All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (15 page)

“If a Caucasian family here is going to push its kids,” Leslie tells me, “they’re more likely to push them in sports, like putting their children in year-round swim team until their shoulders pop out. Whereas the Asian families put more of an emphasis on academics.”

True to her own distinctions, Leslie insists that her children do at least one activity per week that’s physical. Her thirteen-year-old daughter is on the volleyball team, which meets every day; her ten-year-old son does baseball twice weekly, karate twice weekly, and flag football twice a week in the off-season. Academic accomplishment is undeniably important to Leslie too. She speaks with pride about her daughter being an honors student, and the previous summer she hired a tutor for her son because a statewide test for third-graders was fast approaching. But you can hear, in her voice, a certain incredulity that it’s come to this. “I kept thinking to myself,” she says, “
Why am I hiring a tutor for a kid who’s still in second grade?”

It used to be that Leslie’s approach worked. If you moved to an upper-middle-class enclave like Sugar Land and encouraged your children to do a team sport and get good grades, odds were that your kids would one day find a place in the state’s fine system of universities, and then march into the marketplace with a degree and a fistful of contacts. Their place in the world was reasonably assured. Leslie’s husband grew up in Texas and went to the University of Houston, where he met Leslie; they are passionate about their alma mater and post lots of Facebook updates about football games they’ve just attended (
Go Coogs!
)

But recently, there’s been a rather striking assault on the long-cherished order of things. In 1997, the state legislature passed House Bill 588, more commonly known around the state as the “Top 10 Percent Rule.” The bill essentially guarantees college admission (though not the means to pay for it) to the state-funded universities for all kids who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class. The measure drew support not just from poor blacks and Hispanics, who appreciated that their children would be measured relative to the accomplishments of their peers (rather than those whose parents could afford homes in better school districts), but from poor rural white Texans too. But the legislation has had interesting consequences for suburbs like Leslie’s. Where once Texas A&M, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Houston took a disproportionate number of kids from the state’s best public schools, located in places like Sugar Land, today these institutions must hew to the numbers. And the kids who graduate in that top 10 percent, in Leslie’s view, are the children of Tiger Moms. (It just so happened that Amy Chua’s book
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
had come out a few months before my visit.)

“Whites in my daughter’s middle school,” Leslie tells me, “are less than 50 percent”—in fact, they make up just 31 percent, according to the school’s own data—“while Asian and Indian are the most” (53 percent). “So it’s very academically competitive now. That’s a big concern in terms of college admissions. When my daughter finishes eighth grade, she’ll have two high school credits. But there will be kids with five and six.” So by the time high school graduation comes around, says Leslie, “she’ll be lucky to be in the top quarter of her class.”

The distinctions Leslie is making may seem a bit oversimplified, and she may be making them with less hedging self-consciousness than some of her peers. But she is describing a common sentiment among her cohort. The rules for preparing kids for this networked, outsourced, multicultural century are brand-new. She brings up a parent open house she attended the first week of school the previous year, when her daughter was starting seventh grade. “All the Asian parents raised their hands,” she recalls, “and asked about the Duke University program.” Leslie had never heard of it. “And a number of the other Asian and Indian parents start nodding. But it wasn’t on my radar. I walked out saying,
I have no idea what they’re talking about.
”

Later, she learned. The Duke University Talent Identification Program is a national organization that, among other things, invites seventh-graders to take the SAT or ACT, ordinarily taken in grade 11. If a child scores over a certain threshold, he or she may participate in various summer and academic-year curricula held throughout the Southeast and Midwest. When Leslie learned that her daughter, a smart girl, qualified, she “contacted the school counselor and said, ‘What are the benefits? Is it something colleges will look at?’ ” Reasonable questions, she figured. But what she got were maddeningly vague answers. “Their response,” she says, “was, ‘It’s up to you.’ ” The program was not going to show up on her daughter’s transcript, and it was not going to help her get into Duke University one day, though it had Duke’s name on it. “So I encouraged her to a degree,” says Leslie, “but I said it was up to her.”

Her daughter chose not to go. “And in hindsight,” says Leslie, “I feel like I should have pushed. But I was reluctant. She had enough activities. She was all pre-AP. I didn’t want to stress her out.”

THOUGH MOST PEOPLE DON’T
realize it, Margaret Mead had a lot to say about American parenting. Her observations appear in one of her lesser-known works,
And Keep Your Powder Dry,
originally written in 1942. Parts of the book seem quaint today. But the pages about the way we raise our children and the anxieties we associate with them may as well have been written last week. It’s not an accident that Mead wrote the book at roughly the same moment children were losing their traditional roles and the modern, sheltered childhood was invented. Better than almost any social critic, and almost without meaning to, Mead documented what happens to parents when their primary obligation to their children is to cultivate them.

As an anthropologist, Mead was familiar with many different kinds of family structures and child-rearing philosophies. What struck her as different about American parents was that they didn’t know what particular goal they were steering their children toward. If you were an English aristocrat, your aim was to raise your child to be another aristocrat. If you were a rice farmer in India, your aim was to train your child to farm the same land. If you were a blacksmith in Bali, you raised your son to be a blacksmith too. Whether you lived in old-world Europe or a developing nation or a preliterate society, you, as a parent, were a custodian of old traditions, not an inventor of new ones. “In other societies, where parents were bringing up children for their own way of life,” she writes, “the job was reasonably clear. As you sat, so you taught your children to sit.” It didn’t matter if you were a clumsy teacher to your child. Behind “the ignorance and ineptness of any individual,” she observes, “lay the sureness of folkways.” A parent’s job was simply to maintain them.

