Bad Parents

Today, that sort of freedom is largely gone from American childhoods — in part because it’s impractical in a two-working-parent world, in part because it violates the current ethos of raising children. What changed? The biggest factor is that parents are more educated and sophisticated than ever before. This means they not only think more about parenting, but also — aware of how tough it will be for their own kids to match, let alone surpass, them in terms of money and success — feel much more anxious about it. The result: An entire generation has decided that childhood is too important to be left to children.

“We’re professional at everything,” says Ken Ginsburg, a brown-haired 45-year-old whom I meet one afternoon in his office at CHOP. “You’re a professional editor, I’m a professional doctor. And we want to bring that professionalism to parenting.”

This instinct shows itself in a variety of ways, starting with the enrichment culture that has come to define ­middle-class childhood in the past couple of decades, a culture whose driving credo can be described as either a) I want everything in my kid’s life to be educational and good for his development, or b) it’s never too early to get an edge on all those other little bastards out there gunning for Harvard. Hence the spike in all the things we now associate with a professional-class childhood: lessons, tutors, fights to get into the “best” preschools, culturally enriching trips. In a way, it makes me think of Michael Kinsley’s wonderful line two decades ago about Al Gore: He called him “an old person’s idea of a young person.” What we’ve given our kids is a middle-aged yuppie’s idea of a childhood. Why play with frogs, son, when there’s a French cooking class you can take?

But treating youth like some sort of executive training program for short people is only one hallmark of professional parenting. We also see it in our increasing ­safety-consciousness — ­anything that can give you a bump or bruise must be stopped — and even more so in our increasing involvement in our kids’ lives: ­prearranged playdates, hyper-organized youth sports run by hyper-organized parents, obsessive second-guessing and stage-parenting when it comes to school. As one observer puts it diplomatically: “Parents are overly enmeshed with kids. You wonder sometimes if it’s really the child’s accomplishments or the ­parents’.”

The problem is that this over-­scheduled, over-nurturing, overbearing style of parenting robs kids of something crucial: the opportunity to be alone with other kids, the chance to figure the world out on their own.

---