Tag: Children
1 My Son’s Friars Club Roast of Me
This is what my son, Alexander, served up last night for our Fat Tuesday Comedy Roast of the Pastors.
At first, Elaine and Teer asked me to roast Dennis tonight. But that would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
So I decided to roast my Dad instead.
I think my Dad is the awesomest guy in the world. Of course, so does my Dad.
People are always asking me what it’s like to be a pastor’s kid. And I’m always like: ‘I don’t know. Don’t clowns have kids too?’
Here at church, all my Dad talks about is God, Jesus, the bible.
But at home, all my Dad talks about is himself: how awesome he is, how “brilliant” he is, how funny he is, how talented he is.
And he is talented. In ways you probably don’t know. For example, did you know my Dad can sing? It’s true.
On those rare occasions when my Dad actually takes a shower, you can hear him in there belting out ‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.’
My Dad has other talents too.
He knows how to tell my Mom to fix the car.
He knows how to ask my Mom to get her tools and fix the sink.
He knows how to hold tools for my Mom when she’s hanging shelves.
Now, some of you people make fun of my Dad for wearing booty shorts to church.
Let me just say, you’ve got it easy. You’ve got nothing to complain about.
Imagine what it’s like for me. Imagine what it’s like to get picked up at school or swim practice by a Dad wearing booty shorts?
Imagine what it’s like when your classmates ask: ‘Is that guy in the tights your Dad?’
And in those moments all I can say is…‘Well…..I’m adopted.’
I mean, my Dad’s tights are so tight I can tell exactly how much change he has in his pocket.
Seriously, as bad as my Dad dresses at church, you should just be thankful he’s dressed at all.
At home, my Dad just walks around in his whitey tighties.
In fact, I don’t have an alarm clock. I don’t need one. I know it’s time to wake up in the morning when I hear my Mom yell: ‘Jason, you can’t walk around like that. Put some pants on.’
Some of you are critical of my Dad, from time to time. But it doesn’t really faze him.
Narcissism is helpful that way.
If you really want to upset my Dad, don’t criticize him. Just show him the trailer to the Blind Side. It only takes about 3 seconds of the Blind Side for my Dad to start crying like a baby with a poopy diaper.
Here at church, you hear my Dad talk a lot about how Dennis is old, forgetful, lazy, obvious, boring, tired, uninspired, old, predictable, vain, shallow, past his prime, full of himself, phones it in, takes credit for others’ work….
just to name a few things.
But here’s the funny thing—- at home, that’s exactly how we talk about my Dad.
He’s just like Dennis.
But with less hair.
You may have heard already that this year our project in Guatemala is toilets.
Thousands of kids die in places like Guatemala every day from diseases they get from dirty water. So it’s an important project for you to support.
It is also an appropriate project for my Dad considering how
A) my Dad is full of it
and
B) how much time my Dad spends on the toilet.
He goes in there and…….disappears.
He spends more time in the bathroom than those old guys at Mt Vernon Rec Center.
We don’t know what my Dad does in there.
The lunar cycle goes faster than my Dad’s potty breaks.
Thank you for coming tonight. I hope you give lots of money so that tonight will be a success.
I’m sure that if it is a success, my Dad will say it was his idea.
5 Counterfeit Gods: A Reflection from Julie Pfister
It’s Ash Wednesday, the day the Lenten season begins. Lent is a time when we imitate Jesus’ own time of testing in the wilderness by confronting the sin and idols in our own lives.
We will observe Lent this year by preaching on the themes in Tim Keller‘s book Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters. Some of you have insinuated my blog could use a ladies’ touch. Well, here to prove I’m responsive and always a good listener, to reflect on the book, I’ve asked Julie Pfister, one of the most authentic Christians I know, to blog her way through the book.
I have had them myself; stickers on my shiny new SUV (not new or shiny anymore) showing that my family was on its way. A few of the right schools, waiting and hoping for that empty spot on the back window to have just the right University stickered to it showing the world just how smart and perfect the little family that I had made was.
Like most of us, I didn’t realize it as it was happening. Pride, like any other idol can be insidious, and so difficult to spot. But my children, my seemingly perfect little family was on its way. I wanted room in my car to carry around the whole hockey team. I wanted my kids to want to have their friends come to my home where I could serve up the milk and cookies.
