Parenting is harder than it ever used to be.
First, there’s all the guilt about raising perfect kids. Our mothers never had those hang-ups. Some say that the perfect parenting movement is a plot by conservatives to subjugate women. Others point to different factors.
Second, EVERYTHING has to be perfect, including the food. Martha Stewart may you have have a mean roommate named, “Large Marge”.
Third, children receive too much attention, because other responsibilities at home have been outsourced,
Fourth, there are less women home with kids that there used to be, so those that are at home are far more isolated and lonely. Over scheduling Junior may be less about raising a perfect kid and more about the parents just looking for an excuse to interact with other adults.
Fifth, there is less support from the extended family. The grandmothers are liberated. Grandmothers feel that they already raised their kids and now it’s their time to relax. Or the grandparents just live too far away. Instead of help, the grandparents just send vast quantities of plastic toys that litter the basement.
Sixth, the modern parent is much older than he/she used to be. It’s not easy to chase a toddler when you’re in your forties. And that also means that the grandparents, even if they are available and willing, might be way too old to help out.
Seventh, people spend more time at work than in the past. It is harder for workers to leave their jobs at 5:00 and be home for dinner together. That means that usually one person is doing the bulk of the work at home.
Apt. 11d 
I moved out to the Midwest about fifteen years ago. Before that, I lived in D.C., NYC and points north.
It’s easier out here to have a family. The grandparents, aunts & uncle live close by and help out. The neighbors all help each other (a great pleasure). There are more women (and some men) home with the kids. The commute is shorter so it’s easier for those of us who work to show up for school events. It is less competitive and people don’t seem to expect things to be magazine perfect–although I’m amazed at how good at parenting/home managing lots of folks here are (not me).
But the biggest thing seems that people don’t fret about getting their kids started on the right track the way they do back East. People seem to be enjoying the process and don’t judge the quality of the experience by the prowess of the kids. But my kids are still young (7 & 3) so that could change …
Even with all this, I still think it’s incredibly hard.
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Let me provoke some conversation here….
While I agree with the points. 1-7, you make, I think something bigger is going on. Quite simply, a generation ago, children (say, my parents) had a stronger sense of obligation to their parents (my grandparents), while today, parents (my wife and I) seem to have a stronger obligation to our children. If we think more than a generation ago, I think it is incontrovertable that parents did not value their children’s time and development as much as they honored their duties to their parents. After all, in the Ten Commandments it says, “honor your mother and father,” with no mention of taking care of your children. Confucius put much more stress on filial duty than on parental duty to children. Perhaps it was because children died at a higher rate than they do today and people were careful not to invest too much of themselves in kids who might pass away. Maybe other cultural factors were involved.
In any event, today we seem to spend a hell of a lot more time fretting over every aspect of junior’s happy social growth. We seem uncomfortable giving our kids time and space for themselves. And we are quicker to consign our parents to nursing homes (I do not mean to cast apsersions on those doing the hard work of parent care. I am thinking of society at large). Or, middle-class parents now have the means to make arrangements for their final years themselves, without impinging upon their kids time and energy (think of all of those graduated care facilities that did not exist a generation ago).
So, we seem to have entered a rather different historical moment. Our society expects us to spend more time on our kids, and maybe success in the markets that will define their futures requires it, while, at the same time, releasing us from some measure our obligation to care for our parents in their advanced age. Is this good? Is it empirically correct?
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I have to agree with Eloise, speaking from my own small town in the midwest. But I think the issue is as much about class as it is about geography. Laura, your description generally fits me (yet another academic exiled from the east coast)–and all my friends in Park Slope, Jamaica Plain, Friendship Heights, Montclair, etc.
But it has little to do with the reality of my good friend here in midwestern suburbia who works three days a week doing accounts for a graphic design firm, whose husband, a fireman, works 24 hours and then is off for 48, and whose parents, in-laws, sister, brother, etc. all live within half an hour. She’s 35, and her kids are 9 and 7. Like my kids, hers go to the local public school, which is the only option, unless you want to go Catholic or fundamentalist Christian. My daughter is on swim team and her kids have girl scouts and piano lessons, but basically our kids spend the afternoons and weekends running around the neighborhod–we have 11 kids in three adjacent houses and all the parents help take care of all the kids.
