The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids

Not only does overparenting hurt our children; it harms us, too. Parents today are scared, not to mention exhausted, anxious, and depressed.

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

... See more

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence,

... See more

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

... See more

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

... See more