They did for a while. Then, things started to awry. As Keller put it, its not that I loved my children too much, I just didn’t have any room left in my heart or time in my schedule (or theirs) for God. I wanted my children to be happy, successful, loving and to love me! Perhaps it is partly because of the culture I grew up in that the desire for the perfect little family was so important. Having happy, successful, smart, athletic, caring, loving children would validate me as a person – especially since I had quit my job and “sacrificed” (oh please) my career to raise my kids.
Like any false idol, it didn’t take long for the cracks in my perfect little life to really start to show. My children and family are a wonderful gift and precious blessing to me, but I learned a long time ago, what Keller reminded us, that until or unless we stop trying to map out perfect little lives for our children, and trust God to be their God in the inevitably bumpy and even tragic path that HE has for them, we will be brought to our knees.
Do we pray that they will be Humble, shunning the world and the trappings of success and searching for God? How do we view others children who go off the chosen accepted cultural track…high school, college, graduate degree, career, family, Do we think that there is something wrong if our children “choose” a different path? Are we not quick to give a qualifying response when we tell someone that our son or daughter is not in college? How honest can we be with each other when people ask how we are? How is Sally….Can we really just honestly pray that they will know God? Will we or they be ok if we pray that God will use them, that they will seek God and God will seek them…..if that means that they go against the cultural norms? How can we as parents hope that God will break our children’s hearts so they can be desperate for HIM. Do we trust God enough to want that sort of brokenness for them? What if we pray that our children KNOW God? Do we trust him with the pieces of their broken hearts? Do we trust Him to ???? It is so counter-intuitive for me as a mother for my children to want to feel the emptiness and desperation that I have felt. Do I want my children in the pit of despair?
That same pit that Christ reached down and pulled me out of and set my feet on firm ground and put a new song in my heart! I loved teaching at the Day School. With each new class I always felt a twinge of envy along with the joy of meeting the bright and shiny precious, babies and the hopeful, loving parents that brought them. I wondered how they might feel if their child called them something horrible and told them they hated them.
I hoped and prayed that their child would never get beaten to within an inch of his life or disappear for days and weeks at a time. I wanted to go all Isaiah on them and belt out….Get on your knees NOW and study and learn all that you can….not from Dr. Spock but from the Author of their Life….the Ultimate Educator….so that you are as ready and STEEPED in God and His Word that “when the rest of life unravels” He and his Word will be such a part of your fabric that you will not.
Some people still tell me, hoping to not offend, that I used to remind them of Barbie….Unless I missed the happily broken, God fearing, Grace loving, sinner Barbie, there is no resemblance.
1 Gabriel: The Accidental Poet
Yesterday evening, mournfully picking at the dinner he manifestly did not want to eat, Gabriel channeled his inner
Margot Tenebaum and gave voice to this melancholy musing. An accidental poem.
“Gym lights make me sad.
They flicker and flicker but never go all the way on.
They never get all the way bright.
Gym lights make people’s skin look sick and queasy.
It’s like they need a friend.
But they’re too high up and too far away
For a friend to reach them.”
3 Stop Motion Stonewall
G and X made a film of the Battle of Chancellorsville for school. My little Ken Burns….
0 Adoption and Les Misérables
Ali, the boys and I stood in line for over an hour on Christmas Day to see (not the Hobbit, to Alexander’s chagrin) Les Miserables.
I’ve never been one for musicals- at all- and I’ve always preferred the non-musical versions of Les Mis (the French one from the ’90’s that’s set in World War France is terrific).
But I still was moved by every obvious, not subtle at all minute of Les Mis.
One of the things that moved me was Jean’s adoption of Cosette. An adoptive parent myself, I suddenly had a newfound stake in the story.
David French, from the National Review, apparently had the same reaction:
I’m sorry to interrupt the fiscal-cliff garment-rending, but I wanted to take a moment to mention something truly good and beautiful in our recent pop culture. My wife and I finally saw Les Misérables, and — like most NRO writers — we were profoundly moved. One moment stood out more than the others (caution: minor spoiler follows).
