Raising children has become significantly more time-consuming and expensive, amid a sense that opportunity has grown more elusive.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/upshot/the-relentlessness-of-modern-parenting.html
Top fifth income parents spend about $10,000 per year per kid, according to the article.
As noted in the article, increasing income and wealth inequality and the likelihood that, for most people, downward mobility is more likely than upward mobility for the next generation of Americans may be driving the competition that leads to intensive parenting.
It is also true that when families have less children, there is more focus on “doing a good job” with each one. The US birth rate has been declining and so the perceived need to nurture these scarce resources (the next generation) has grown stronger.
Giving the choice of intensive parenting or free range and no option of a happy medium, I’m free range all the way. No one will ever accuse me of being a helicopter mom, of that I’m quite certain lol. And imagine, one launched very successfully and the other just one semester away from a successful launch. “There are two lasting things we give our children. One is roots and the other is wings.” Guess what? Both are free.
The best gift my parents ever gave me was the gift of boredom.
They still watched me, but I remember hours playing in the backyard and the basement (a treasure trove of old stuff). I read - a lot. I made my own fun. Granted, there was less to get into trouble with in a small town where there were parents everywhere, and no Internet, but I think I turned out okay.
I see the difference with my own kids. My oldest, for whom ballet consumed nearly every hour not in school (her choice), is just now figuring out the gift of downtime on college break. My youngest, with a more relaxed schedule that still includes an adult black belt, is the one who will start baking or drawing if she’s bored.
Ironically, the one who didn’t spend a lot of time with the arts is the one who expresses herself through the arts.
I agree in theory, however I think the problem is that these days kids deal with boredom by "playing’ on their phones/devices which requires no creativity, imagination or physical activity. I like to keep my kids busy rather than fight the electronics.
I grew up in the ‘60’s, small town, family with a limited budget. No organized sports available for girls, no money for music or dance lessons, etc. School was far less demanding than the suburban schools my kids attended. I spent my free time hanging out with the neighborhood group and other friends.
Honestly I spent a lot of time being just plain bored. I would have loved the opportunity to have at least a few organized activities. The nostalgia for those days is highly overrated.
I was happy that we were able to provide our kids with so many more options and opportunities. The downside is that there is such a growing devise between the kids whose families can afford this and those that can’t.
There are things gained and lost with the changes in parenting from my perspective. I have spent way more time with my kids than my parents spent with me (definite plus for me and hopefully for them too), but the level of freedom I had as a child was mind-blowing (minus for them). Overall, probably a net win for my kids, but I will always have the rose-colored glasses of my childhood on.
The problem I found as a SAHM was that there were never any kids anywhere in the neighborhood for my kids to play with. I would take them to parks and no one was ever there. Even in the evenings, there were generally only kids there if they were having a birthday party or the older siblings were playing soccer or baseball. I often wished we had enough to pay for daycare so they could have other kids to play with during the day.
So once they got old enough I had to put them into activities which is where all the working parents were taking their kids in the evenings & weekends. And then we had to use the cheaper activities when so many were paying for club sports. I know the one year my DD went to basketball camp w/ a friend; the friend’s mom wasn’t happy because her daughter didn’t win any basketball awards that week. Crazy.
I will say I am laser focused on getting my kids a college education with, hopefully, a great return on investment.
I agree about the gift of boredom. My kids would come to me to say they were bored and I would say “Good, you’re about to do something wonderful,”
We never had a tv. My kids are in their late 20’s but we had no computer and no smart phones for most of their growing-up.
Screens are the main reason some teachers give to account for busy work given for home.
Downtime is so important.
@laralei I could have written that myself. My kids all grew up with each other as playmates in the end even though our neighborhood had many kids. Even after the other kids got out of school in the afternoon (mine were homeschooled) they were all in after-care and not outside. My kids are really grateful for the childhood they had - no screens, no TV most of the time. With college, I will still be kind of hands off. I mean, they know what good grades bring. They know their strengths and weaknesses. I make sure they know their options but it’s up to them to figure out how far they want to go. They will all graduate HS with an Associates in hand, too. If that is their terminal degree, I’m OK. If they want to go farther, they will have to know what they want to do and how they want to do it. I went to college blind which was a terrible way to go into college.
