Given the increasing devotion to one’s children—at least as measured by time put into their care—we should not be surprised to find that many of the professional middle-class parents are dismissive of the efforts their own parents put into being close to their own children. Ironically, however, they see in their mothers having been home the potential for intimacy. Even though they often describe their mothers as having engaged in a parenting style that could be characterized as benign neglect—as when they were allowed to swim in the river or wander through the neighborhood—nostalgia for what might have been becomes the guide for what should be. Parenting out of control has roots in and gains urgency from this nostalgia.
For example, consider how Kevin Hansen, the doctor who assumes total maternal availability in the past, described the dynamics of his own household in the years before his wife died. He worries that the busyness of parents and children means less time spent together:
I think the big problem is [that in] a lot of families, parents and kids have so many things going on that it’s hard to spend significant amounts of time with each other. And I think it’s probably important that we do that. I don’t think we do as much as we should. … I think that’s one problem. . . . When [my wife] was working and I was working, there were other people taking care of the kids, and we weren’t around as much.
Similarly, Erica Harper, a white mother of three teens—who noted that even though her mother had worked outside the home, she was able to leave work in time to be home when the children got out of school—mentioned that when both parents work full-time outside the home, or confront stresses of their own, they are less able to be fully present for their children. She, too, contrasted what she sees today with what she recalls of the past:
I think the biggest problem that faces parents today are probably many parents’ inability to be available physically and emotionally for their children, whether it’s due to working or stress in life. . . . [For my parents it was] very, very, very different, and I think our culture and our society is very, very different. And that’s another bigger piece, [and I think] that [it is] very difficult… to parent within our society right now. . . . My parents were able to be physically available; [their children] did not have to be put in child care or have a babysitter. . . . We had access to the family unit; it was a strong family unit; my mom stayed home.
If parenting out of control relies on nostalgia for what might have been, it also appears to rely on the perception—mistaken as it may be—among the elite that for women, work outside the home represents a choice. Working-class and middle-class women know they have to work; in some cases, especially among women of color, work outside the home is part of a long tradition rather than a new option for “liberated” women. But many of the professional middle-class women—and their spouses—still assume that
womens employment means putting oneself before family concerns; in these cases, nostalgia combines with a sense of guilt for not providing children with a stay-at-home mother.
Thus, it is no surprise that parents like Erica struggle to find ways to remain “physically and emotionally” available even as they continue to work outside the home, and Erica specifically holds out as an ideal not just “family time” but rather distinctive “parenting to each one of [her three] children.” When asked to describe her approach to parenting, Paula Brown, the administrator at a southern university and mother of two teenage children, gave a response that suggests the supreme importance she also places on creating opportunities for what she thinks of as “quality time”:
There’s a book called Language of Love, and it talks about how different people have different languages that they try expressing love in and how they want people to express it to them. And mine is “quality time.” So I know that’s how I try to demonstrate and communicate. So I think that’s kind of a baseline for everything about parenting. If we can just be together, somehow there’s going to be some really good things coming from that.
Different attitudes between those who are less well educated and those with professional training have concrete manifestations as different amounts of time spent with children. As noted, highly educated parents who are employed outside the home and who devote long hours to their careers also devote long hours to their children. As the sociologist Mary Blair-Loy says, these may indeed be “competing devotions.”19 Hence, those adults who don’t opt out of the labor force altogether might well find themselves squeezed for time: how could they possibly find the hours (or energy) to spend on any interests they might have separate from their careers or their children? In this context, perhaps, we should not be surprised that children become the stated site of friendship and fun, as well as of work and worry. Parenting out of control is time consuming; there may not be enough hours left over in the day for “quality” time in any other aspect of one’s life. And indeed, contemporary studies of how Americans spend their time indicate that they are less involved in organizational activities and visiting in other people’s homes than were generations before them. These studies also indicate that those who are married spend less time with their spouses than did adults in the generation
before.20 Children, then, constitute a more prominent source of ones social interaction on a daily basis today than was the case in the past. When children take up more of ones ongoing thoughts and activities, parenting might well be conceived of as having gotten “out of control.”