The professional middle-class parents have differentiated themselves from their parents—even rejected their parents—as they make decisions about how to approach the care of their own children. Not only do they believe
that the world holds greater dangers than was the case when they were children, but they feel more alone in the task of warding off those dangers. At the same time, they want more flexibility and more communication. Hence, they opt for both greater protectiveness and greater intimacy. And if these stances are sometimes burdensome, the latter especially is also the source of immense satisfaction and a way in which elite parents feel superior to their own parents. At the same time, the location of the balance point between being too involved and not being sufficiently attentive eludes them. So too does finding the balance between being close to their children and having enough distance to discipline them. They know they should be parents rather than friends and can repeat that litany, although their repetitions are sometimes pro forma. They find themselves torn.
It is, of course, entirely possible that these professional middle-class parents are unable to draw clear lines of authority because at least some of what they want is so very amorphous. How does one know when a child is sufficiently “happy,” deeply engaged in finding her or his true passions, and living up to her or his boundless potential? Given this essential uncertainty, the parents who worry that they are too involved in their children’s lives have no choice but to remain precisely that involved: the goals they hold out require that they check in with their children and examine both their psychological state and their daily activities.
But it is also entirely possible that the troublesome negotiation in which these parents engage with their children is precisely what they want because it keeps them close to their children, even as that negotiation means that their children do not always meet their expectations about appropriate behavior or appropriate activities. Moreover, their desires are not just ambiguous; they are also fundamentally contradictory. These parents want their children to succeed, but they worry about the stress those children experience as they strive to live up to their parents’ expectations of success. They want to provide their children with what they need to fit in with the crowd—a laptop computer, a cell phone—but they worry about being too indulgent.6 They want to protect their children from growing up too fast, but by their own admission, they talk to them as if they are adults and encourage them to make choices from a very young age.7