All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (16 page)

Chrissy didn’t have the sureness of folkways, as Mead would have said, to guide her parenting.

the globalized, optimized child, part ii

Leslie may believe that her cohort’s emphasis on sports isn’t as useful for college admissions as geometry might be. But not all parents feel that way. Our beliefs about what will get our children ahead are idiosyncratic, really, based on a murky combination of conjecture and personal experience. Tiger parenting can assume many shapes and forms.

I see this very clearly one late summer afternoon in Missouri City, another suburb of Houston, as I sit at a local park with Steve Brown. Missouri City is a mite different from Sugar Land: more African American (42 percent) and not quite as well-to-do (though still well off). What Missouri City does share with Sugar Land, however, at least at the community level, is a mania for sports. Steve, in particular, is
really
gung-ho about sports. We’re here to watch his seven-year-old son play soccer.

“Y’all scrimmaging today?” Steve asks as he sets up two mesh chairs. Steve and his wife are both black and both Southerners, and they live in a neighborhood that is pretty but more modest than Leslie’s, with houses running about $150,000 each. Looking at this particular park, though, you wouldn’t sense much of a difference: It has more beautifully maintained sports fields than I can count.

“No,” says his son. “Saturday.” He heads into the field. We take our seats in the shade.

I ask Steve whether soccer was his idea or his son’s.

“It was . . . a family idea,” he says. He’s handsome, personable, intense; his shoulders are taut and become even tauter when he watches his son play. “See, as a kid, I’d gone and played in all different sports. I didn’t settle into what I wanted to do”—tennis—“until I was in high school.” He still carries the aesthetic with him. He’s dressed from head to toe in tennis whites. “So I kind of want to expose him to different things. He’s at the age where he
could
do football. And we put him in a camp, over the summer, just to get a sense. But soccer’s one of those sports where the skill sets are transferable.”

Steve likes to say that in his family, when he was growing up, “sports were king.” A tennis scholarship made his college education affordable; a basketball scholarship made one affordable to his father.

Steve’s son swings by for a swig of water. “Where
is
everyone?” Steve asks him, looking at a half-empty field.

“I don’t know.” His son runs back out.

I know something else, though, about Steve’s son: he’s not necessarily the competitive type. I can see it, and Steve’s wife, Monique, has basically told me as much. So I ask Steve: what if his son turns out to be the kind of kid who likes to paint?

He laughs. “Maybe he’ll be,” he says. “But at least through ten or so, he’s going to do this.” Then he explains. “My brother wasn’t really into athletics. We’re twelve years apart. And Dad didn’t push him. He didn’t coach him the way he coached me.” He speaks with a certain delicacy next, a certain carefulness. “And I don’t know how that impacted his personal growth, not being pushed. But we’re clearly two different people, me and my brother.”

Steve’s brother has done just fine for himself, actually. But Steve—people
know
Steve. If he wants to argue that his college commitment to competitive sports has given him an edge in life, it’s hard to quarrel with him. He has his own public affairs firm in Houston (he lobbied on behalf of the Top 10 Percent Rule, in fact); he’s the chairman of the Democratic Party in Fort Bend County. I had no idea he had such a high profile in the community when I first contacted him. I found him through the parent-teacher organization of Palmer Elementary School, one of the most diverse in the area; his wife, Monique, and several other parents in this chapter are on the board. It just so happened he was a well-known local guy.

So sports and success, I say, are intertwined, as far as he’s concerned.

“Uh-huh,” he says. “You have a will to succeed that most people don’t sense. I think that’s one of the things you carry over into your real life. A strong will and desire. And ambition.”

He looks again into the field. “Where
is
everybody?” he repeats.

“So for a time, we’ll keep doing this,” he says, keeping an eye on his son. “It gives him structure, it teaches him discipline and teamwork—certain things that are transferable to real life. To make sure he has a foundation. He may get to the point where he doesn’t want to compete. And that’ll be fine. I think athletics, though, will still be a part of our lives.”

So that he and his son will still have something in common? Or so that he stands a better chance of earning a scholarship for college?

