The Culture of Parenting

The author, September, 1964

Perhaps every generation looks at its childhood as idyllic. I have idolized my pre-adolecent summers from 1964 to 1974 as a 9AM to 9PM adventure in the Northern California suburban outdoors, mostly playing pickup games of baseball but also hanging out with other boys and hiking in the hills, fighting crayfish and attempting to catch bullfrogs, riding our bikes around town, creating small explosives with match heads, and releasing paper gliders off of kites. I had to conform to two rules: report back for meals and be home before it got dark. My parents did not set up play dates, nor did they supervise any of the activities. No parents on my block did. My father's summers in the 1930s and 1940s were similar, though growing up on the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco he witnessed considerably more violence and cruelty than I. Skipping forward to the 1990s and beyond, however, my children experienced a quite different style of parenting during their summer break. They participated in organized sports and the games were closely observed by their parents. They were driven to play dates. They never simply left the house without telling me where they were going. They never went out and came back in twelve hours with bruises and bee stings.

Historian Jon Grinspan traces a short history of parenting from the late 19th century to today in the May 31, 2014 New York Times article The Wild Children of Yesteryear (link here). Boys were expected to spend "their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture" to foster a young republican outlook: self-reliant, democratic, striving and entrepreneurial. Late 19th and early 20th century changes, especially the progressive movement, urged laws to protect children. Additionally demographic changes (less children) created more worried parents. The movement to becoming helicopter parents, Grinspan argues, began not in the 1970s but before the McKinley administration.

Parents have becoming more involved in education as well, and what parents think is good for educating kids may not be. Sociologists Keith Robinson and Angel Harris argue that parental involvement in children's education is unnecessary. In the April 12, 2014 NYT article Parental Involvement is Overrated (link here)and in their book, The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement with Children's Education, Robinson and Harris argue that "most forms of parental involvement yielded no benefit to children's test scores or grades, regardless of racial or ethnic background or socioeconomic standing." Occasionally parental involvement did matter, but the research showed it depended on which behavior and which ethnic group. For example, regularly reading to elementary school children benefited white and Hispanic children but not black children. The researchers argue that policy makers need to take into account the factors of behavior, academic outcome, grade level, racial and ethnic background, and socioeconomic standing when advocating for the very few parental involvements that help kids. More simply, though, "parents should set the stage and then leave it." This adage may apply to kids' play lives as well.