But Americans, Mead immediately noticed, were a special case. They didn’t have old folkways to rely on. They didn’t have a “way of life” that they were raising their children for. The whole promise of America—its very appeal, its very strength—was that its citizens were not hidebound by tradition or rigid, immutable social structures. Americans were—are—free to invent and reinvent themselves with every generation. Sons and daughters do different things from their fathers and mothers, in different ways, and in different places. “The American parent expects his child to leave him,” she writes, “leave him physically, go to another town, another state; leave him in terms of occupation, embrace a different calling, learn a different skill; leave him socially, travel if possible with a different crowd.”

In many ways, this is an incomparably wonderful thing. But it leaves mothers and fathers with few guideposts to direct their children. Following Mead to her logical conclusion, Americans are trying to ready their sons and daughters for a life that will look nothing like the lives they themselves lead. The word Mead uses to characterize an American father’s relationship to his sons is “autumnal”—a lovely word, and even more resonant in today’s world of snappity-pop technological change—because he is preparing his sons to surpass him. “In a very short while,” she writes, “they will be operating gadgets which he does not understand and cockily talking a language to which he has no clue.”

Uncertainty, Mead notes, makes even the brightest and most competent mothers and fathers vulnerable. In America, uncertainty starts the moment their children are born. New parents in the United States, Mead observes, are willing to try almost any new fad or craze for their baby’s sake. “We find new schools of education, new schools of diet, new schools of human relations, sprung up like mushrooms, new, untried, rank like skunk cabbages in early spring,” she writes. “And we find serious, educated people following their dictates.” Which is why attachment parenting is considered de rigueur one year and overbearing three years later. And why cry-it-out is all the rage one moment and then, after a couple of seasons, considered cruel. And why organic, home-milled purees suddenly supplant jars of Gerber’s, though an entire generation has done just fine on Gerber’s and even gone on to write books, run companies, and do Nobel Prize–winning science. Uncertainty is why parents buy Baby Einstein products, though there’s no evidence that they do anything to alter the cognitive trajectory of a child’s life, and explains why a friend—an extremely bright and reasonable man—asked me, with the straightest of faces and finest of intentions, why I wasn’t teaching my son sign language when he was small. (“Because my mother didn’t teach me to sign,” I told him, “and look! I’m smart and pay my taxes and everything.”) It is why, in any bookstore, you will find parenting advice guides by the hundreds, by the thousands, many of them starkly contradicting one another.
There is no folk wisdom.
“In old static cultures,” Mead writes, “one can find a standard of behavior—a child will be judged a baby until it can walk, or a small child until it has lost its teeth or learned to pass kava or take the cows to pasture . . . but in America, there is no such fixed standard—there are only this year’s babies.”

Uncertainty is also why parents of school-age children pack their schedules cheek-by-jowl with what they hope will be enriching and life-readying activities. As far as a child is concerned, Mead writes, “all one can do is to make him strong and well-equipped to go prospecting for himself.” How one equips children to go prospecting for themselves has never been more unclear, but teaching them chess for strategic thinking, enrolling them in AP classes, encouraging them to do sports so that they’ll learn the virtues of teamwork and perseverance and resilience—these all seem like they might help. We are no longer training our children for a trade or a guild or a place on the farm. As Mintz notes
,
American society since World War II has uniquely assumed “that all young people should follow a single, unitary path to adulthood”—namely, the staircase of kindergarten through grade 12, followed by a trip to college, if they’re lucky enough to be among the middle class. This singular path turns all peers into potential competitors, all measured by the same metrics (the SAT, GPAs, AP scores, a slate of extracurricular involvements). The only thing parents can do in such an environment is help give their children a boost above the fray, cultivating them with the same assiduousness with which children once cultivated the family fields. Nora Ephron put it this way in 2006:
“
Parenting [is] not simply about raising a child, it [is] about transforming a child, force-feeding it like a
foie gras
goose.”

WHEN MEAD WROTE
And Keep Your Powder Dry,
the United States was a fairly homogenous nation. It would be another twenty-three years before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which eased restrictions on Asian, Latin American, and African immigrants, was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. But once it passed, we became the most diverse nation on the planet, and Mead’s observations took on an extra resonance. They acquired more meaning still as the economy globalized and the world’s borders began to dissolve. Not only were parents training their children for a life that was radically different from their own, but they were training their children for a life that would, potentially, be conducted in a different language
.
It was this anxiety that made parents encourage their children to study Japanese during the 1980s, and it is this same anxiety that drives a certain kind of parent to enroll their toddlers in Mandarin classes today (and explains the sudden appearance, in 2007, of Nickelodeon’s
Ni Hao, Kai-Lan
). It’s as if parents, uncertain about what future to prepare their kids for, are trying to prepare them for any and every
possible
future.

Leslie expressed this anxiety with singular directness. But I heard it from other parents too, framed in different ways. Like Chrissy, the Minnesota “Committee” mom who had outlined her four kids’ formidable extracurricular schedules for me. After an ECFE class one day, I asked her: where did all her internal parenting pressures come from?

“I think they come from a variety of places,” she told me, “but one of the things that set me off was Tom Friedman.” She was referring to the
New York Times
columnist, who frequently writes about globalization. I should add that we were not talking about anything like globalization at the time. “His book
The World Is Flat,
” she continued, “and the idea that Chinese families and Indian families are working so hard to raise these kids, and they were going to take all of the jobs.” She shook her head. “After reading that, I was like Ho-ly Buckets!” Her children’s future jobs could just as easily be snatched away by a student in Delhi as in Denver.

But didn’t she still feel like her four kids had lots of natural advantages? I asked. They were white middle-class Americans, and they went to good magnet schools in St. Paul. . . .

“I
do
think my children have a lot of natural advantages,” she told me. “But the world is changing, and we’ve seen so much change just in my lifetime. You just don’t know what’s going to happen in ten, fifteen years.”