As an older SAHM, living on a street of mostly older people, there were few kids around for my daughter to play with, I had to arrange play dates, which were unknown when I was a kid. I did sign her up for a few activities that interested her, but she had lots of time on her own to be creative, and she managed to keep herself busy. I think it helped her to grow into the self-motivated person she is, and she did very well in college.
I managed to provide unstructured free time with friends for my kids, but it took some serious networking. It would probably have been simpler to just sign them up for more activities. I’m that crazy woman who knocked on your door and introduced myself and asked if your kids wanted to play with mine at the park. If I saw you at library story time and then at a nearby grocery store, I’d be striking up a conversation to see if you’r kids wanted to have free time with mine.
My son’s best friend is a kid we met at story time and found out live a few blocks away and started meeting at a local park. We kept inviting every kid we met and many are all still friends who end up playing pick up sports, making goofy videos, playing games, making music, and all sort of unstructured creative ventures together still. They are teens now and can make their own plans without my assistance most of the time, but I’m glad I made the effort when they were little. I wish it could have happened more organically, but it is what it is.
I grew up in South Korea post-Korean war pretty much a street urchin. My generation didn’t have toys, so we played with mud, made our own wooden swords, slingshots, skateboards made with wood and metal scraps, etc. When we didn’t get along with one another, we settled the matter with fist fights, which was about a weekly affair. One thing we did have aplenty growing up in such an environment was unbridled freedom and imaginations that have often gotten us in trouble. Our parents were so busy making a living, often desperately, that we basically lived separate lives, the kids entirely to themselves roaming the streets and the parents having no idea where we were nor what we were up to. I did go to school, and when my mother became a successful business woman and we were financially well off, I even went to a private elementary school with seasonal uniforms imported from UK. She just wasted her hard-earned money, though, because I never studied and had received straight "F"s all the way until we emigrated to the U.S.
Fast forward few decades with my own children born in the U.S. with radically different culture and educational system. While I’ve had a wonderful childhood full of freedom, creative imaginations and street survival skills and smartness that I’d have dearly loved to allow my kids to experience, as well, that just wasn’t a viable option for their generation. For one, technology has dominated our lives in such a way that it’s forever changed the way we live and raise our children. We also don’t live in as safe a world where children are free to explore the world outside their immediate homes in unfettered joy and spontaneity. Their “freedom” is sadly a crimped kind, closely monitored, supervised and even scripted.
Knowing there’s extremely slim to no chance in the world that they’d amount to anything by emulating their dad’s “wonderful” childhood formula of 100% all play with 0% devoted to study, I had to find a well-balanced way to raise them to both succeed academically while allowing them all the opportunities to enjoy their childhood as much as possible. Finding that balance, I’d say, was the greatest challenge as far as my parenting was concerned. How do you find that elusive balance when, on the one hand, you want your kids to have all the time and freedom in the world for self-discovery while, on the other hand, you need to guide them toward the top college admissions as pathways to securing successful lifelong careers? Sure, I didn’t have to guide my kids with the ambition toward the top college admissions. Why not just settle for any colleges with average B’s? After all, this is America, you don’t have to go to those top elite schools to succeed in the land of opportunities. Anyone who works hard can achieve the American Dream.
But for us Asians with prime emphasis on educational achievement as a way to all successes, that kind of attitude just isn’t a part of our cultural makeup. It’s not that it doesn’t sink in; it just can’t in our collective consciousness. So, we all become, one way or another, Tiger parents. Except I had to come to terms with my own past childhood totally devoid of rules, work ethics, study habits and conformity, so I decided to compromise by adopting my own brand of parenting method I’d call “TiggerDad.” No, it ain’t as dramatic and pathetic as Amy Chua’s. It’s simply a method of providing the kids all the freedom in the world while excelling in academics and extracurricular activities of their choosing WITHOUT all the pushing and shoving and threatening that are part of the strict Tiger parenting. Whenever there was a school party, homecoming, school play, proms, football games or just hanging with their friends in the park or at the movies, off my kids went. I never said no whenever they wanted their freedom. There was enough time to accommodate their freedom of activities yet with the time also necessary to excel in their school work. To this day, I don’t know of any other kids around me that were as busy as my kids; their schedule was brutal at times, but that’s the only way that they can have it all. Each and every summer was devoted to camping and road trips and being in outdoors hiking and soaking in hot springs the nature has endowed us with. Do they have any regrets the way they were brought up with any pieces of their childhood missing? I don’t think so. While the balancing act was tough, it can be done.
