Rich Parents Helicopter - And It Works

[NavalTradition]

Richer parents are helicopter parents, study finds:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/upshot/rich-children-and-poor-ones-are-raised-very-differently.html

Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation, says Annette Lareau, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist whose groundbreaking research on the topic was published in her book “Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life.” They try to develop their skills through close supervision and organized activities, and teach children to question authority figures and navigate elite institutions.

Working class parents, in contrast, are not:

Working-class parents, meanwhile, believe their children will naturally thrive, and give them far greater independence and time for free play. They are taught to be compliant and deferential to adults.

Helicoptered kids, as we all might have suspected, are more unpleasant to be around:

Working-class children are happier, more independent, whine less and are closer with family members, Ms. Lareau found. Higher-income children are more likely to declare boredom and expect their parents to solve their problems.

…but also more likely to succeed in college and beyond:

Yet later on, the more affluent children end up in college and en route to the middle class, while working-class children tend to struggle. Children from higher-income families are likely to have the skills to navigate bureaucracies and succeed in schools and workplaces, Ms. Lareau said.

So, overschedule your kids and teach them to be whiny and bored. They’ll go farther in life. (?)

[fractalmstr]

And raising your kids based on statistical outcomes is a pretty bad idea too, IMO. It is a fact that some helicoptered kids will do poorly in life, and some free-spirited kids will do very well. Outliers matter here!

[romanigypsyeyes]

So, overschedule your kids and teach them to be whiny and bored. They’ll go farther in life. (?)

No. Raise them rich and they’ll be rich. Raise them poor and they’ll be poor.

That’s how our system works. (Generally. Of course there are exceptions.)

[carolinamom2boys]

This study implies that parents use one set of parenting skills without adapting to a situation . I believe that successful parents adapt parenting styles to best suit every situation. Making huge generalizations are helpful IMO .

[frazzled1]

They are taught to be compliant and deferential to adults … Yet later on, the more affluent children end up in college and en route to the middle class, while working-class children tend to struggle.

It would seem that compliance/deference don’t assist kids in succeeding later in life. Is the point to raise children to be compliant with adults, or to succeed as adults? In any case, given that classroom management is a significant problem in schools of all types, including those in working-class neighborhoods, I’m skeptical that the less well-off kids are really that much more compliant.

I realize the author is doing an academic study and needs to draw generalizations. But it is possible to raise kids to treat adults with respect but not necessarily be compliant with them. Better-off kids have more money and the advantages associated with that. I think that’s more significant in their eventual success than any class-based differences in how kids are raised.

[carolinamom2boys]

Meant to say making huge generalizations are not helpful. Caught the error after time elapsed to edit.

[romanigypsyeyes]

I was actually just talking with my best friend about this the other day. We’ve been best friends since freshmen year of high school. Went to the same high school, took similar classes, etc. The difference is that he was raised in a very well-off household and I was not.

Despite us having very similar personalities and me having a much higher GPA than he did, he was able to get well-paying jobs in the summers because his dad had connections. He was able to network with the semi-powerful people that he knew through his parents’ yacht club. These would have all lead to a much more comfortable life for him, had he chosen to take it (he instead chose to be a teacher but that’s a whole 'nother story). His brother did choose to capitalize on those connections and now has a very nice paying job thanks to someone he knew at the yacht club.

Me? Those opportunities never presented themselves to me. I didn’t have parents who had connections to x, y, and z people. I didn’t have access to a yacht club or other places where I could learn how to interact with the well-off and tap into those connections.

We like to pretend that we live in a meritocracy, but we don’t. This is becoming even more apparent with my generation as we’re the first that will not, statistically, do better than our parents in a long, long time.

So are there (generally) differences in how rich and poor kids are raised? Absolutely. (And, personally, I hope to give my kids the type of “poor child” raising I had without the stress of not knowing whether or not the bills will get paid.) Do I think that is what ultimately determines their success or failure in the modern economy? Nope. Maybe in an “all else is equal” world, but we are not anywhere close to that type of world.

[CheddarcheeseMN]

I’ve seen many references to the Lareau research but haven’t ever seen the nonpoor parents referred to as helicopters. That is something different. Here, the middle and higher income kids are driven to private lessons but are encouraged to discuss their issues with teachers and others on their own. The kids question authority - their parents don’t get involved.

[partyof5]

@romanigypsyeyes yes I see this with internships. A lot of well deserving kids can’t afford internships that will offer them connections, can’t afford to take unpaid jobs, or live for the summer in NYC, DC etc.

[lookingforward]

Personally, I see a lot missing from that. And it was a 30 day survey, not an in-depth study, nor longitudinal. A lot of the positive, takes-a-village sorts of influences were skipped.

Oh, I was referring to the Pew study.