When Jean Valjean (played by Hugh Jackman) finally removes the young Cosette from her abusive home, he sings to her as he very gently, very awkwardly caresses her sleeping head. That moment took my breath away. The combination of the words of the song, the adoring yet fearful and uncertain look in Valjean’s eyes, and the tenderness of his gestures showed on the screen the very emotions I’ve struggled to explain since becoming an adoptive parent. What is it like to meet a new child and love her instantly and so completely? Watch the movie, and you’ll get a glimpse of the indescribable joy — combined with awkwardness and uncertainty — of the moment when an adoptive parent first meets his adopted child.
After the movie, I googled Hugh Jackman and discovered that he is an adoptive parent himself and has very publicly advocated for adoption. I don’t know much else about Mr. Jackman (other than the fact that he’s a very believable Wolverine), but in this regard he is rendering invaluable public service. A true culture of life in many ways rests on a foundation of adoption — and not just in the literal, legal sense. After all, Christian readers should recognize that each of us has received a “Spirit of adoption” as children of God, and it is that very Spirit that causes us to cry out to our Heavenly Father.
The results of the election — along with a myriad of other cultural indicators — have reinforced the need to return to first principles, of the need for families to “walk the talk” of the kind of culture we want to restore or create. As an echo of our Savior’s love for us, a spirit of adoption only enriches our culture and our lives, and seeing that spirit so beautifully portrayed on film was a marvelous holiday gift. Well done, Mr. Jackman.
Here’s the post.
0 Seriously? Outsourcing Our Kids’ Manners?
Parents are now paying for etiquette classes for their kids. You know, to have a stranger to teach them what the parents no longer have time to teach them. I guess once family meals fall by the wayside so napkins on the laps and no elbows on the table.
Granted, the way my children eat sometimes (and their Dad too I suppose) this may not be a terrible idea after all.
But…NO…it’s a terrible idea. Or at least it’s a terrible indictment of what does and does not fit into our standards of living and busy schedules.
Next parents will be paying strangers to wipe their kids butts and change their diapers.
Actually…that is a good idea.
Here’s the article from the NY Times.
IT’S dinnertime, and 6-year-old Joaquin Hurtado is staying in his seat. He hasn’t stood up, run around the table or wrestled with his little brother. Good thing. It wouldn’t take much unruly behavior to shatter the dishware or the mood in this upscale restaurant.
“This is a place where you come to eat,” the boy says softly, explaining nice manners. “It’s not a place to play.”
The place is Chenery Park, a restaurant with low lights, cloth napkins, $24 grilled salmon and “family night” every Tuesday. Children are welcome, with a catch: They are expected to behave — and to watch their manners, or learn them. Think upscale dining with training wheels.
Chenery Park has many allies in the fight to teach manners to a new generation of children. Around the country, there are classes taught by self-appointed etiquette counselors — Emily Posts for a new age — delivering a more decentralized and less formal approach to teaching manners than in years past. A few restaurants, like Chenery Park, and high-end hotels set aside space and time for families.
These etiquette experts say that new approaches are needed because parents no longer have the stomach, time or know-how to play bad cop and teach manners. Dinnertime has become a free-for-all in many households, with packed family schedules, the television on in the background and a modern-day belief of many parents that they should simply let children be children.
Some of these manners-minders acknowledge that they can sound like curmudgeons, just another generation of older folks mourning the lost habits of more refined times. But they also say that parents welcome their efforts as a way of outsourcing the hard work of teaching youngsters to follow rules.
During a recent family night at Chenery Park, Joseph Kowal, an owner, roamed among the regulars and newcomers, saying hello and occasionally playing parental ally. He’s got a twinkle in his eye but a steely commitment to having children — even if they’re not etiquette role models — at least sit politely and not scream or throw food.
“Some parents will say, ‘Uncle Joe’s going to come up here, and he’s going to be cross with you,’ ” Mr. Kowal said. “They use that to their advantage.” He recalled one child who wouldn’t settle down, and he threatened to tape the child’s mouth. The child told him to go ahead and try.
