Megan and I are totally on the same wave length right now. She has a column on parenting in Bloomberg. There’s a lot in there, so I’m going to decline to sum it up. Let me just jot down my own thoughts.

Parents, especially in wealthy communities, are raising children in an entirely different way than parents in other communities. Kids are groomed, supervised, tutored, medicated, and honed. Their time is micro-managed by parents. The free-range kids are news only because they are the freaks.

These momagers mean well. Their motives are good. They want to care for their children. They keep an eye on education bureaucrats and local government officials. The schools and town politics work well for a reason — people are keeping an eye on them.

However, it also creates inequities. The intensive efforts of these well-meaning parents have intensified that gap between managed kids and kids without the new momagers. The wealthy parents who opted out their children out of the standardized tests may have harmed the accountability of schools in poorer areas.

Megan writes, “Still, the net effect is a system in which affluent parents nominally support equality of opportunity while practically doing much to make it less likely. And because they are rarely personally acquainted with many children outside of their socioeconomic group, their views on what would benefit those kids are bound to be impoverished.”

 

Related: How the rich get their kids into the ivies.