Helicopter Parents Are SO Last Century
22nd November 2010
The NY Times says that the picture book for children is disappearing, largely because so many aspirant middle-class parents are pushing their children aggressively towards reading chapter books early in life, and receiving some endorsement in this move from teachers who need to prepare students to deal with No Child Left Behind-inspired testing programs.
Expert authority may have much less influence in American public life today than it did in 1960, but one segment of the population is still intensely glued to what experts recommend or demand: the professionalized middle classes, who exist in a state of perpetual anxiety about social reproduction. They want to know one thing: what must they do to secure a steady, reliable future for their children in which their children will do jobs and have status approximately commensurate with their parents (or better)?
When experts in education, childhood, psychology, economics, what have you, venture forth into the public sphere to say that our schools are failing to do something utterly essential, or that tomorrow’s children must absolutely have some skill that they do not have now, or that oh my GOD SWEDEN and CHINA and ARGENTINA all have started teaching children how to program in Java while they are still in the WOMB, you know what that’s the equivalent of? It’s like going up to someone who is starting to develop a dissassociative identity disorder and pretending to be one of those little voices from a satellite that he’s hearing that tell him that everyone’s out to drain his precious bodily fluids.
Middle-class parenting is precisely where expertise and the authority of both state and civic institutions often have their most toxic intersection, and where unintended effects blossom like ragweed in September. The double vulnerability of those parents is especially intense now: as they lose many of their most treasured markers of social difference, they’re also waking up to just how much economic ground they’ve lost in the last two decades, and how much likelier their children are to continue that downward mobility.