In spite of these realities, when professional middle-class parents talk, they sometimes imply that the stages of childhood are written in stone. Even more often they evince concern that the world is imposing itself too quickly on their children and that their children are being exposed to specific images at “way too young an age” […]

Starting with the influential and admittedly highly contested research of his­torians such as Philippe Aries, scholars have come to the conclusion that if childhood itself is not an invention of the relatively recent past, the particular stages of demarcation—infant, toddler, preschooler, preteen, adolescent—are themselves arbitrary and subject to ongoing change.3 Several quite contem­porary examples illustrate […]

n November 3, 2008, as voters in the United States held their breath for the outcome of the Obama-McCain election, an entirely unre­lated story made headlines in the evening news. A study conducted by staff of the RAND Corporation and published in Pediatrics reported that a rise in teenage pregnancy could be attributed to the […]

The more elite parents who were interviewed are often more separated from their parents in two ways. More of these adults have moved away from the communities in which they were raised and thus cannot draw on their par­ents for daily assistance in rearing their children, even if in all likelihood they have drawn on […]

The working-class and middle-class parents do not speak with a common voice about their own adolescent experiences. And they do not all have the same perceptions of how engaged and aware their own parents were. This is a varied group of adults; the experiences that they bring to bear on percep­tions of appropriate relations between […]

Parenting across the social classes is perceived as being more difficult today than it was in the past for yet another reason: many parents believe that chil­dren’s deference has given way to what they view as a culture of disrespect. Patsy Doria, a white, working-class mother of three, noted that because her parents could count […]

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 […]

Professional middle-class parents extend these concerns into an elusive and, perhaps, unattainable goal. These are the parents who emphasize the efforts that go not just into creating family time but into creating “quality time” for each and every one of their children in the midst of their busy lives. And this enhanced goal might stand […]

Some aspects of the consequences of the shift in womens labor force par­ticipation are viewed similarly by parents with professional degrees and by those with less education. All parents worry about how they can create suf­ficient family time when there is so little time to be had, hope that they can “be there” at critical […]

The new, compelling sense that the world is more dangerous and that parents are more alone combines with other attitudes that have their roots in a major social change. At a median age of forty-four, most of the interviewed parents have lived through the enormous increase of womens labor force participa­tion in the last half […]