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.

How Berkeley Changed My Political Philosophy

Berkeley Heroes

I came into this world surrounded by liberal Democrats. My parents are Democrats as were their parents and grandparents before them, all the way down the line to Ellis Island. My parents empathized with the disenfranchised and poor. The family faithfully subscribed to the San Francisco Chronicle and before I was a teenager my dad encouraged me to write a letter to the editor, castigating Nixon for  his "enemies list." As a high school student I was committed (and stupid) enough to wear a Carter button to school in 1976. When I went off to college a few years later I was unprepared for the inevitable challenges to my worldview and political philosophy. The university was a very liberal place. How could it change my belief system?

Berkeley in 1978 was trying to get over the fact that the 1960s were over. The place was desperately looking for a cause, and until the all-knowing people there found a good one they kept busy hating everything about bourgeois American life. They sneered at a suburbanite like me because I wanted to get my undergraduate degree and get out. Berkeley political correctness meant high density living, Trotsky lookalikes snarling on the street, dirt, drugs, grittiness, and poverty--and not the clean and cheery suburbs I grew up in. Berkeley wanted the year 1969 to go on forever. I wanted to graduate and pursue a career.

What I found most off-putting, however, was the intolerance of the place. Anyone with views other than those of the hard left was shouted down. Despite the students' 1964 free speech movement, conservatives rarely received the benefits of free speech at Cal. So it stands today.

Midway through my undergraduate experience I had a political science class with professor William Muir. I had never experienced lectures from a professor, an intellectual, who admitted working for Republicans, even (gasp) Governor Ronald Reagan. Professor Muir was bright, charming, and reasonable. His tactic for getting us to do the reading, "Do it or I'll call on you and embarrass the hell out of you" worked and I use it with my own students. I thought all Republicans were selfish boors. How could this guy be a Republican?

My cognitive dissonance didn't end there. Professor Muir gave us a reading by a prominent liberal that criticized using a meritocracy to reward people. People shouldn't receive wealth because they worked harder or did things better, the liberal argued. The liberal's argument made no sense to me. Perhaps I wasn't a Democrat after all.

It was time to explore and find what resonated inside me. I read and enjoyed Hayek, Will, Hirsch, von Mises, and Sowell. I learned that to be successful you must give something of yourself, something society wants. By my late 20s I considered myself a Libertarian-Conservative. My family was shocked. The university had indeed opened my eyes.

Dad, Weather, and Directions--40 Years Ago

Winter mornings were dark but full of life and with a hum growing louder like an orchestra’s slow crescendo. My father, his head on the pillow only moments before and eyes still half-closed put a few scoops of Folgers in the coffee maker and opened a can with a label of some smiling animal probably drawn by an Andy Warhol wannabe. The dogs, of course, were ecstatic, jumping on their hind legs like circus animals badly needing Ritalin, since they were sure they hadn’t ever tried this food before, and it was probably better than fillet mignon. It wasn’t, but I’m sure the dogs’ grating squeaks of gratitude made it to the upper spheres. The coffee machine gurgled and dripped and the bitter aroma wafted through the house. Morning smelled like plain coffee, the stuff that cost a quarter along with your eggs and toast at the local diner. Everyone was awake, eyes still closed, but aware by now. Dad then roused all the kids with four simple words: “Time to get up.” Naturally a morning person, I sprung out of bed and was dressed and eating in the kitchen in ten minutes. (Unfortunately for the rest of humanity, I didn’t discover the wonders of daily showers until adolescence.) My brother usually joined me a few minutes later. I enjoyed reading the San Francisco Chronicle while consuming my usual Life cereal and milk. Now fully awake and in good spirits, coffee in hand, Dad would regale me with questions about the weather in cities around the world. “What was the high in Buenos Aires yesterday? Guess the average temperature in New York City.” Later he became an hour-a-day devotee of the Weather Channel, and he and a few farmers complained bitterly when the cable company dropped this exciting program. He asked me and my brother these questions with such excitement and interest that you’d think he was talking about the end of the Vietnam War or the Apollo Space program, but no, it was whether it rained yesterday in Death Valley. Eventually my brother and I amused ourselves by giving purposely wrong answers and watching Dad’s horror—on this dark December day Anchorage had a high of 95 degrees and it snowed on Oahu. How could his boys be so ignorant after all the training he had given us? Completely disgusted, Dad quit asking us about the weather.

However, my father’s interest in weather was renewed in the days before the family embarked on a summer road trip. Dad would check and double check that my brother and I packed the proper gear for the coldest early morning hours. If there was a chance of a sprinkle, he told us to bring rain gear too. Despite myself, before we left I knew the probable highs and lows of every leg of our trip and the chances for rain at our destination. If my memory serves me, he was usually right—never off by more than a few degrees. He wasn’t just lucky or possessing special skills in watching birds fly. A scientist through and through, he read local weather reports, watched newscasts on television, especially the jerky storm maps (about as interesting as the natural history museums he also loved), and perhaps most critical, forecasted from his “instruments” he perched in various places in the backyard. Using three primitive tools, a thermometer manufactured around the time of the Korean War, a plastic barometer the size of a large clock that my mom found at some G-d-forsaken garage sale, and the dogs’ water dish (which measured precipitation and the night’s low by thickness of the ice) he saw patterns in our area. He successfully generalized these patterns to our trip locale after looking at the television weather maps. To this day, I trust his forecasts better than the professionals—he has a better track record.

Dad occupied himself with the logistics of the trip as well. Three different color pencils and straight edge in hand, he calculated the best route, tracing colored lines in sections over a National Automobile Club map. As he hunched over the well-illuminated table like General Patton in his war room, he let everyone know that he could not be disturbed as he was “figuring out how to get there.” Never have I seen such absolute concentration. I secretly hoped that some day I would possess this manly skill and calculate my way to and from the high Sierra Nevada mountains. Dad didn’t hold much stock in road signs, believing only in following the directions of the compass, usually assessed by the placement of the sun and the name of the highway. On the rare occasions that he lost his way, he, a combination of American Indian chief and US Army Ranger, oriented himself using celestial objects and moss on the trees.

Today I never use a map. I could never come close to the skills of the master, and I prefer depending on road signs and some inner compass to guide me. Dad’s maps, an anachronism for anyone using modern GPS systems, are no longer needed. Dad doesn’t trust the GPS though, and brightens when he proves the machine wrong. Besides, he’s a much better father than any machine, warning us adult children every year about the fog bank one block from his house.