“I went to my office, got some blue painter’s tape, came back and ripped a piece off,” he said. The kid piped down. “The parents looked at me like, ‘We’re going to try that at home.’ ”
All of which raises some intriguing questions: Is it Joe who brings out the best in his young patrons? Or something else? And what are the best strategies for training children to be polite, to pay attention to the world around them, whether they are in dim lighting with fragile dishware or at home?
ETIQUETTE teachers, other parents and people who spend time thinking about how and why we mind our manners have some interesting ideas about new strategies.
“These days, you have to teach kids about return on investment,” said Robin Wells, the founder of Etiquette Manor in Coral Gables, Fla., which holds classes on etiquette for adults and children. When it comes to children, she said, long gone are the days when you could tell them that they have to behave a certain way “just because.”
So, even as she imparts lessons about using forks and the importance of looking the waiter in the eye, she does so by framing the lessons in a constructively selfish way for the children. She often exhorts her young students: be polite to your mother because she’ll be happier, and if she’s happier, you’re happier.
On the first day of her five one-hour sessions, which cost $285, she tells the children to go home and do one unexpectedly kind thing so that they can see how wide-eyed and impressed their parents will be. “It’s almost manipulation at its finest,” she said.
Then she starts in with the knives and forks, and the proper way to address an adult or a waiter. On the last day of class, they attend a three-course meal at an upscale restaurant. (Among her lessons: she slams a clunky landline phone on the table and asks children if that seems O.K. No, she responds, so don’t put your cellphone on the table either.)
Around the country, hundreds of entrepreneurs teach versions of etiquette and manners classes, said Elena Neitlich, the founder of Moms On Edge, a company, with offices in Osprey, Fla., that offers online certification for manners teachers through a course called Etiquette Moms, at prices ranging from $250 to $1,250.
She believes that teaching manners to children has grown more challenging, and necessary, in part because of technology.
“Kids have stopped making eye contact at one another,” Ms. Neitlich said. “They bring their technology to the table. She added that it is true of parents, too: “Everyone is in a hurry. Things are clipped, clipped, clipped.”
It all makes teaching manners at home challenging, said Faye de Muyshondt, the founder of Socialsklz, which teaches workshops in New York City on etiquette and social skills. Modern children seem to want no part of the conversation, she said.
“Say the words ‘manners’ or ‘etiquette’ to kids these days, and they run the other direction,” she said. She prefers teaching the children that they are “building the brand called ‘you.’ ”
“People don’t want to eat with someone whose plate looks like a science project,” she tells the children in her workshops. “If you want to be invited back on a play date,” she explains, be polite.
She thinks that one key aspect of her workshops, which take place in schools or with Brownie troops, is that they don’t happen in the home or at the dinner table. “The casual nature of the home makes it difficult,” she said, adding that most children she talks to say that their families have the television on during dinner.
Indeed, she and other experts talked repeatedly about setting, and how it affects manners and behavior.
It turns out that this concept is connected to science from a group of seemingly unrelated researchers: criminologists. They look at what is happening at a place like Chenery Park through a very different lens called ecological psychology, or its subset, broken-windows theory. It suggests that when an environment is dilapidated, it gives permission to people to misbehave. When the proverbial windows are not broken, neither is the behavior, or so the theory goes.
“A fancy restaurant gives off so many cues that this is a place for refined behavior,” said Ralph B. Taylor, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University who studies how environments influence behavior. And he and other people in the field say that the environment changes not just the youngsters. “The parents are changed,” he added. “You’re not talking loud; you’re not yacking on the cellphone. Everybody is with the program.”
Dr. Taylor and other experts said that parents can take some of the ecological psychology lessons from places like Chenery Park.
“Take parts of the restaurant home with you,” he advised. Use a tablecloth or nice napkins to simulate the environment that changed children’s behavior. He suggested also introducing children to other environments — like highbrow concerts or museums.
Ms. Wells, the Florida manners teacher, made a similar point: take a child to the window of a nice restaurant, look inside and ask how people are behaving and what the child loves about the scene.
And when you bring the well-mannered rules back into your own home, don’t do it every night, counseled Ms. de Muyshondt, of Socialsklz.
“You turn into a nag,” she said. Given the less formal nature of our society, she suggested creating a “bridge” through periodic training, like one formal night a week.
