The Anxious Style of American Parenting

Our culture is really doing a ten out of ten job in caring in the worst possible ways. There is no infrastructure to support parents of caregivers, so care makes you poor and exhausts you. (Solution: Pay caregivers! Universal and affordable childcare and eldercare!) Parenting has become more instrumental than it used to be: kids are a project, anot... See more

As Barbara Ehrenreich and Katherine Newman have convincinglyargued, many boomers also had anxiety about falling out of the middle class in their 30s and 40s. But those years of their lives were not subject to constant optimization. The kernels of productivity culture had been sewn, but they hadn’t yet been normalized. Some upper middle-class white ... See more

Many young people concerned with burnout don’t have kids. But their motivations are an extension of the same impulse behind concerted parenting—they, too, feel like participants in a pseudo-meritocratic rat race, and they’re terrified of losing status, class, or future income. Young YouTube stars work to exhaustion to meet the expectations of an al... See more

Raising children has come to look more and more like a business endeavor and less and less like an endeavor of the heart. We are overly concerned with “the bottom line,” with how our children “do” rather than with who our children “are.” We pour time, attention, and money into insuring their performance, consistently making it to their soccer game ... See more

In this anxious inheritance from my mother and my grandmother, I’ve both under- and overcorrected. Most of what I provide to my kids is nurturance, care and a soft lap before bed. I have excellent paid help to address many of their practical needs. I indulge them a lot. They participate in zero extracurriculars and do not have great table manners.

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In this anxious inheritance from my mother and my grandmother, I’ve both under- and overcorrected. Most of what I provide to my kids is nurturance, care and a soft lap before bed. I have excellent paid help to address many of their practical needs. I indulge them a lot. They participate in zero extracurriculars and do not have great table manners. ... See more

The modern style of parenting is not just exhausting for adults; it is also based on assumptions about what children need to thrive that are not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past. For most of human history, people had lots of kids, and children hung out in intergenerational social groups in which they were not heavily supervised. You

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