“Well, an athletic scholarship wouldn’t hurt,” says Steve, and laughs. “That’s part of it.” He reflects for a moment. “That
is
part of it,” he suddenly says, much more soberly. “We’re competitors in my family. That’s how we were raised.”

Then he makes a point I wasn’t expecting, but perhaps should have. “I do believe that soccer’s going to be the basketball of the next generation,” says Steve. “So it’ll be a pretty good sport to excel in. More so than when I was growing up.”

This is the age of globalization, in other words, and soccer is the most popular sport on the globe. So if you’re the Tiger Mom of sports—which Steve cheerfully admits he is—and if you want your kid to be competitive in these changing times—which Steve most certainly does—then soccer is the game to play.

IT IS FREQUENTLY PRESUMED
that concerted cultivation is the province of the most narcissistic parents. In some cases, this is true. (Hence the term “trophy child,” a devastating new addition to the parenting lexicon.) All of us have met the parent who natters on with false humility about the over-accomplished wonderfulness of his or her children. But there’s also a more charitable way to interpret this mad rush to cultivate middle-class kids. One could simply say it’s a legitimate fear-response, a reasonable and deeply internalized reaction to a shrinking economic pie.

When my parents bought their first house in 1974, it cost them $76,000. They managed the down payment with the help of my two grandfathers. Even correcting for inflation, that kind of money is birdseed today. To buy the same house would cost
three times
the adjusted amount, and it is doubtful that men of my grandfathers’ occupations—a Brooklyn hospital administrator and a movie-theater projectionist in Queens (the man to whom patrons shouted “Focus!” and “Louder!” if the picture and volume weren’t exactly to their liking)—could contribute in the same meaningful way. (And they contributed, I should add, almost equally.) Today’s dollars don’t stretch as far, and middle-class families don’t have the same amounts socked away. On the eve of the recession, the average household debt exceeded its disposable income by 34 percent.

In
Perfect Madness,
Judith Warner rehearses the details of middle-class economic decline in painful detail: while a record number of American households are worth more than $5 million, the adjusted wages of middle-income families haven’t budged since the 1970s; mortgages for the average home have made up a larger and larger proportion of household income; health care costs are now brutally high (even for families with private insurance, averaging 9 percent of their income, according to the White House’s Middle Class Task Force). Men especially have suffered demoralizing setbacks in their earning potential in the last few decades. Between 1980 and 2009, college-educated men between the ages of thirty-five and forty-four (prime working years, at least in theory) have seen their wages rise at less than half the rate of productivity. And women, it turns out, pay a steep economic price for being mothers: according to Shelley Correll, a Stanford sociologist who looks at gender inequities in the labor force, the wage gap between mothers and childless women who are otherwise equally qualified is now greater than the wage gap between women and men generally.

But perhaps the most terrifying number to today’s parents comes from the US Department of Agriculture, which estimates that a child born in 2010 will cost a middle-income family $295,560 to raise. If the family is high-income, the number is $490,830; if the family is low-income, it’s $212,370. These price tags do not include college tuition, which is rising at a rate that vastly outstrips inflation. The average annual cost of a private, four-year college came to more than $32,600 in 2010, and a public college, nearly $16,000.

Under these constrained circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that today’s middle class looks at their children and fears that they will have little purchase in the world by the time they grow up. Any well-meaning parent would do what they could to assure their children an edge, and therefore a slightly brighter fate.

Ironically, this panic has played out in some of the most flamboyant ways among the middle-class families with the most means—namely, the
upper
-middle class, who seem to be the most startled by these economic changes and most threatened by losing their prerogatives. In 2005, the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano wrote a paper noting that we’re now at an unusual economic juncture: the best-paid men in the American workforce are far more apt to put in long work hours than those who make the least (specifically, the top 20 percent versus the bottom 20 percent). The reverse was almost always the case throughout the twentieth century. And it’s not the monetary rewards that motivate them to work long hours, these economists speculate; it’s more likely that they hope to distinguish themselves in an uncertain job climate and, by doing so, land an added measure of job security at an insecure time. The opportunity cost of
not
working a lot is too great.