On a recent night at Chenery Park, Joaquin, the well-behaved 6-year-old, sat in the upstairs dining area near the front, eating pasta with butter and Parmesan cheese. He was joined by his brother, Sisto, 4, eating a Hebrew National hot dog, one of the handful of inexpensive kid-friendly Tuesday night menu items, and their two mothers.
One of them, Arcelia Hurtado, said that the family regularly goes to Chenery Park, largely because the adults want a nice meal. But it’s a bonus that the boys think about being in “an adult space.” At home, Ms. Hurtado said, dinnertime is chaos.
“There’s something about the physical setting” of the restaurant, she said. “They see the cloth napkins, and they know to put them in their laps.” She sometimes has to tell them to remember to behave. “I kind of feel an obligation for kids to behave well, since Joe is doing this nice thing for us.”
Mr. Kowal, who does not have children of his own, grew up in Rhode Island in a family that wasn’t super strict, he said, but did require children to be polite. He started his family nights after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 — initially because business was slow on Tuesdays, but then it evolved as a popular training ground. The restaurant’s Web site says, “We’re here to help kids learn proper ways of eating in nicer restaurants with Mom and Dad.”
Mr. Kowal himself can sometimes come across as hurried and even brusque. He has been known to scold parents, too. He once reprimanded a woman for talking on her phone and ignoring her son, who was yelling loudly. The woman was offended and told Mr. Kowal she wouldn’t be going back. He responded that that was her choice, and the people at nearby tables applauded.
Another night, two families were sitting at adjoining tables. At one of them, a 5-year-old starting yelling and jumping up and down.
“The second or third time it happened, one of the kids at the other table goes over to the one jumping up and down and said, ‘You can’t do that,’ ” Mr. Kowal recalled. “That was the best.”
0 Thankful for…My Geniuses
1 Desperate for a Playlist? My Boys’ Top Five.
I frequently hear people bemoan the need for some new music. New driving tunes or a new running playlist.
Well, for all you parents out there who stand back and tolerate &&%$#@ music by Raffi, Justin Bieber or even Jack Johnson (sorry Andi) here are my (prematurely cool) boys’ TOP FIVE BANDS along with their favorite song,
Give these a try.
Alexander:
1) Vampire Weekend (‘White Sky’)
2) Lumineers (‘Big Parade’)
3) Decembrists (‘Rox in the Box’)
4) Arcade Fire (‘No Cars Go’)
5) Welcome Wagon (‘I’m Not Fine’)
Gabriel:
1) Jack White/White Stripes (‘Little Ghost’)
2) The Black Keys (‘Howlin for You’)
3) Kanye West (‘Jesus Walks’)
4) Band of Horses (‘Ghost’)
5) Spoon (‘I Turn My Camera On’)
*6) For Both Boys: Willie Nelson (‘I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover’)
0 Embracing Kids For Who They Are
Jane Brody writes in an article in the NY Times: The goal of parenting should be to raise children with a healthy self-image and self-esteem, ingredients vital to success in school and life. That means accepting children the way they are born — gay or straight, athletic or cerebral, gentle or tough, highly intelligent or less so, scrawny or chubby, shy or outgoing, good eaters or picky ones.
One of my mantras with my boys is: ‘there’s nothing you could do to make me love you more and there’s nothing you could do to make me love you less.’
Not only is it, I think, the Gospel (see: Son, Prodigal) it’s also damn good parenting advice in that my love for my children as they are should always be in submission to whatever hopes, dreams, expectations or desires I have for my kids.
Brody goes on to say:
Contrary to what some parents might believe or hope for, children are not born a blank slate. Rather, they come into the world with predetermined abilities, proclivities and temperaments that nurturing parents may be able to foster or modify, but can rarely reverse.
Perhaps no one knows this better than Jeanne and John Schwartz, parents of three children, the youngest of whom — Joseph — is completely different from the other two.
Offered a bin of toys, their daughter, Elizabeth, picked out the Barbies and their son Sam the trucks. But Joseph, like his sister, ignored the trucks and chose the dolls, which he dressed with great care. He begged for pink light-up shoes with rhinestones and, at 3, asked to be “a disco yady” forHalloween.
