Demanding as it might be, this approach to parenting clearly has its own, very significant rewards. Professional middle-class parents take immense delight in the close bonds they believe they have established with each and every one of their children. Indeed, when asked specifically about the source of the deepest satisfaction they experience as parents, rather […]

These professional middle-class parents ensure that this nudging and discus­sion will occur by being constantly available. The physician quoted earlier, after talking about trust and giving advice, continued, “And I think [good parenting is] being available for them and letting them know that you’re always available.” In claiming the necessity for constant availability, parents indicate […]

Latitude itself depends on trusting children, and many professional middle — class parents insisted that they take this stance most of the time: they believe that their children will generally remain within the framework of what their parents view as acceptable behavior and that those children will strive to become the “best” as their parents […]

The link between flexibility and belief in a child’s potential is made clear as college professor Tom Audet described his approach to parenting his eigh­teen-year-old son and fourteen-year-old daughter: I’m a believer that you should allow the child as much latitude as you pos­sibly can to develop to their own potential. So far that has […]

Rather than worrying only about the media images and their own actions as parents, less privileged parents often view the real world directly outside their homes as being a very concrete threat to the safety and well-being of their children. The concerns they identify are thus neither imaginary nor distant. They are more central to […]

Some of the elite parents focused less on material overindulgence than what we might think of as psychological overindulgence. Professional middle-class parents spoke about being responsive to their children, about respecting indi­vidual needs, and creating “quality time” to make up for their daily absence at work. But these actions create concerns as well. In Berkeley, […]

Professional middle-class parents find it necessary to indulge their childrens material desires as a means of supporting their children’s enthusiasms and interests, as well as a way of enabling them to keep up with and, as the soci­ologist Allison Pugh suggests, join in conversation with their peers.18 At the same time, they worry about the […]

Closely related to the issue of overscheduling is that of ongoing pressure. Many parents talked about competitive schools and increasing amounts of homework. Ron Giddings, a white city planner from northern California, spoke about his six- and three-year-old children: “I think there’s a lot more pressure to achieve at school. Our kids are still young. […]

Equally ironic, a set of concerns found exclusively among the professional middle-class parents has to do with precisely what it is that parents are doing to ensure their childrens success. In their efforts to secure status reproduction by preparing their children to seize advantage, parents move to neighborhoods with demanding public schools, pressure their children […]

Across the board—and especially among the professional middle class—par­ents view television, movies, and, more recently, the Internet as the primary, uncontrollable sources of threat to innocence. These parents thus sound much like the cultural critic Neil Postman in tying the “disappearance of childhood” to the introduction of these forms of mass media.13 Consider the answer […]