” Similarly, Virginia Williams, an African American, working-class mother of five from San Antonio, hopes that by the time her children are done with college they will “start trying to pursue their careers [and] become what they want to become.”
Although there are some similarities across the social classes in the notion that children might have made career decisions by the time they finish their education, that time is different for the elite than for the nonelite. Professional middle-class parents extend that time to include the years spent in graduate school, while their middle — and working-class peers limit it to the years spent in college. A difference in material resources underwrites this distinction and determines whether parents work within a set of finite limits: most parents who hold down professional jobs can afford to delay their child’s launching; most parents with less remunerative employment cannot do so. But the professional middle-class parents also appear to want to do so. The pleasures of parenting (as opposed to simply having your kids and raising them) mesh well with a realization that flexibility is significant. As a result, the professional middle-class parents delight in the thought that they will be parents—having dependent children who have not yet made up their minds about what it is they want to do; having children who might need coaching and advice about the best choices—far longer. These elite parents actively encourage their children to remain open to a wide range of possibilities; from both joy and duty, they remain willing to extend the time during which they will be called on for guidance and material support. The less privileged parents also find pleasures in raising children; however, they are readier at an earlier moment to move on to the next stage of their lives.