Joseph loved words and books, but “our attempts to get him into sports, which Sam had loved so much, were frustrating bordering on the disastrous,” Mr. Schwartz, a national correspondent for The New York Times, wrote in a caring and instructive new memoir, “Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms With His Sexuality” (Gotham Books).
“This is not just a book about raising a gay child,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview. “It’s about raising children who are different,” both recognizing and adapting to those differences and being advocates for the children who possess them. Citing the novel “The Martian Child,” about an adopted son, he said, “We’ve got to take care of our little Martians.”
Adjust Expectations
The goal of parenting should be to raise children with a healthy self-image and self-esteem, ingredients vital to success in school and life. That means accepting children the way they are born — gay or straight, athletic or cerebral, gentle or tough, highly intelligent or less so, scrawny or chubby, shy or outgoing, good eaters or picky ones.
Of course, to the best of their ability, parents should give children opportunities to learn and enjoy activities that might be outside their natural bent. But, as attested to in many a memoir, forcing children to follow a prescribed formula almost always backfires.
Click here to continue.
0 Do We Need More Helicopter Parents?
So I tend to be free-wheeling in my mockery of the Tiger Moms, Soccer Dads et al. I’ve taken ‘Helicopter Parents’ to task for their outsized, possibly narcissistic, expectations for their children, who are all invariably gifted-not merely ‘above average,’ multi-sport, over-scheduled and privately tutored.
I can assume such a posture because, let’s be honest, once you brush aside the fact that my boys don’t play lacrosse, I’m every bit a Helicopter Parent too. That’s me in the kiss and ride (aka: expensive SUV) circle every morning and afternoon along with everyone else.
And maybe that’s not a bad thing.
After all, would anyone credibly argue, having surveyed the present state of American education and family life in its totality, that the burning issue is TOO much parental involvement, TOO high of expectations, TOO much exposure to extracurricular cultural cultivation?
Admittedly it’s silly to assume that my children, by virtue of their zip code, are destined for ivy leagues and hallowed halls. But it’s sillier, and far more serious, to think that assumption a more pressing cultural problem than the plight of the other 90% of children.
All this is echoed by Brink Lindsey in the Atlantic:
Today’s hyperventilating “helicopter parents” are comic fish in a barrel. Playing Mozart to their babies in utero and dangling Baby Einstein gewgaws over their bassinets. Obsessing over peanut allergies, turning school science fairs into arms races of one-upmanship, and hiring batteries of private tutors to eke out another 10 points on the SAT. When we stop giggling, it’s only to cluck with disapproval. Katie Roiphe, writing in Slate, says that overparenting “is about too much presence, but it’s also about the wrong kind of presence. In fact, it can be reasonably read by children as absence, as not caring about what is really going on with them, as ignoring the specifics of them for some idealized cultural script of how they should be.”
Well-educated parents of means these days do have their own distinctive way of messing things up. And so it’s entirely appropriate for those of us in this group to mock and admonish ourselves into lightening up a bit. Yet when we extend our gaze beyond the relatively narrow confines of college-educated parents and their college-bound kids, things look very different.
Examining American society as a whole and the role of family life in shaping that society, a good case can be made that the main problem with helicopter parents is that there aren’t nearly enough of them.
THE PARENTHOOD DIVIDE
The kind of intensively hands-on parenting that we now like to lampoon and criticize is of relatively recent vintage. In this regard, it’s worth noting that the terms “helicopter parent” and “overparenting” only entered general usage in the past decade or so. New words were needed to describe a new phenomenon. We can actually document its emergence statistically: according to husband-and-wife economists Garey and Valerie Ramey, starting in the 1990s parents began spending significantly more time with their kids.
And what really stands out in the Rameys’ findings is a clear distinction between college-educated parents and everybody else. Prior to 1995, college-educated moms averaged about 12 hours a week with their kids, compared to about 11 hours for less-educated moms. By 2007, though, the figure for less-educated moms had risen to nearly 16 hours while that for college-educated moms had soared all the way to 21 hours. Similar trends were observed for fathers: The time that college-educated dads spent with their kids rose from 5 to 10 hours, while for less-educated dads the increase was from around 4 hours to around 8 hours.
