Parenting culture is a disaster
Anxious parents micromanage their kids' entire lives. But why?
Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you like this blog, smash that subscribe button.
One of the richest people I’ve met (outside my job, which occasionally involves interviewing wealthy individuals) is probably my plumber. He’s older, and owns his own small plumbing businesses. On top of that, he owns something like 40 rental properties, and manages that many more. I can only guess at his net worth, but based on my knowledge of the local real estate market and his age (being older means he probably has more equity in his properties than a younger person), my guess is he’s worth at least $20 million. But that number could be much much higher if he owns his properties outright, and if his plumbing and management businesses are worth any significant amount. If he’s cash-flowing $1,000 a month off each rental — which I think is realistic — he’s making $40,000 per month before even counting his plumbing and management income. Which means he’s probably making around $500,000 per year1.
I’m going to come back to my plumber in a second.
But first, I recently read this piece in The Atlantic, which argues that parents shouldn’t teach their kids to fear the world. The thesis of the piece is that when it comes to children, “teaching them that the world is dangerous is bad for their health, happiness, and success.” Amen.
Unfortunately, though, fear seems to be the modus operandi of many parents right now. The Atlantic piece cites a Pew Research poll showing that “parents say children should be at least 10 years old before they should be allowed to play in front of their house unsupervised while an adult is inside.” I tweeted this quote and I was surprised that more than 100 people either replied or quote-tweeted me, many of them sharing tales of running wild through their neighborhoods at ages much younger than 102. But despite the free-range parenting disposition of my Twitter community, Pew found3 that parents are on the whole reluctant to cut the umbilical cord:
Parents say children should be even older before they are allowed to stay home alone for about an hour (12 years old) or to spend time at a public park unsupervised (14 years old).
To each their own, but it seems apparent from all of this that parenting has come to involve a lot more supervision today compared to a generation or more ago.
The ironic thing is that this phenomenon has happened at the same time that children’s lives have become much safer. The Washington Post did a great piece about this back in 2015, noting that the numbers on things like child mortality, child homicides, and reports of missing children have all been falling significantly for many, many years. And the piece also concluded that improved childhood safety probably isn’t the result of parents becoming more protective4:
Bottom line: If it was safe enough for you to play unsupervised outside when you were a kid, it's even safer for your own children to do so today.
All of this raises a question: If the world is actually getting safer, why are parents getting more protective and anxious about their kids? Why do a majority of parents, as Pew has shown, favor a degree of intervention in their kids’ lives that when I was a kid in the 1980s and 90s would have seemed insane?
There are many theories, but the one I find most compelling is that intensive, fear-based helicopter parenting is actually a symptom of economic anxiety. This is an idea that’s been covered in the New York Times, The Atlantic and elsewhere, but the gist is that parents perceive that their kids are entering a world that is economically rougher than the one they themselves inherited. And they respond by pushing their kids harder to compete. So, every moment of a kid’s life is supervised and scheduled so they can jump through all the right hoops until they eventually go to Harvard and then become a doctor.
Not everyone actually goes to Harvard, but the idea is that there are fewer financially stable, middle class career paths than there used to be, so you better do everything right to snag the best position you can. And that struggle creates anxious, helicopter-y parents. Eventually it also creates a norm that pervades parenting culture generally, whether people are explicitly thinking about their kids’ prospects or not. One of the more interesting things about that tweet I mentioned was that a bunch of people responded saying they don’t like helicopter culture, but fear having Child Protective Services called on them if they, for example, let their kids roam free in the neighborhood.
In any case my own field, journalism, offers a case study in the way there are a shrinking number of viable career paths. According to Pew, the number of jobs in newsrooms fell 26 percent between 2008 and 2021. The Columbia Journalism Review also found that 6,150 jobs in the news business were cut during the pandemic alone. Journalism was never an easy or get-rich-quick profession, but a generation ago it was at least a middle class job. When I started — I got my first full-time newspaper job in 2010 — there were at least enough local papers that I could find an entry level position that launched me on my way. People starting out now don’t have as many opportunities as I did, and if you live in one of the many cities that lost all its newspapers there are no options for you at all.
I’m lucky I got in when I did. But the point is as a dad, when I’m thinking of viable career options I might suggest to my kids, I would no longer put journalism on the list. And as more and more professions get removed from that list, it becomes more and more competitive to succeed in the ones that remain (tech, medicine, law, etc.).
Which brings me back to my plumber.
What’s remarkable to me is that he didn’t follow the same path that I was led to believe was the only option. That’s not to say his field wasn’t competitive, but rather that he we competing in a different arena with different rules and (I think this is key) different values. But he’s also doing better than the vast majority of people who have followed the professional class recipe for success. He is, in other words, the perfect example of what I previously described as the gentry-class approach to financial stability; rather than earn high wages, he owns cash-generating assets (rental property, businesses, etc.).
The point I’m ultimately trying to make is that maybe there are other options besides micromanaging kids’ lives in an anxious, zero sum effort to win one of the dwindling number of spots in elite society. Personally, I hope my kids go to college so they have a chance to read Shakespeare, learn about art history, and get a basic understanding of science. In other words, the classic liberal education. But when it comes time for them to choose a job, I may end up telling them to ignore my own example and be more like my plumber.
Thanks for reading to the end of this post. If you’ve enjoyed Nuclear Meltdown, consider sharing it with a friend.
News to check out this week:
There Is No Road Map for the Longest Phase of Parenthood
“Even with these hurdles to overcome, maintaining a close relationship pays off for both adult kids and their parents. In her research, Fingerman has found that grown children who receive intensive parental support fare better than those who receive less aid. Parents benefit, too, because adult children who got a lot of help are also more likely to provide a higher level of care when their older parents need it. Indeed, the happiness one derives from family grows with age, according to a June 2022 AARP study.”
These numbers are rough estimates. But even if I’m off by hundreds of thousands of dollars, he’d still be making multiple six figures per year, and have a multimillion dollar property portfolio to boot.
Some people on Twitter pushed back on the free range idea, citing dangers like traffic. And to each their own. If you want to helicopter parent, go right ahead — though I would note that my friends of my generation (elder millennial) who grew up in urban settings had probably the most free range childhoods of anyone I knew. They were riding the subway, visiting bodegas, going to museums and more by themselves at ages younger than 10, which I couldn’t even have fathomed.
I wanted to better understand what this Pew research was saying, so I read through the report. And I was surprised to see the breakdown: 32 percent of Pew’s respondents said a kid should be between the ages of 10 and 12 to play unsupervised in front of their home; 17 percent said kids should be between the ages of 13 and 17; and 7 percent said “kids” should be 18 or older (kids is in quotes because at 18 they’re not even a kid any more).
Today the biggest threats children face aren’t being stuffed into the van of a stranger, but rather things like becoming obese because they live in a community that was designed for cars not for walking.