by postponing children, many modern parents are far more aware of the freedoms they’re giving up.

The way most historians describe this transformation is to say that the child went from “useful” to “protected.” But the sociologist Viviana Zelizer came up with a far more pungent phrase. She characterized the modern child as “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”

These perennial difficulties are worth dissecting and will certainly play a role in this book. But I am also interested in what’s new and distinctive about modern parenting. There’s no denying that our lives as mothers and fathers have grown much more complex, and we still don’t have a new set of scripts to guide us through them. Normlessness is a

Today parents pour more capital—both emotional and literal—into their children than ever before, and they’re spending longer, more concentrated hours with their children than they did when the workday ended at five o’clock and the majority of women still stayed home.

That women bring home the bacon, fry it up, serve it for breakfast, and use its greasy remains to make candles for their children’s science projects is hardly news. Yet how parenting responsibilities get sorted out under these conditions remains unresolved. Neither government nor private business has adapted to this reality, throwing the burden bac

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ABOUT adolescence is that it’s a repeat of the toddler years, dominated by a cranky, hungry, rapidly growing child who’s precocious and selfish by turns.

Kids are no longer allowed to drop out of school in order to work, and the world now requires more and more schooling to succeed. What’s more, parents feel a great need to protect their children. Many, especially in the middle class, have waited forever to have them. They fear for their physical safety and economic security.

organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood. But the distance between those proxy experiences and the real thing, ultimately, can be measured in light-years. Prospective parents have no clue what their children will be like; no c

“During childhood, it’s about trying to help develop who your kid’s going to be. During adolescence, it’s about responding to who your kid wants to be.