All In The Family

As I quoted back in January, David Brooks noted research by Jonathan Haidt when noting that parents were being overprotective. Mr. Haidt recently penned an article for The Atlantic, titled End the Phone-Based Childhood Now, which I listened to as a podcast this past weekend. And it occurred to me that I have the same criticism of Mr. Haidt that I tend to have of Mr. Brooks; namely, he understands that things have changed in a way he doesn't like, but not really putting any effort into understanding why those changes came about.

One of the points that he makes is that many Generation X/Millennial parents prevented their children from having the sort of childhood that they themselves "enjoyed." And I can see this. I certainly enjoyed hanging out with my friends, going to the arcade, going to the comic book shop as a group, et cetera. I look back on that with a certain amount of fondness. But it seems odd to me that if that was the most common understanding of the time for people of my, and the following, age cohort, it wouldn't be so close to complete extinction. Accordingly I suspect that for a lot of people, the sort of "free-range parenting" that Mr. Haidt so lauds is regarded as negligent, bordering on abusive, either because they perceive that the times have substantially changed, or they don't think very highly of their own parents' ways of going about things. (Of course, nothing prevents it from being both...)

In the several years leading up to my moving from Chicago to the Seattle suburbs, a few of the people in my circles married and had children of their own. And one thing that I noticed about them as a sensitivity to what other people, especially fellow parents and authority figures thought of their parenting. This isn't something I remember being as much of an issue for my own parents. And I suspect that contributed to a high level of social pressure.

When I was young, it was pretty much understood that after high school, one would go to college, unless a person was either fairly poor, or very stupid. It may as well been another four years of mandatory education. And while my parents signed on to that mode of thinking, I felt most of that pressure from my peers. Now, I suspect that there is much more pressure to make sure that children are successful from other parents. And this is on top of the greater investment in individual children that come from smaller family sizes. Few of the people in my current circles are parents, but nearly all of those who are have only one or two children unless they married someone with children of their own. Even then, a blended family with more than three children between them seems large. When I think of my friends' children by name, all of them who come immediately to mind are only children. Not that huge families were the norm when I was young, but only children were unusual, and many of my friends had two siblings, and sometimes three.

Of course, not everyone reacts to social pressures the same way, but people do react to them. that's sort of the point of it in the first place. And I don't think that the pressures, and the norms they create, are going away anytime soon. Mr. Haidt can offer new norms, but without changing the factors that buttress the current ones, it likely won't help.