Annette Lareau and her colleagues have shown that there’s a parenting analogue to this phenomenon. Mothers who have gone to college, they found, enroll their children in far more organized activities—in large part for the same reasons the best-paid men work so much. These mothers, too, believe that the opportunity cost of not enrolling their children in loads of extracurriculars is too great. It’s the problematic psychology of any arms race: the participants would love not to play, but not playing, in their minds, is the same as falling behind.

the irreproachable mom

“Do you have my sunglasses?” asks Benjamin Shou, thirteen, as he opens the car’s rear door. It’s 2:45
P.M
., and his school has just let out. He dumps his backpack into the empty seat next to him.

His mother, Lan Zhang, answers in Chinese. She and Ben always speak in Chinese. But because I’m around, she switches to English. “Do you want to eat something? Fruit? Water? Gatorade?”

“No,” says Ben. “How long am I skating?”

“Two hours.”

“What?” He frowns. He’s not a frowny sort of kid usually. He tends to be self-assured, can-do, all smiles. He was the one who coordinated this meeting with his mother, though his mother speaks extremely good English. “I have so much homework,” he says. “I have a math test tomorrow.”

Lan, who’s prone to smiles herself, and not very big on formality (she’s wearing jeans and no jewelry, unless you count the hair scrunchy on her wrist), gives him a curious look in the rearview mirror. “What? It should be Friday.”

“No. Tomorrow. And a vocab test too.”

“So how many hours of homework do you have today?”

“Three.”

Now it’s her turn to frown.

“Do you want to take a nap? You have twenty-five minutes.” That’s how far away it is to Sugar Land Ice and Sports Center.

Ben shakes his head.

“So what else. Any news from school?”

“Yes. I have so much homework!” He grins.

“That’s the third time you’ve told me! Maybe you can talk to your coach.” And she returns his grin in the rearview mirror. “Poor Ben. Everyone pushes you.”

IF ONE WERE INCLINED
toward bald-faced stereotyping, Ben looks, to all outward appearances, like the incomparable product of a Tiger Mom. He attended a prestigious magnet school in Houston until sixth grade; today he goes to St. John’s, one of the city’s most storied private schools. He started figure skating at six and today trains six days a week, two of them in Sugar Land; at the age of twelve he placed fourteenth in the juvenile division of the 2011 US National Junior Figure Skating Championship. He does Boy Scouts on Tuesday nights. He takes piano lessons on Sundays, for which he practices about half an hour each day. He gets very good grades. How could an indefatigable Tiger Mother
not
be behind at least some of this?

Lan, Ben’s mother, is indeed indefatigable. But she also perfectly demonstrates the nuance that’s missing from any polemic about parenting (or any subject, for that matter). Lan’s affect is extremely gentle. There’s an anxiety to her, and it’s not of the sort that results in aggression; it’s much closer to ambivalence and vulnerability. A lot of Ben’s endeavors weren’t her idea. He’s the one who became obsessed with ice skating, after seeing skaters one Christmas in the nearby mall. He’s the one who expressed an interest in playing the piano, after seeing a neighbor’s child play.

And for the record, Lan doesn’t send Ben to Kumon, the after-school enrichment program that first appeared in Japan in the fifties and now has dozens of centers in the Houston area alone. She tried once, when Ben was in the fourth grade, but he hated it and she didn’t push. “I’ll be honest,” she says as we sit in a gallery above the rink and watch Ben skate. “I don’t
like
Kumon. I come from China, and the system there is so strict. I hated that. I want Ben to grow up like a normal kid.”

In fact, Ben is currently only one grade ahead in math, just like Leslie’s daughter, while many of his friends are two. To Lan, it’s enough. The idea that excellence no longer suffices and super-excellence has become the new standard clearly gives her trouble too. She says she flinches every time she hears friends or fellow parents comparing results on standardized tests. “I don’t want Ben to hear that,” she says. “I only want him to know that if he wants to achieve, he has to work hard. But I don’t want to push him.”