So while the time parents spend with children living at home has increased across the board, the trend has been especially pronounced among highly-educated households. The parental attention gap is growing.
This is part of a larger parenting shift that breaks down along class lines. Through in-depth observation of family life in select homes the sociologist Annette Lareau has identified clear differences in parenting across the socioeconomic spectrum. Among the poor and working-class families she studied, the focus of parenting was on what she calls “the accomplishment of natural growth.” In these families, “parents viewed children’s development as unfolding spontaneously, as long as they were provided with comfort, food, shelter, and other basic support.”
College-educated parents have taken on a much more ambitious role – one that Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.” “In these families, parents actively fostered and assessed their children’s talents, opinions, and skills,” Lareau writes. “They made a deliberate and sustained effort to stimulate children’s development and to cultivate their cognitive and social skills.”
The findings of Lareau and the Rameys document the emergence of a growing class divide in American family life. But the fissure is actually much wider than the work of these scholars shows it to be. The parenting gap isn’t just about how much time parents spend with their kids. It’s also about whether they live together with their kids.
THE RISE OF THE SINGLE-PARENT HOUSEHOLD
Over the course of the past half-century, American society generally has seen a dramatic rise in single-parent families. Children born to unmarried mothers have soared from 10 percent of the total in 1969 to an astonishing 41 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, the share of children living with two married parents has fallen from 77 percent in 1980 to 65 percent in 2011.
The rise in single-parent households is much more pronounced among minority families. In 2008, 29 percent of white, non-Hispanic children were born to single mothers, compared to 53 percent of Hispanic children and 72 percent of black children. In 2011, 75 percent of white, non-Hispanic children were living with two married parents, while the same could be said for 60 percent of Hispanic children and only 33 percent of black children.
These racial cleavages are largely explained by a similar divide along class lines. As of 2011, 87 percent of children who have a parent with a bachelor’s or higher degree were living with two married parents. The corresponding figures for high school grads and high school dropouts were 53 and 47 percent, respectively.
A major contributor to the growing class differences in family structure is the emergence in recent decades of a “divorce divide” along educational lines. Divorce rates have traditionally been lower for college-educated couples than for the rest of the population, but marriage breakup rates for everybody soared during the 1960s and ’70s. For women whose first marriage occurred between 1970 and 1974, the share whose marriage failed within 10 years stood at 24.3 percent for those with a college degree or better and 33.7 percent for the rest. But since the ’70s, divorce rates among the highly educated have fallen significantly; among non-college grads, by contrast, they have stayed high. Specifically, only 16.7 percent of women with at least a college degree experienced a marital dissolution within 10 years of a first marriage between 1990 and 1994 – a 31 percent drop from 20 years earlier. For other women, though, the marriage breakup rate in the latter period was now 35.7 percent – 6 percent higher than 20 years before.
Family life on either side of the class divide has thus been heading in opposite directions over the past few decades. Among the roughly 30 percent of Americans with college degrees, marriages have grown more stable and parents have committed themselves to a more intensive, hands-on, and time-consuming approach to raising children. But for everybody else, a more modest increase in time commitment by parents in intact families has been swamped by a rising tide of family breakdown. Children of the well-educated elite now receive unprecedented parental attention aimed at “concerted cultivation” of the skills they will need to thrive in today’s highly complex knowledge economy. Other kids, meanwhile, are left more on their own in the traditional style – except that now the “accomplishment of natural growth” is hampered by all the distractions, disruptions, and stresses of family breakup.
THE CONNECTION WITH INCOME INEQUALITY
It’s no coincidence that rising inequality in the home has been occurring at precisely the same time as rising inequality in the workplace. These two kinds of social polarization – one cultural, the other economic – are interrelated and mutually reinforcing.
Discussions of economic inequality often focus on the top 1 percent of earners versus the other 99 percent. But the more socially significant distinction is the one between the 30 percent and the70 percent – between, that is, the 30 percent of Americans who have college degrees and everybody else.
