We need an elite paradigm that values family

Ennoble kinkeeping and stay-at-home moms, not workaholism

Credit: 20th Century Fox

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Over the holidays, Vivek Ramaswamy — a one-time presidential candidate who now advises Donald Trump — went viral for a sprawling tweet about immigration and American culture. His argument was essentially that we need to become more rigorous to compete in a globalized labor market.

I’ll leave the immigration debate to the wonks. But what really caught my eye was Ramaswamy’s vision of American family life. Among other things, he calls for “more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers,” and “more extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’” He criticizes parents who accept “normalcy,” and seems to suggest that the purpose of a successful family is to produce STEM graduates.

Ramaswamy’s argument — which was essentially that we should all become intensive parents a la “tiger moms” — has generated pushback, with The Free Press among others arguing that there is more to life than big salaries and elite credentials.

I agree with that point and find the endless grinding school of life quite grim. Where in this equation is love, friendship, happiness or la dolce vita?

But here’s the problem: Ramaswamy isn’t just offering recommendations for what families should do. He’s also articulating an elite worldview, a recipe for accumulating success and status. In this paradigm, the family is a kind of optimization machine. Parents are coaches and reap social rewards in proportion to the intensity — i.e. helicoptering and tiger-ing — of their involvement. Worth equates with resumé. Each crack of the whip brings more prestige.

In that context, it’s not enough to simply push back a la The Free Press against the idea that, for example, math tutoring and extracurriculars are childhood’s highest callings.

Instead, the antidote involves an entirely different paradigm that reframes the definition of success and the source of social status — and which sees the family itself as a social asset.

Of course that’s not really the world we live in now. The height of the tiger parenting phenomenon, for example, was over a decade ago — as you can see from this Google Trends data. But in the time since, things have not gotten better. Today, helicopter parenting not only remains ubiquitous, but has evolved as a phenomenon so that some parents continue to hover even after their kids go to college. We also have a new term, snowplow parenting, that describes parents who go further and attempt to clear obstacles from there kids’ paths.

While this has been happening, experts such as Jonathan Haidt and Lenore Skenazy have sounded the alarm, arguing — with a growing mountain of evidence — that diminished childhood independence has an array of negative impacts on children. We need more hanging out at the mall, in other words, not less.

All of which is to say that the fruit of this worldview that prizes over-parenting is rotten.

I’ve always found it a little confusing, in that light, that tiger-helicopter-snowplow parenting persists. It’s doubly confusing because this philosophy requires so much work. It’s so much easier to let your kids run free, and it’s likelier to produce better results anyway.

But it’s easier to understand what’s going on when viewed through a status lens. Intensive parents look like they care more, and anyway they get to show off that they have the time and resources to dote endlessly over their kids. People who don’t necessarily agree with over-parenting might fall in line anyway to avoid social penalties. And many of the people I know (including myself) who do proactively try to cut back on their helicoptering make a point of talking about it a lot, perhaps as a defense mechanism against potential backlash. My kids might seem like feral ragamuffins, the thinking goes, but that’s really because I know more and am smarter than you. Checkmate, helicopter parents.

In any case, I’m far from the first person to notice that parenting practices reflect attitudes about status and class. But the point I’m really trying to make here is that I don’t envision any meaningful move away from the tiger-helicopter-snowplow paradigm as long as the tiger-helicopter-snowplow parents consistently win the status game. It’s not enough to bombard people with facts and data about the benefits of something like free-range parenting. It’s not enough to say, as The Free Press laudably did, that there’s more to life than grinding and work. We also need an environment in which a different type of person is revered.

Parenting is one thing, but the implication of Ramaswamy’s argument goes far beyond raising kids. I struggle, for instance, to understand why anyone would have a family at all in this paradigm. To be sure, there are status rewards to be had if you get your kid into Stanford or one of the better Ivies. But when you boil the family down to an ROI equation, it starts to look like a bad investment. You have to put so much time and effort into kids, and their future is uncertain, so it starts to make more sense to just invest in yourself.

I have a little personal experience with this. I’ve written many times about how I delayed having kids until my mid 30s. That decision had to do with financial anxieties, the fact that I was having a good time as a non-parent, and many other factors.

But I also think that deep down, I was aware that in the world I inhabited¹ at the time there were few social benefits to be won by having a family. That’s not to say people with families were discriminated against, or that family was a liability. But as I looked around, I didn’t see a lot of people forming families or many benefits flowing to those who did.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this. As I edited the draft of this post Thursday, I saw a twitter conversation in which Ivana Greco and Liz Wolfe discussed this very thing. Wolfe argued that some women work because they perceive of being a stay-at-home mom as a low-status position. Greco pushed back somewhat, but agreed that status may be a factor in some elite families.