This is not to say it isn’t hard, and certainly my friend and I spend a lot of time bitching about how busy and annoyed we are, and how we can’t believe the school has asked us to do one more thing, to add to the zillion things we’re already doing. But I read a review of The Bitch in the House that pointed out that parenting small children and parenting small children while working outside the home have always been hard, and then the kids grow up and it gets easier. Could part of the intense focus on how hard it is these days be as much a result of our generation’s solipsism as of material changes that really affect only a percentage of us?
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Is parenting harder for NE ambitious types? Do other income groups and geographic areas have it easier?
Well, single moms of any income bracket have it tougher than I do.
The working class moms on my block are certainly not developing their kids like I do. They aren’t logging countless hours to get their kids speech therapy, like I’m doing. They aren’t taking their kids to the library or into the city for an adventure. There are no rules on TV or video game time. Also, their husbands are home earlier than mine is.
But they don’t have help from extended family either. They have more kids than I do. There are no rules about night time or cleaning up messes. They are also very isolated.
And poorer families have their own set of worries, but I am not sure if they have gotten easier or worse over the years.
But, on the whole, I agree with Rebecca and Eloise.
Sam’s point about the growing neglect and obligation to old people sounds good. My parents are still pretty with it, even if my dad is growing deaf. (joking, dad.) So, I haven’t had that worry yet.
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I’m not a parent, but just had a quick thing to mention regarding point #5 on extended families not being so close by anymore. A reason for that is that I think people are moving more often now, perhaps due to our economy’s transitioning away from agriculture & manufacturing and towards services & technology.
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I think the changes in our society have had a huge effect on parenting. As an academic, I cannot live close to my extended family. My mother quit working when she was pregnant with me (my father was able to afford this), and when I was born, my grandmother and great-grandmother were both hale and hearty and really helped out. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, but for the first 6 months of my life, she says she didn’t do ONE load of laundry. My grandmother came over and helped out.
Whenever my mother needed to do something/go somewhere without me (or later my sister), my grandmother, great-grandmother, or some baby-sitter from up the street could look after us. Since the age of 3, we just ran around the neighborhood all afternoon, which would not be an option for my children if I still lived in Cambridge, Mass. Luckily, we have moved to the mid-west, where it is still possible to see a passle of kids running around the backyards in the afternoon.
I don’t have the extended family to look after my expected (any minute now) child, and I can not afford in the short-term or the long-term to quit my tenure-track position (nor do I wish to). I am lucky that my time will be more flexible than most, but there are still a lot of differences between my mother’s experience and my own.
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Part of the difficulty of the academic life is that if you (or your spouse, or worse still, the both of you) are interested in tenure-track, 9 times out of 10, you have very little control over where you will end up geographically. My husband got a TT job that put us 1400 miles from both of our families, and on the West Coast, where the cost of living is astronomical in comparison.
Now that I’m getting my graduate degree and children are an increasingly appealing possibility, we’re taking a hard look at the practicalities of prioritizing our careers over quality of life issues like being able to afford a home, living in proximity to extended family, and being able to afford to live on one income, which we prefer.
As collaborators in artmaking, we find it much easier in general if one of us is able to bring in the steady paycheck and health insurance while the other is free to write grants, secure exhibition spaces, and coordinate our large-scale performance installations. When kids are in the picture, this preference will likely be upgraded to a necessity.
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Melissa’s and my greatest frustration with all the different social and economic factors which have shaped contemporary parenting has to be the way neighborhoods have changed. My wife and I would love to be in your place Rebecca! We miss sidewalks; we miss parents being at home so playdates can be arranged casually and on the fly; we miss being part of unit of homes where there are a variety of more-or-less reliable support structures. We live far away from immediate family, so they can’t be there for us or our kids; while we are members of a very supportive church environment, its members aren’t geographically concentrated, and so interacting with friends they’ve made there is often complicated. The same, unfortunately, goes for school, since the local districts around here are gerrymandered in annoying ways. All in all, we long for neighbors.
I grew up on a farm, so for me this is all something I know only through others; rural environments have their own sort of strategies for dealing with raising kids. For Melissa, however, raised in a very close-knit Michigan community, it’s a reality she pines for. Ours is a very nice little cul-de-sac; but there are rarely kids there until late in the day, and almost never parents around, and the sense of shared space is minimal. Whatever the flaws of in-development; whatever the blessings of large lawns and ranch homes; whatever the gains of far-flung malls and planned surburban communities: I’m convinced that parenting today has been complicated more by the collapse close-by living associations and networks–block parties, common parks, neighborhood associations, clean sidewalks, the works–then by any other single factor.