The average college grad today makes about 70 percent more than the average high school grad – up from around 30 percent back in 1980. According to data compiled by the Economic Policy Institute, wages for college grads rose 23 percent between 1979 and 2007 after adjusting for inflation, while real wages for workers with advanced degrees climbed by 27 percent. Meanwhile, the inflation-adjusted wages for high school grads actually fell 3 percent over the same period, and those for high school dropouts dropped by 17 percent. If you add fringe benefits to wages and make different adjustments for inflation, you can make the numbers look better for everybody, but the disparities will remain.
Why have wages for the college-educated and everybody else been moving in opposite directions? It’s a simple story of supply and demand: the demand for highly skilled workers has kept growing as the economy gets ever more advanced and complex, but the supply of those workers has failed to keep up. According to Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, the relative supply of college graduates rose at an average rate of only 2 percent a year between 1980 and 2005 – a steep decline from the average rate of 3.8 percent a year that prevailed between 1960 and 1980. And all of the growth that has occurred has been due to women: the college graduation rate for young men is roughly the same as it was in 1980.
Things would surely look very different if the trends in college-educated homes toward greater family stability and “concerted cultivation” had been mirrored in the rest of the country. Consider, for example, a recent study by economists Sheldon Danziger and Patrick Wightman. Looking back at people born between 1956 and 1958, they found that 37 percent of those born to college-educated parents could expect to finish college by age 25, compared to only 8 percent of those whose parents had a high school education or less. Fast-forward to people born between 1979 and 1982, and the share of the kids of college-educated parents who earned a college degree by 25 had risen to 53 percent, while for the kids of high school grads and dropouts the share had slipped to 6 percent.
In other words, families with well-educated parents have been moving in sync with economic trends: They have been increasingly likely to produce new college grads in step with the rising demand for highly skilled workers. For families with less educated parents, however, there has been a total disconnect. And as a result, their kids have been falling behind.
MORE HELICOPTER PARENTS, PLEASE
The advantages of having well-educated parents are varied. Smart parents who naturally do well in school pass on their genes. They also tend to make more money, which can buy a safer neighborhood and a higher-quality education. But a less appreciated advantage is that college-educated parents are more likely to dote obsessively – even, yes, comically – on their children. And there is evidence that the very nature of their parenting style is good for grooming productive workers.
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling Outliers, many of us are now familiar with the “10,000 hour rule”: in almost any field you can think of, you can’t perform at the very highest level without logging the requisite hours of diligent, focused practice. The move in well-educated homes toward “concerted cultivation” – or helicopter parenting, if we want to be snarky about its sometimes absurd excesses – can be seen as an effort to inject a lot more deliberate practice into childhood. Practice, in particular, at developing the skills needed to excel in school, and later in the workplace.
Most obviously, the children of well-educated parents receive much more intellectual stimulation in the home than do other kids. For example, child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley estimate that by the time they reach age three, children of professional parents have heard some 45 million words addressed to them – as opposed to only 26 million words for working-class kids, and a mere 13 million words in the case of kids on welfare. By the time kids start school, kids of well-educated parents are much better prepared than their classmates. Consequently, they’re much more likely to receive praise and encouragement from their teachers, which means their attitudes about being in school are much more likely to be positive. Even relatively small advantages conferred early in life can thus snowball over time.
The deliberate practice that is going on constantly in well-educated homes extends beyond purely intellectual pursuits. As they march their kids through the weekly gauntlet of organized activities, the practitioners of concerted cultivation are drilling their kids in a host of skills critical to academic and economic success. Skills like managing one’s time by making and keeping schedules, getting along with other people from different backgrounds on the basis of common interests, and deferring gratification in order to maximize rewards down the road. All of these, as well as fluency in the three Rs, are vital components of “human capital” – economist-speak for economically valuable skills.
So by all means, keep making fun of helicopter parents. The delusion that drives them off the deep end — that, with enough exertion and planning, the crooked timber of their little ones can be lathed to perfection – is, after all, risible. But keep in mind that the excesses of concerted cultivation are of little account when compared to the deficits that now afflict so many homes. Those deficits are a major factor behind some of the thorniest problems in American society today, from multi-generational poverty and mediocre and worse schools to stagnant wages for large segments of the workforce. Policymakers tasked with addressing these problems face the daunting challenge of designing bureaucratic substitutes for the hovering, loving harassment supplied by Mom and Dad. A tall order, indeed.
Here’s the full piece.