The Anxious Style of American Parenting

The more money you make, the less likely you are to place ‘being a parent’ at the center of your identity. Part of this probably has to do with the fact that middle and upper-income people are more likely to understand their identity  as  their job, but even that doesn’t fully explain this stat. Instead, I’d argue that bourgeois parents

Just don’t mistake refining their human capital — molding them into ideal bourgeois citizens — for parenting. Because that work is not an expression of love, not really. That’s fear.

As for why parenting-as-performance generally feels more stressful and shitty, well, it’s pretty hollow: you can check all the boxes and still feel like something’s missing, so you just keeping adding more boxes, and comparing your parenting to others’, then adding more “boxes” to beat them. It’s a similar phenomenon, I think, to buying a house, a

Parenting with less money is hard in so many compounding ways — so how do we explain why it’s also  more  enjoyable and  more  rewarding? Sociologist Annette Lareau offers the most broadly accepted explanation: middle and upper-class parents approach parenting as a form of “concerted cultivation,” in which they work ti

We also know that parents with the most acute fears due to race and/or income level are, on the whole, less exhausted and stressed and more rewarded by parenthood. By contrast, parents with fewer fears — whether due to class status or the protections of whiteness — are more exhausted and less rewarded. A harsh reading would be that parents wit

Sometimes it's useful to have these stats spelled out: a full 47 percent of mothers find parenting to be tiring pretty much constantly. (Also lol at 16% of fathers who  never  find parenting stressful or tiring). A third of moms find parenting stressful  all  or  most  of the time, compared to a fourth of dads.