[musicprnt]

I have read similar studies, and the problem with the way it presents the ‘facts’ is it makes it seem like there are two different ends here, the well off parents are helicopter parents, involved in everything and see their kid as some kind of ‘project’, while blue collar parents are ‘hands off’, and teach their kids to be independent and such, the rich kids are whiners and so forth.

There are differences, I saw some of this myself growing up. With blue collar parents there often is the idea that if a kid wants to do something, they will ask to do it, parents tend to be less likely to suggest things, whereas with more upper class parents they will actively suggest things to the kids (though this has a downside, the parents pushing their kids into things they don’t want to do and other bad behavior). One of the biggest battles gifted kids from working class backgrounds face is that their parents assume that the school will take care of things, it doesn’t really dawn on them that the schools may not do the right thing, whereas upper income parents tend to be a lot more into actively interceding.

That said, I don’t think that it is that cut and dried, I know plenty of working class kids who have no respect for authority, for example, and I know plenty of upper class kids who are decent, respectful people who treat others with respect and aren’t the self involved monsters they are painted to be. I have seen people tell us that being involved with our son the way we were with his music was 'too much", but the thing was all we did was support him, he was making a lot of his choices and learning how to direct himself (irony, one of said parents had two sons that quite frankly, grew up and suddenly found they were adults and didn’t have a clue how to live, something I guarantee you our son does). I think there is truth to the upper class parents who are all about making sure their kid ends up on the ‘right’ track, that they do the right EC’s, take only the classes guaranteed to get them looked at by some elite school, but I also know a lot of parents in the same boat we are, fairly well off, who encourage their kids to try new things, take chances have time to play and goof off, and otherwise live a little bit, too, for every tiger parent or suburban commando parents, there are a lot of parents who don’t see life as getting into an Ivy and being an investment banker or hedge fund manager.

[NavalTradition]

I’ve seen many references to the Lareau research but haven’t ever seen the nonpoor parents referred to as helicopters. That is something different.

That was my spin on it. If parents who raise whiny kids and cart them to a million extracurriculars don’t count as helicopters, who does? I use helicopter in a positive not normative sense here of course. If the term is only one of abuse and has no social science content, it’s not very useful, is it?

[GMTplus7]

Rich kids have a glass floor. No matter how badly they screw up in life, they’ll never fall below middle class.

[travelnut]

It may be as much a question of options and access as it is about attitudes. Unpaid internships, for example, can be the most direct way to enter some fields. Who can consider them? Though the playing field has never been level, it seems that the disparity is growing, though I only have anecdotal evidence of that.

Having family as a back up (financially or emotionally), can smooth out bumps in the road and allow for opportunities that might not be possible otherwise. Not all parents who have the financial ability to help are helicoptering; some are responding exclusively to their kids initiatives in the context of their means.

[Zinhead]

There are different views on whether helicoptered kids are better off:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/the-real-problem-with-helicopter-parents-there-arent-enough-of-them/263410/

The kind of intensively hands-on parenting that we now like to lampoon and criticize is of relatively recent vintage. In this regard, it’s worth noting that the terms “helicopter parent” and “overparenting” only entered general usage in the past decade or so. New words were needed to describe a new phenomenon. We can actually document its emergence statistically: according to husband-and-wife economists Garey and Valerie Ramey, starting in the 1990s parents began spending significantly more time with their kids.

And what really stands out in the Rameys’ findings is a clear distinction between college-educated parents and everybody else. Prior to 1995, college-educated moms averaged about 12 hours a week with their kids, compared to about 11 hours for less-educated moms. By 2007, though, the figure for less-educated moms had risen to nearly 16 hours while that for college-educated moms had soared all the way to 21 hours. Similar trends were observed for fathers: The time that college-educated dads spent with their kids rose from 5 to 10 hours, while for less-educated dads the increase was from around 4 hours to around 8 hours.

So while the time parents spend with children living at home has increased across the board, the trend has been especially pronounced among highly-educated households. The parental attention gap is growing.

This is part of a larger parenting shift that breaks down along class lines. Through in-depth observation of family life in select homes the sociologist Annette Lareau has identified clear differences in parenting across the socioeconomic spectrum. Among the poor and working-class families she studied, the focus of parenting was on what she calls “the accomplishment of natural growth.” In these families, “parents viewed children’s development as unfolding spontaneously, as long as they were provided with comfort, food, shelter, and other basic support.”

College-educated parents have taken on a much more ambitious role - one that Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.” “In these families, parents actively fostered and assessed their children’s talents, opinions, and skills,” Lareau writes. “They made a deliberate and sustained effort to stimulate children’s development and to cultivate their cognitive and social skills.”

