Some of the advantages of testing, private schools, neighborhoods with good public schools, extracurricular engagement, and encouragement of distinctive talents are not unique to the children in the more elite families. But less privi­leged parents indicate that they have to be more cautious about the accom­panying financial burdens, and they talk about how they make […]

In turn, that nurturance and encouragement reflect an awareness not just of a diminished space for the professional middle class but of the demands of turbulent times. Contemporary social theorists such as Manuel Castells pre­dict that in the future work will be increasingly transformed to require greater flexibility and will be less stable.15 Others note […]

Most distinctly, the professional middle-class parents seek out extracurricular activities for their children to nurture the talents that will help them get into good schools down the road. They enroll children in music lessons if they show the slightest ability (and sometimes even if they don’t); they sign them up for soccer leagues; they encourage […]

Even without disabilities, a parents understanding of a specific child’s person­ality, or a parent’s desire to secure a “better” education, might lead to the con­clusion that a private school education would be the best option to help that child maximize achievement.10 A number of professional middle-class parents spontaneously explained that they had sent their children […]

Professional middle-class parents spoke knowledgeably about learning dis­abilities. When their children did not perform at a satisfactory level, they had their children tested to find out whether there might be some psychological or physiological cause. If tests confirmed one of the new class of learning disabilities (e. g., ADD, ADHD), parents requested that schools make […]

And small wonder that all the interviewed parents were making efforts to ensure that their children would have a competitive chance in these turbu­lent times, often starting very early in childhood. Before turning to the ways in which the goals and aspirations—and actions—of the professional middle class differed from those of the middle — and […]

By many measures, parents do, indeed, have good grounds to be concerned. Those who came of age in the 1980s could not have been unaware of a major stock market crash in the middle of that decade and then some significant bumps along the way to the first decade of the twenty-first century.2 The boom […]

F rancesca Guarino is a married working-class woman, the daughter of immigrants from Italy.1 She lives on Staten Island in New York City wi th h er husband, who is employed as a technician for a telephone com­pany, and her three children. Their two daughters are aged seventeen and fif­teen; they also have an eight-year-old […]

Those who write about the concerns parents have about the physical well­being of their children often also talk about the concerns parents have about their childrens psychological well-being, daily activities, and future develop­ment. The recent shift toward more involvement in childrens lives has been well described by two contemporary scholars, Sharon fiays in The Cultural […]

S cholarly and ad hoc explanations for the new overanxious parent suggest a variety of immediate causes. Some argue that since events such as Col­umbine and especially 9/11, the world has become—or appears to be—a more dangerous place. Consequently, parents are “simply” responding to that new danger—or to a perception of danger.1 Many point to […]