Availability, intimacy, trust, flexibility, and belief in potential are the hallmarks of the style that I call parenting out of control; these produce great satisfaction and provide a way for professional middle-class parents to distinguish themselves from their own parents. Yet, as has been implied, elite parents often acknowledge that the attributes of parenting out of control
are the source of enduring dilemmas and tensions. Indeed, when asked to describe what is most difficult about being a parent, many of the interviewees gave some answer that could fall within the general set of concerns of fearing that they often got too involved in their childrens lives, of having difficulty in drawing appropriate limits with respect to disciplinary issues, and of not knowing how to enact trust when the stakes were so very high.
Consider again Jeff Wright, who takes immense pride in the deep conversations he has with his daughter. When asked to dwell on problems, he talked about how very hard it is to maintain boundaries and to know when it would be best to step back from an intense engagement in Katie’s life. As he reflected on this issue, he recognized that because he is forging a new mode of parenting, he can not simply rely on the practice and approach of the generation before him:
[The greatest difficulty is] knowing when to step in and when to let her be on her own. … I think my parents were parents that didn’t ask questions that much, so I don’t know if they ever really knew what I was thinking about. I didn’t find myself confiding in them and sharing, but I think [my daughter and I] have a different form of communication where she can share if she needs to. And I’m not sure my parents would have been ready to share.
To be sure, Jeff faces particularly difficult challenges: he has to guide his daughter through her adolescence while helping her cope with the recent death of her mother. But, as we have seen, he is not unique in describing this closeness (though it may more commonly be found between mothers and children than between fathers and children). Nor is he unique in his sense of concern about not knowing just when to get involved—and when to back
off.
When asked whether the new approach is more difficult than that adopted by her parents, Eve Todd gave an answer that explicitly links respect for children’s feelings and ideas to endless negotiation. Eve’s interview took place over two sessions, and in the first conversation Eve had prided herself on her support of her daughter Kara’s ambition to be a rock star. She had explicitly noted, as well, that her parents had been more concerned with “basic things.” In contrast, Eve said she and her husband wanted to be “encouraging and supportive in what their [childrens] views were.” During our second meeting I asked Eve whether she thinks this new, supportive approach makes parenting more difficult. She responded thoughtfully. She denied that having envisioned more options for a child’s development is the source of the dilemmas she faces as a parent. Instead she struggles with the consequences of having loosened the reins of authority and of having become more attentive to her daughter’s feelings:
Yeah [it is more difficult], and I think that the options [expanded]. It created its own set of problems as not having the options, but I don’t think that it’s the kind of problem that I have with my daughter, where she’s confronting me and asking me to explain myself a lot. Or “Well, gee, Mom, you get to do that” or “Gee, can’t a person be tired?” You know, that kind of conversation would never have happened with my parents because the rules were much tighter, rather than looking at the individuals and thinking, “Let’s do it this way. Let’s consider how they feel.” There wasn’t as much consideration about how the kids felt. It was more taking care of food and everything.
Early in my conversation with Anna Benton, she had mentioned that she thought parenting was easier for her parents than it is for her because her parents had been more authoritarian. Anna had also insisted that she and her parents found entirely different satisfactions in child rearing. Her parents valued good behavior; she values intimacy. In fact, Anna explicitly acknowledged that the intimacy she has with her children fills in for the intimacy she feels she did not have with her own parents. When asked to discuss more fully her particular parenting style, she referred to Thomas Phelan’s book /-2-5 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2—12 as she quipped about how her own approach differs from that one:5
There are some parenting books that you have to be so regulated to follow their approach. There was one that was called “1-2-3 stop” or something; it’s some sort of behavior modification program. So many of those aren’t helpful to me because that’s just not my personal way of doing things. Mine is “1-2-3 maybe.”
Anna also spoke of how her “1-2-3 maybe” approach is the source of intense personal frustration. She wants to remain close to her children, and she values responding in a flexible manner. Yet she is sometimes irritated because she views her children as insufficiently’ attentive to the demands of family life, and she does not know how to inculcate different attitudes:
anna: [I’m] probably not strict enough. We are a very close family. We do a lot of things together. I think that we don’t have enough fixed rules, so there tends to be more arguing and negotiating that goes on.
interviewer: What are some of the areas where you have conflicts?
anna: You know, about how much TV, and I don’t think that they contribute enough in terms of chores and kitchen, and things like that. . . . Like I was saying, there’s something about the seventies and the, you know, we should all be close and talking on pillows and everybody’s in therapy and talking about their feelings and somehow feeling like more should be resolved in a consensual way with your kids. There isn’t any of this, you know, “that’s the rule,” and I think a little more of that is a good thing. I’m trying to do that more with my kids. Sadie’s more obedient, but Leah pushes the limits—not like risky behavior but a little too much of a prima donna.
Anna thus both boasts and worries about her relationship with her children. She also both embraces and mocks her new approach to being a parent.
Donna Gibson, Anna’s friend in Berkeley, raised a related set of concerns. Donna believes that she and her husband are both permissive and protective, but she too worries that she leans too much toward permissiveness. Interestingly, Donna sees permissiveness as standing in opposition to being protective, rather than as the converse of being authoritative (or even authoritarian), which suggests that she conflates the two issues of permissiveness and protectiveness. That opposition also suggests, perhaps, that Donna cannot even imagine being authoritative (or authoritarian) about routine matters that do not involve safety, even though she thinks that might be a more appropriate stance some of the time: “On the spectrum of things we’re relatively—I was going to say permissive, but sometimes people say we’re not; they characterize us as being more on the protective end. . . . But in terms of like rules, operat
ing in this house, were very permissive and probably too permissive, particularly for Jordan. He could probably use more rules, truthfully.” When asked what her greatest difficulty as a parent is, Donna answered that she sometimes becomes a “bit hysterical” around issues of safety and around issues having to do with her childrens academic performance, demonstrating once again her conflation of two quite different issues:
[My greatest difficulty is] keeping fear under, you know, not letting your fear drive your reaction to your kid. . . . The thing that happened with Sophie [who at age fifteen wanted to go to an underage club] is in my mind. [I had] a lot of fears around her doing this, and I think that my fear drove some of my decision making around it, and I became a little bit hysterical with her about it. . . . And the same with Jordan [who is twelve]. I worry if he says, “I don’t want to do any more homework, and I don’t care.”
I worry that that means he will be an unemployed bum.
Donna laughed as she talked about her son being a “bum,” but the laughter was nervous. Donna makes no distinction between fears about safety (Will Sophie be all right as she travels to an underage club across the San Francisco Bay?) and fears about status reproduction (Will Jordan do his homework?). Both sets of fears prompt Donna to become more vigilant—thus violating her commitment to trust—even as she values her own “permissive” stance. She then is left not knowing what to do should her son refuse to do his homework and refuse to remain engaged in the family practice of high achievement. The same kind of status anxiety is also lurking in the comment of Kristen Garner, a white, widowed mother of two living in suburban Connecticut, as she wrestles with the issue of whether to intervene when one of her two children is experiencing academic difficulties: “I think one of the hardest things is to get involved to the right extent and not to too much of an extent.”