The findings of Lareau and the Rameys document the emergence of a growing class divide in American family life. But the fissure is actually much wider than the work of these scholars shows it to be. The parenting gap isn’t just about how much time parents spend with their kids. It’s also about whether they live together with their kids.

[mcat2]

This thread reminds me of the following story:

At one time, several of us discussed about the pros and cons of eliminating standardized tests like SAT as one of college admission metrics. I said that this kind of test could be unfair to some kids whose parents are either financially poor or not very highly educated. So there is some merit of not using these written tests. But one of my coworkers said immediately that even though the contents of these standardized tests may not be totally fair, everybody still has a means to overcome it because what is good or bad has no ambiguity. If you eliminate this kind of test, everything is based on the holistic, “personal quality” criteria (“life achievement/experiences”, ECs, intern opportunity, starting charity organizations or business, etc.) the rich kids, with the backing of their families, will beat those not from such families even more badly. (Just look at how many opportunities that the “shrieking girl” at a certain top college had had before she set her foot on campus because of her parent. She is actually an example of being a “kid” from such family who would not raise a kid who is compliant and deferential to adults or authoritative figure – this is good unless the purpose of education in this country is just to produce working ants who dutifully serve serve their assigned role of serving the rich and powerful.)

[Zinhead]

Meghan McMardle wrote an insightful article about the rise of helicopter parenting.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-30/what-really-scares-helicopter-parents

So while the economic explanation rings true, “we got richer” doesn’t seem to be enough. Rather, we have to look at the specific way in which we got richer. Specifically, we need to look at the rise of the extensively educated professional class.

The change in our novels reflects a change in our economy: the decline of manufacturing; the rise in the number and remuneration of professional jobs; the increase in the size of service firms; and the resulting shift toward salaried positions rather than partnerships or sole proprietorships. As a result of these changes, the upper middle class has found itself in a curious bind. In some ways, its economic fortunes are better than ever: They make more money, more reliably, than they used to. But because they are employees rather than business owners, they have a very limited ability to pass their good fortune onto their children.

A parent who had built a good insurance business in 1950 had a valuable asset that he could hand over to his sons. As long as they put a full day in at the office, they too would be able to take home a good living. That calculation applies across a broad range of manufacturing, retail and service businesses that used to form the economic bulwark of the prosperous middle class.

An MBA, however, is not heritable. Neither is a law degree, a medical degree, or any of the other educational credentials that form the barriers to entry into today’s upper middle class. Those have to be earned by the child, from strangers – and with inequality rising, the competition for those credentials just keeps getting fiercer.

Of course, parents have always worried about their kids making it; small family firms were often riven by worries about Uncle Rob’s ability to settle down to the business. But those were worries about adults, at an age when people really do settle down and become less wild. These days, we’re trying to force that kind of responsibility onto teenagers in their freshman year of high school. Of course, we don’t tell them that they need to earn a living; we tell them they need to get into a good college. But the professionalization of the American economy means that these are effectively the same thing for large swathes of the middle class.

Many teenagers – and I include myself at that age – do not quite have the emotional maturity and long-term planning skills for the high-stakes economic competition they find themselves engaged in. So their parents intervene, managing their lives so intensely that their child doesn’t have much opportunity to, well, act like a child instead of a miniature middle-aged accountant. Since the professional class can’t pass down its credentials, it passes down its ability to navigate the educational system that produces the credentials. The more inequality widens, the more obsessively they will manage their kids through school – and the more economic mobility will stagnate, since parents outside the professional class will have grave difficulty replicating this feat.

I see this in my cohort of parents. Practically all of the parents of high achieving kids in our HS are highly educated professionals that typically work for someone else. The kids of small business owners or of less educated parents, of which there are a number in our HS, are missing from the ranks of the high achievers.

[romanigypsyeyes]

Child of small business owner (plumber) and banner (no, not the rich kind) here.

I think I’m in the high achieving category.shrug

I hope beyond hope I never act like the parents described here. That sounds like a miserable childhood.

[HRSMom]

I was born poor but didn’t end up poor…

I think people don’t “own” a business now (meaning work for others) bc the capital they would need to get the return they get now simply by working with their advanced degrees is simply far too much. Plus, many watched those businesses go down the drain in the 70/80s and didn’t want any part of owning their own business.

[lookingforward]

It’s not the quantity of parental attention, but the quality. DH and I did shuffle the kids to certain experiences and did expose them to certain things, but the advantage was how we could teach them to approach challenges, how put their shoulders into tasks and to think critically. We were very firm on the value of working toward goals and not quick gratification with the bought trappings.

There’s lots of talk on CC about the “packaging” of wealthier kids, but not much acknowledgement how it can backfire, how it often represents very little, either by itself or in comparison. These soft landings don;t say much about personal drives.