Mommy, Where Do Parents Come From?

Something is rotten in the state of parenting. The decline in the very existence of parenting itself is of course a prima facie warning sign. Conventional wisdom holds that the collapse in the total fertility rate for American women is par for the course in affluent Western societies, but that’s not quite right. From its Baby Boom peak above 3.5 births per women, the figure fell below 1.75 in 1976, but then proceeded to climb back above 2.0 by 1989 and reached 2.12 in 2007. At least in the United States, the sudden decline to all-time lows, even before the pandemic struck, is a phenomenon not of late-20^th-century affluence but of post-financial-crisis social and economic phenomena.

Your one thing to read this week is from Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times: Today’s Parents: ‘Exhausted, Burned Out and Perpetually Behind’

Miller goes chapter and verse through the indicia of parental misery, starting with the recent report from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy that declares parental stress to be among the “significant public health challenges that require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” Of course, she acknowledges, “parents have always worried about their children.” So what’s changed?

It’s because today’s parents face something different and more demanding: the expectation that they spend ever more time and money educating and enriching their children. These pressures, researchers say, are driven in part by fears about the modern-day economy — that if parents don’t equip their children with every possible advantage, their children could fail to achieve a secure, middle-class life.

It seems to me that’s only half right. Yes, immense social pressure has built on parents to act in a certain, unsustainable way (and the evidence suggests that pressure is increasingly pervasive across class and educational divides). The “expectation” indeed exists. But is it justified?

Our society is filled with all sorts of “prisoner’s dilemmas” and “races to the bottom” where everyone would be better off if everyone behaved one way, but individuals see it to their advantage to behave a different way, at which point everyone else must respond in kind lest they be left behind, and off we go. I don’t think parenting is one of these.

The point is not a grand philosophical one, but rather a simple empirical one. Everyone agrees that parenting has gotten wildly more intensive in recent decades. The data does not provide evidence of improved outcomes. Kids are not more emotionally resilient—almost surely less so. Their mental health is worse. Their test scores are lower. Those who go to college arrive less able to handle living on their own or doing the coursework. Heck, young men’s wages are no higher than they were 50 years ago. For the first time, in the 2010s, young Americans aged 18 to 34 were more likely to be living at home with their parents than in their own home with a partner. Serious question: How much worse could we do here?

To the extent that parenting has become stressful because parents are doing it in an unsustainable way that lacks benefits, the solution is not childcare subsidies and mental health services, it is to stop parenting in that way. This, notably, was not among the Surgeon General’s list for “What Parents and Caregivers Can Do.”

Obviously, this is easier said than done. What we are dealing with is a malfunctioning transmission of social knowledge. “Freedom is a fragile thing,” said Ronald Reagan, “and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.” The same goes for sustainable models of family formation and child-rearing. A family homestead passes by legal mechanism; parenting practices do not. And once social norms change, there is no natural way to change them back.

But if we were to focus on this as a problem to be solved, rather than an inevitable fact of modern life to be worked around, we would begin looking in very different places for some of the solutions. Alongside the push to get phones and social media apps out of young hands, could we convert youth sports back to gaggles of kids chasing a ball around the field in town? Could the experts focus their research, connect the dots, and convey in an accessible way that the stressful model does not in fact help, and probably hurts? Could our education system replace its college-or-bust model with one that offers a three-year apprenticeship leading to a good job after high school? That’s what most parents say they want! For those who are attending college, could we fully invert the failed push to disregard test scores and instead disregard resume padding?

Alongside these social pressures are also very real economic pressures, which have different causes and will not be solved with a different attitude. We also need to rebuild an economy that makes family-supporting jobs accessible to everyone—both so that parents can support their own families and so that they can have more confidence that their kids will land on their own feet. We should have a much more generous family benefit that directs more of society’s economic resources toward parents raising children. But getting the economics right will not by itself fix the stress—to the contrary, the upper-middle-class parent is typically regarded as the epicenter of the crisis. The culture also needs to change.

We are fortunate that the challenge here is not to somehow persuade people to act collectively against their individual interests, but rather the more achievable task of reaching a better understanding of what it is, in fact, in their interest to do. This is among the many places where conservatives would do well to focus less on the concept of a free market in which rational actors take personal responsibility and more on the concept of a community in which our institutions, formal and informal, are indispensable in forming people for their own indispensable roles.

BONUS LINK: Credit where due, the Times also had a very good op-ed this week on why Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often. The examples at the end about ensuring that public spaces that are for adults also accommodate kids are great ones.

BONUS BONUS LINK: A long read, and a bit of a tangent, but a fascinating one. The assumption that kids learn best when left free to pursue their own interests has come under scrutiny…what if the development of shared knowledge in a communal setting is what matters? Shared Knowledge and the Ratchet Effect