Land of the Lost Parents

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Hymowitz, the author of her own recent book on child rearing, Liberation’s Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age (Ivan Dee), notes that as children's likelihood of surviving to adulthood increased, so did parents’ anxiety about how their kids would turn out. And those fears have continued to grow. As dual-income families became more isolated, neighbors became less likely to look out for each other's children, explains Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn in an article on child raising in The Wilson Quarterly (Spring 2003). Supervision suddenly became all-important. The prevalence of child day care, she argues, has changed our parenting focus from nurturing to supervision because “society has embraced day care as a solution to the disjuncture between full-time work, consumerism, and family life.” But Lasch-Quinn also acknowledges that there are very real dangers facing children: “Until we can make society more conducive to children's freedom and independence, it hardly seems logical to drop our guard.”

Still, it’s ironic that in the wealthiest and one of the best-educated countries on earth, parents are so overwhelmed by the responsibilities of raising children and so quick to turn to experts. This pressure is perhaps understandable in light of the American dream, which demands that children must be more successful than their parents. After all, if childhood is now merely a boot camp preparing the young for future accomplishment, parents can be forgiven for believing they need all the expertise they can get their hands on.

But the most important role of parents may not be ensuring that their kids get into the right schools and then find their way to careers in booming fields. Maybe their real job is to raise kids whose worth is ultimately determined by who they are, not by what they earn or own. In considering this possibility, parents may wish to toss aside the child-rearing guides and expand their reading choices to other works that just might deepen their parental skills and insights in unexpected ways.

Anne Geske is a Minneapolis writer.

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