Johann Kurtz made a similar point last August, suggesting at the Becoming Noble substack that status explains collapsing fertility rates. Basically, the argument is that having a kid reduces status relative to other competing life choices — so people rationally choose those other things.

I basically agree. In elite circles, you’re unlikely to be celebrated for being a stay-at-home mom², for example. There’s simply no place atop the heap for such people. Ergo, if we want the best and brightest to take seriously stay-at-home parenting as a viable option, that role must be somehow ennobled³.

The same thing goes for other aspects of family formation. One of the best books I read last year was Brad Wilcox’s Get Married, which marshals a huge amount of information to argue that marriage is a good thing. But it occurs to me that another way to persuade people, particularly powerful and ambitious people, that marriage is good is to persuade them that it’s cool. All the data in the world is meaningless if people associate family with squares, losers or people who settled.

I don’t know how to do that. But I am reminded here of this post from the NonZionism substack that explores why Israel has a higher fertility rate than other developed countries. The argument is basically that there are ultra-orthodox Jewish communities in which it is the norm to have a lot of kids, and which are set up to encourage child-bearing. These communities then influence other Jewish communities, which boosts Israel’s birthrate. It’s sort of the inverse of my experience when I looked around and saw few families in my world — the lesson being that we all do whatever our peers think is socially acceptable.

The NonZionism post also has a “takeaways for gentiles” section in which the author suggests other countries wanting to copy Israel could form “high-fertility communities that are so cool those around them aspire to get close, but also have enough conviction in their own right to coolness that they never let the orbiters get close enough to influence them.”

In other words, if you want people to have kids, it’s not all about money or the social safety net or whatever else that is being tried without success in various developed countries. At the end of the day, it’s about coolness — which is really just another word for status.

Either way though, the counter argument to Ramaswamy is not simply that we should do different things, it’s that we should believe differently. We have to find ways to make kinkeepers and parents high-status roles. Ramaswamy criticizes 90s sitcoms,⁴ but I watched those sitcoms with my parents. Ramaswamy dislikes jocks (lol), but my introduction to sports involved my dad coaching my various little league teams. Perhaps parents who choose to spend time with their kids, who model a balanced life, who see the family as an end in itself deserve as much praise as those who are obsessed with math tutors. Ramaswamy slams those who accept “normalcy,” but perhaps he is in fact articulating an ethos of normalcy, a recipe for life in which credentials mask an utterly mediocre existence. Perhaps the current elite paradigm is one that awards status for the wrong things.

I will conclude by acknowledging that for many people, status is not a major source of motivation. Greco noted this in her Twitter exchange, and I’m not suggesting here that we all need to become status-obsessed strivers. But I will point to a famous scene from the movie The Devil Wears Prada to explain why the attitudes of elites matter. In the scene Anne Hathaway’s character shows up to her job at a New York fashion magazine looking like a schlub. She sees herself as a serious journalist, and chafes against the prevailing view at her workplace that fashion is important.

But then Meryl Streep, playing the magazine’s editor, schools Hathaway’s character. She looks at Hathaway’s frumpy sweater and explains how it is the result of a long process that began on the runway. Hathaway’s character may not have cared about fashion, but she was subject to the whims of elite designers all the same. The elite are inescapable.

This scene is cited often as a handy explanation for how elite culture trickles down to the rest of us, and I think that applies here as well. You or I may not care about Ramaswamy et al, or envision a future in which we claw our way to the top of American society. That’s not reality for most people, nor should it be.

But the views of leaders and taste-makers, people with large platforms and large fortunes, do eventually set the tone for everyone else. Helicopter parenting itself, once a niche behavior of the wealthy that is now unfortunately mainstream, is a good example of this process. And so it is worth searching for a better elite paradigm in which the family is more than just some sort of optimization machine.

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1. At the time I was considering having kids, I worked at BuzzFeed News and lived in central Los Angeles. Because of where I lived, many people I knew worked in the entertainment industry.

2. The same is true for stay at home dads, though of course I think men and women experience status penalties and rewards differently.

3. Of course families also need various kinds of support. Lots of families (including my own!) have both parents working in some capacity for a variety of other reasons. But again, we’re talking about high-earning, highly credentialed people here.

4. The most hilarious part of Ramaswamy’s tweet was his use of 90s teen sitcoms, which he appears to hate but also have watched very closely. Do you know the difference between Steve and Stefan Urkel? Ramaswamy does.