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 that some of the traditional professions (e. g., doctor or lawyer) are less certain routes to prestige and security than they were in the past.16 Contemporary parents with professional training are well aware of these shifts. As one parent, a college professor, said to a college-age woman who was interviewing him for a study of preschool educational choices among professional middle-class parents,
Mobility is going to be less predictable. . . . Our ability to plan an educational track to get people to become a certain kind of person with certain kinds of prospects is going to be a lot less predictable as we shift away from the model of you grow up, you learn how to do something, and then you get the job that you’re going to do for the rest of your life. For your generation the average is like ten or twelve jobs for your lifetime, or different occupations even. And so I think that the model of education being a unilinear process, or tracking to one thing, is not going to fit anymore with the reality. . . . You’re going to have to have multiple skill sets and multiple occupation niches. All that means less predictability.17
Instead of planning one “educational track” to get his son ready for a particular career, this man is already planning for flexibility. Like Eve and Sarah, this father said that you never really know which skills will be relevant in the future, and, therefore, the wise parent encourages them all: “There isn’t an
explicit discussion that we do about this sort of thing. It’s this implicit practice of, if a kid shows an interest in something, you follow it. Because who knows, maybe that will be a skill that they’ll develop.”
In the absence of a clear understanding of what the future might bring, elite parents seek to create adaptable children with multifaceted skills and abilities. They must remain alert for evidence of particular talents even as they discourage settling too early on a narrow route to achievement in a single sphere.