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My mom often points out that we’re a selfish generation. We’ve put off child rearing until our thirties and had a whole lot of time to ourselves before that. I have my first when I was thirty four. Before that, I went to see concerts until four in the morning. I backpacked through Europe several times. I lingered in bars for hours bullshiting with friends. Ah, the twenties were good years.
I had a lot more autonomy and fun than my mom’s generation had. I put off being an adult until I was 34. God forbid that my mom is right about anything, but maybe we are spoiled.
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“Ah, the twenties were good years.”
Weird. I hated my twenties, or at least the portion during which I was unattached. I didn’t hate it as much as high school, but I was plenty unhappy. Most concerts were loud and made me tired and grumpy; most dates went nowhere; school was fun, but my jobs were a drag and my roommates were freaks. (Of course, they could say the same thing about me, moody irresponsible jerk that I was.) Basically, I thought being young was overrated; I didn’t find all that “autonomy” particularly rewarding. I just wanted to grow up and get thrown to the wolves of the real world as soon as possible. (I still feel this way, incidentally. Now 35, I look forward to my 40s, when I think I’ll really finally begin hitting my stride.)
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Hey folks, let’s not romantacize past kinship networks too much here. The US has always had a mobile society and extended families were constantly breaking up. The break up of the extended family is a recurrent theme in our culture.
As for me, we live in the city of Philadelphia in a neighborhood called Germantown. We have other kids on the block (and more on the way), neighborhood barbecues (especially to introduce new arrivals), sidewalks, two playgrounds within walking distance, etc. etc. My daughter (almost 2) has spontaneous playdates with the 4-year old across the street. When my daughter chalks on the sidewalk, people stop and chat. Our nighttime babysitters live around the corner so if there is an emergency their parents are right there (not that that has happened). My cousin and her two teenage daughters live 15 min away in the suburbs, my brother, his wife, and 2 year old, live up the street from them. My mom bought a place in a to be built CCC (that’s Continuing Care Community) that is two miles from our house. We work walking distance from each other (and only a 10 minute drive from our house), have only one car, and I take the train to work or car pool with neighbors. The neighborhood is alive and well in the East Coast folks. My wife is from the Midwest and between us we have lived in the East Coast, Midwest, and Southwest and we decided to stay in Philly precisely because it was the only place where folks were friendly to outsiders and there were neighborhoods.
Oddly enough this is a constant theme on sports radio here in Philly, lots of men who grew up in other places (often the West) and saying the can’t believe how friendly Philly is… except when we are throwing snow balls at Santa Claus, of course.
And did I mention Philly is cheap too?
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David, Philadelphia–based on my limited but very pleasant experience with the place–is probably the most intimate and community-minded big city in America. The fact that it is also, as an urban area, still heavily influenced by a working-class and fairly static vocational population and mentality clearly has a lot to do with that. (Also trains. Pity the people who live in big cities where the money or civic will simply hasn’t been put into creating a decent public transporation system. There are ways to get around the lack of such, of course, but it’s hard, especially if you’re trying to get by without you and your spouse both throwing yourselves entirely into the rat-race. Now that I think about it, Melissa and I might not have been able to negotiate our schedules in such a way to avoid using day care if I’d gone to graduate school in, say, Los Angeles, as opposed to D.C. with its excellent Metro.)
I should note that it is probably possible to find thriving neighborhoods just about anywhere, but just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s easy. Count yourself lucky if you stumble into an area where there are a sufficient number of one-career (or part-time or work-at-home) families to actually allow for a critical mass of adults to be around during the day, where the large yards are reserved to the back rather than the front, and where you’re not living along a bypass or some overtrafficked suburban access road that makes the street dangerous for kids.
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It is interesting to see people here able to “romanticise”. I’m in my early twenties (gosh mid-twenties coming on quickly) and I’m the child of a two career couple. I never lived in a neighbourhoods where people played on the street and all the mothers were at home — that’s how my grandparents neighbourhood worked when my mother grew up, by the 1980s that was gone in our area.
My mother was at home until I started school, pretty much, but worked part- and full-time while my sister, born 5 years later, was young. She spent a lot of time with babysitters who worked from their houses and being ferried to preschool in taxis. My grandparents never lived closer than a five hour drive and were only available in real emergencies (of which there were several, and they did step in).
I suppose there’s at least some potential interest in the question about whether children who grew up in such an arrangement will feel more or less guilty about perpetrating it. To be honest I don’t remember my own encounters with childcare all that well now.
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