Although higher SES parents seem to be trying their hardest to stack the deck in their kids’ favor, based on the perception that the next generation will have to compete harder for fewer opportunities, with greater likelihood of downward mobility for the “losers” in such competition. As the article notes, spending on kids is increased by a much greater amount for the top fifth income families than it has for other quintiles.
A generation or two ago in the US, it was a much more dangerous world in terms of various accidental hazards and crime, but helicopter parenting was not so much a thing then. Kids would finish school for the day and go on their own to play with their friends (e.g. pickup basketball in the school yard, riding their bicycles around town, playing with a dog that one of the kid’s families had, etc.).
My kids’ schedules were very packed growing up and they were also expected to do well in school, but at the same time we had a lot good quality time together as a family. We ate together most of the time. When we traveled it was a complete down time for us (no forced museum visits or “lets do a lot research before we visit a foreign country,” but instead we just took in the moment). As busy as I was, I never missed any of their parent/teacher conferences or recitals. I think all of that taught them time management. They knew what’s important and how to manage many demands in their lives. They were successful in school and continue to do well in their adult lives. D1 just told me recently that when she has kids she would want to raise them the way I did. Maybe she just doesn’t know better, but I am good with it. 
A funny story…When D1 was 6 she told me she didn’t want to go to any summer programs because she was tired after a whole year of school. I was stupid enough to listen to a 6 year old, so I didn’t sign her up for anything. She was only home for 1 week before she started complaining she was bored. I had to call up so many places in trying to get her into a summer program. That was the last time I listened to my kids about wanting to just hang out.
Every kid is different, even in the same family. My son loved sports above all else, and baseball among all sports. Academics were effortless for him, he came home and cranked out his work efficiently and moved on. What I do regret is not pushing back more when my husband decided to “teach him that you can do anything you set your mind to” and had him training year round, batting lessons at 7:30 am sunday mornings, playing two summer leagues…his sophomore year of college, he told us that when he was in 10th grade, he realized that he was never going to be big enough to play baseball at a high level, and that he had wanted to switch to soccer in 8th grade, but it was “already too late”. That makes me sad.
He is a junior now, majoring in math, (statistics), and Econ. He is an umpire in the summers, and this
spring he will start scouting HS baseball players for colleges. He found a way to stay in the game, but I feel sad for all the 95 degree days with double headers and lost sleep on Sunday mornings.
I was inchargenof the girl’s, and they mostly did nothing. My eldest likes to read, so she did. All the time. She is a freshman in engineering , but her christmas list is still mostly books - but she does rock climb now.
The little one did nothing but screens - but she built amazing things on minecraft, and the Sims, she makes green screen movies, edits, and lots of video shorts. She just turned 11, and started painting and drawing a lot. She thought herself to play the Ukelele, and her christmas list was all art supplies and a wooden xylophone and a Kalimba. She is naturally VERY athletic, but she HATES anything organized. She doesn’t like to “create obligations” for herself. How would YOU like it if someone signed you up for a sport you had no interest in? I can’t disagree with her.
Seems like she prefers individual sports that do not require scheduling or prearrangement, right?
@Gudmom your youngest sounds exactly like my youngest right down to the ukelele.
“A generation or two ago in the US, it was a much more dangerous world in terms of various accidental hazards and crime, but helicopter parenting was not so much a thing then.”
I do wonder how much helicopter parenting is caused by the world now being a safer place. The attitude to risk when I was growing up was much more blasé. If you take it for granted that kids and adults die in car crashes (no seat belts!) or otherwise (murders were far more common), then other risks (like kids wandering the neighborhood on their bikes) seem less concerning.
It’s amusing to look back even further (to the early 1900s) and see pictures of people posing on the overhanging rock at Yosemite’s Glacier Point for pictures. That doesn’t happen much any more, which is one reason why the Free Solo movie feels so “out there”.
It extends much further beyond childhood too. I was perfectly happy in college to go mountaineering, climbing and caving in situations that today I would regard as completely reckless (i.e. we had no idea what we were doing and made it up as we went along). And if you try to be supportive of your kids taking even relatively modest risks then you are quite likely to meet with disapproval. For example a lot of people were surprised or even shocked that we let our kids go traveling in Europe on their own for a couple of weeks (at age 17) after high school graduation.