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 them for important financial support.23 And more of these adults shudder when they think about the parenting regime under which they were raised, even as they acknowledge their own misadventures.
For some parents—especially the older professional middle-class parents— risky behavior was part and parcel of the rebellious spirit of the sixties.24 Perhaps because the working-class and middle-class parents are, on average, a few years younger than the professional middle-class parents, none of them mentioned that era. But looking back, the older professional middle-class adults not only mentioned the sixties, but they also suggested that their involvement
in the activities of that time period (or its legacies) knocked the socks off their parents, who were totally unprepared for the ways in which the world appeared to be turning upside down.25 Susan Chase, the white attorney from Berkeley, said that her parents were in such “denial” and had such anger that they really didn’t know how to handle their children’s rebellion:
My parents had their kids in the fifties, which means that we were all in high school in the seventies. And I think the whole counterculture, drug culture hit them like a ton of bricks. And they were really not ready for it. And they were in denial, and they were angry, and they were just so horrified that they didn’t know what to do. Drug culture and the sexual permissiveness culture—my parents are Catholic, and you know, they were really surprised by the whole thing and didn’t handle it particularly well.
One white professional middle-class woman, who is now in her fifties and is the mother of two children in their twenties and one teenager, suggested that her parents felt that their children were rejecting their successes as well as their values:
I think that they were shocked by the sixties. . . . That probably shocked them tremendously, and I think they felt like, “how have we failed?” That just was devastating that we would throw away all the things that they had valued so highly. Some of that was just us being obnoxious. . . . There was a reason to be different, but I think it was heartbreaking for them.
The professional middle-class parents also take different lessons from what they see as being the gap between themselves and their own parents (whether caused by their involvement in counterculture activities or not) than do their less privileged peers. Professional middle-class parents do not just view their parents as having been ignorant (or shocked), but they view them as having been insufficient in their engagement and understanding. And these professional middle-class parents believe that these insufficiencies meant that their parents were unable to reap the immense pleasures and joys that parenting can hold. Blithely they dismiss their parents as not having had anything like the satisfactions they believe are available if one approaches parenting through connection and communication rather than hierarchical authority.
Susan Chase, who noted that she participated in the counterculture of the sixties, suggested that her own parents “missed out” because, she astonishingly suggested, they did not love their children as much as she loves hers. And whereas she saw herself as being quite distant from her parents, she takes pride in her belief that her own son (at age sixteen) does not regard her as being so very different from himself:
Their generation and my parents in particular, because of who they were,
I think they really missed out on a lot of stuff. We really love our kids, way more than they did, and again that may be a certain kind of involvement or parents trying to be their kid’s best friend, whatever happens now, but I certainly thought of my parents as very alien and very “other” and people—my parents and their friends and my teachers—as kind of the enemy.
I just don’t think that kids [now] feel that way so much about adults. And yes, I know that Miles doesn’t want to hang around with me all the time, and there are certain things that he doesn’t want me to know, but I think at the same time I don’t think that he sees me as alien or that he needs to kind of protect himself from me. (Emphasis added)
Like Susan, Anna Benton, who acknowledged that parenting is easier if parents remain in charge, wants to change the model from the one in which she was raised. She too insisted that she and her parents found entirely different satisfactions in child rearing, ff er parents valued good behavior; she values intimacy. Moreover, Anna explicitly admitted that she is reacting to the absence of intimacy with her own parents by creating intimacy with her children:
[My parents] were just not that involved. [They were satisfied] that they had kids that were good kids, and. . . I’m not sure [how to account for the change]. I think for me I was kind of more marginal and not really treated as that much of an equal, so I guess I’m retrying with my kids. That’s not to say that retrying results in better kids—they’re still brats—but I’m sure it’s more for my own need to be intimate and close because I wasn’t that close with my parents. (Emphasis added)
Contemporary parenting styles emerge from an effort to make up for, and even to reverse, the lessons of the past. The less well educated parents choose parenting with limits because they want to create relationships based on authority to ensure that their children follow the rules they set forth and because they do not accept the decline in deference. Moreover, because they perceive the world today as being more dangerous and themselves as having more responsibility to help their children avoid risks, they also want to be more aware of what their children are doing. The more highly educated parents also want greater vigilance, but they want to diminish the gap between parents and children by filling it with love, trust, and respect; parenting out of control rests on the assumption that a relationship based on authority alone is unsafe, unhealthy, and unsatisfying for all concerned.
Across the social spectrum, most parents feel that they are parenting on their own desert island, and they think that this isolation represents a significant change from the past. They hark back to a time when communities were supportive and when moms stayed at home. They view contemporary parenting as fraught with difficulty. Within this acute sense of isolation, each household believes itself to be an island of sanity and believes, as well, that it needs to be attentive to the threat outside its doors. Stranger danger extends among these parents to the man and woman living in the next house or apartment.26 In response, parents feel the need to be more vigilant than their parents were with them.
All the interviewed parents also believe that there had been a sharp generational divide in the past. This generational divide meant not only that lines of authority were clear—children did what they were told and didn’t question their parents—but for some of the interviewees, across the social classes, that generational divide meant that their own parents didn’t know what their children were doing. But not all interviewees look back at this divide with the same sentiments. Some working-class and middle-class adults believe that the generational divide served them well and that they were thus guided to appropriate behavior; some believe that they were mistaken to have ignored the authority of their parents and to have indulged in risky behavior. And there are some who believe that the generational divide resulted in insufficient attention from their parents. No matter what their current assessments of the past, the middle-class and working-class parents now want to find better ways of ensuring that their children are attentive to lurking dangers, and they welcome any assistance they can get in monitoring their children more closely; this is especially true for those who view dangers as being very present and who view th e wo rid, in general, as having become less benign. They are unlikely to be particularly trusting about the specific answers their children give when questioned about their actions; they don’t want to make the mistakes they attribute to their parents of naivete or blind ignorance. They opt for tighter limits and greater surveillance.
The professional middle-class parents are in a trickier spot. Many professional middle-class parents now believe that the sixties impulses were excessive, but many of them link their own contemporary values—their rejection of pure materialism; their interest in the existential goals of passion, self-confidence, remaining flexible, and having “fun”—to the very same set of ideals that they embodied during those years of rebellion. In addition, their break with their parents was not just about authority; it was a fundamental rift about politics, values, lifestyle, and ideology. The scars of that rift might be more difficult to heal than those resting on “benign neglect” or on not having listened to sound advice.
Not only did many of the professional middle-class parents actively reject their own parents as being out of step with the changing times, but they also, as a group, are very mobile.27 They might bemoan the fact that they have no family around now to help ease the daily burdens (and share the pleasures) of raising children, but they have actively sought careers and followed opportunities that have taken them far away from the communities in which they were raised. As a result of their own actions, they are more adrift in the world as they look for guidance on how to parent and as they look for bonds of connection.28
And ironically, given professional middle-class parents’ own stance with respect to their parents, many of them seek these bonds in their relationships with their own children. These trends clearly have multiple sources: maternal guilt because of employment and the compensatory effort to create “quality time”; changing gender patterns and the greater involvement in parenting by fathers; and “nostalgia for a mythical family past.”29 I would add as well that among the professional middle-class parents especially, the new mode of parenting is at least in part driven by a drive for connection across generations, especially when upward ties have been frayed (by the events of the sixties) and when horizontal ties (e. g., with friends, in voluntary associations) are diminished among those whose employment combined with child rearing keeps them too busy to find much time for either sociability or civic engagement.30