Intensive Parenting Is (Probably) Incompatible with Having Many Kids.

Editors’ Note: This essay is the second in a three-part series on the challenges of Western parenting. You can read the first essay of the series, written by Elizabeth Grace Matthew, here.

Recently, I was taken aback when a mom on a local Facebook group vented about a group of people she thought shouldn’t be parents: those who couldn’t pay for their kids’ college education and put a down payment on their kids’ first houses. As is typical for moms on social media, this elicited plenty of angry controversy. Some chimed in to label the mom who posted elitist, while others agreed that good parents have plenty saved to support their kids in the transition to adulthood. I was in the former camp. It can’t be the case that only upper-middle-class Americans should have kids, I thought. Surely, the standard for good parents these days isn’t the ability to fully pay for college and then help their adult children buy a home? Obviously it’s wonderful when parents can do this, but we aren’t considering that the only good way to parent, right? And yet … this mom’s complaints are part of a larger trend in the United States toward intensive parenting.  

Intensive parenting is a hot topic. It is also a squishy term. What is intensive parenting? Sociologists usually define it as “time-intensive, child-centered parenting, particularly for mothers and among middle-class parents.” Intensive parents often see themselves as engaged in a fierce competition to secure the best of everything for their children, so as to secure a successful future in a cutthroat world. Perhaps the archetypical example of an intensive parent is Amy Chua, who wrote the best seller The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Professor Chua, who teaches at Yale Law School, wrote about the high-pressure techniques she used to raise two tremendously successful daughters. Famously (or infamously, depending on your perspective), Ms. Chua told one of her daughters practicing piano: “If the next time’s not PERFECT, I’m going to TAKE ALL OF YOUR STUFFED ANIMALS AND BURN THEM!”  

After a brush with death, Ms. Chua says she has some regrets: “the things I regret more are the harsh things I said to them and losing my temper.” Overall, though, she says she’s glad she engaged in intensive parenting: “most of it was worth it. I look around and see kids of twenty-five, twenty-eight, and some of them still live at home and don’t have jobs.” A very uncomfortable truth about intensive parenting is … it works. An essay in The Atlantic summed it up in a title: “Stop Pretending That Intensive Parenting Doesn’t Work.” The essay notes evidence that demonstrates intensive parenting “can mean a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars in future income.” While acknowledging that wealth does not equal happiness, the essay concluded that because income is so strongly tied to health and happiness, “[i]f you want to raise a happy and healthy person, intensive parenting works.” 

I don’t disagree that intensive parenting “works,” in the sense that it makes it more likely that a child will “win” the race of travel sports, cheerleading competitions, and college acceptances. But we still should reject it. Why? In short: it’s artificially depressing fertility rates and then making life more difficult for those parents who do have kids. As journalist Tim Carney, dad of six, writes in Family Unfriendly, people are less willing to have kids because it’s now frowned upon to “send the kids outside, grab a drink, and [relax until] someone comes back starving or bleeding.” 

Recent research released by the Brookings Institution backs Carney up. Brookings took a deep look at the link between intensive parenting and fertility. The report found that intensive parenting—in particular, status competitions surrounding getting kids into prestigious schools of higher education—reduced fertility rates. According to the paper’s authors: “We find that parental concerns about education and the degree of intensive parenting are negatively associated with total fertility rates across high-income countries.” In other words, arguments like those in The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother create a sort of double whammy for fertility.  

First, this view suggests that the ultimate measure of success for a family is when a child does something extraordinary. One of the high points in Chua’s book is when her oldest child, Sophia, plays at Carnegie Hall as a teenager. For the occasion, Ms. Chua and her husband rent a room at a luxury hotel in New York City to have a party. The party seems to be almost as extravagant as a wedding. Ms. Chua writes: “In addition to sushi, crab cakes, dumplings, quesadillas, a raw oyster bar, and iced silver bowls of jumbo shrimp, I ordered a beef tenderloin station, a Peking duck station, and a pasta station (for the kids). At the last minute I had them throw in Gruyère profiteroles, Sicilian rice balls with wild mushrooms, and a giant dessert station.” In addition to this extravagant party, Ms. Chua says, “I’d also printed up invitations and sent them to everyone we knew.” This is the second factor that contributes to fertility decline. Not only is the goal for the child to do something extraordinary, it is important for surrounding families to know about the extraordinary activity. Even parents who otherwise might not be interested in intensive parenting feel pressured to engage in it by friends and neighbors. 

Mentioning this is not to criticize Ms. Chua and her husband. As noted above, intensive parenting is popular because it works. In a society that is increasingly cutthroat when it comes to college admissions, lucrative jobs, and lifetime income, it is rational for parents with significant resources to devote them to only one or two children, in order to maximize the chances their child will have a successful career. 

To fully evaluate intensive parenting, though, we must explore the downsides. First, as discussed at length in the superb book Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It, intensive parenting can dramatically backfire. Sometimes it does indeed produce brilliant, well-rounded, successful children. Other times, it burns children out in high school (or even middle school) in a way that can take years to recover from. It also burns out their parents. As the author of the book, Jennifer Breheny Wallace, writes, when she first left journalism to stay home with her kids, she decided: “I would … devote myself … to making our family life perfect.” Ms. Wallace notes that she threw herself into researching “ideal sleep routines,” healthy foods, and different parenting styles. She explains: “I devoted my education and talents to my kids and their successful future.” Indeed, she essentially equated her children’s success with her own, saying “[p]arent-teacher conferences felt like my year-end reviews.” This level of devotion to one’s children, as Ms. Wallace points out, can lead to women’s erasing their own identity and burying their own needs in pursuit of being the perfect mother. 

In addition to burning out parents and children, intensive parenting makes one of the great joys of children—warm and connected family life—very difficult. Parents are pushed to spend significant time rushing their children to the best school possible and then to different prestigious and often competitive extracurricular activities. People hire expert baseball coaches for eight-year-olds to “get them on the right foot.” Competition for the “right” preschool in New York City can feel like applying to college … but for a three-year-old who has barely been potty-trained. Instead of long dinners and time spent reading books on the couch, enjoying movies together, and going stargazing, organizing the family calendar can feel like a full-time project management job. Having a big family starts to seem almost neglectful, because how can any mother of six kids (no matter how well-educated or attentive) even begin to devote the kind of resources that Ms. Chua devoted to her children?  

For parents who recognize the downsides of intensive parenting (for parents considering a third child, or who know they don’t have the money to fully pay for college), what mindset can they adopt instead? In 2010, Anna Quindlen wrote a superb essay called “The Good Enough Mother.” (It’s so good that I make a point of rereading it annually). Ms. Quindlen movingly describes her own childhood, in which she was free to roam widely, and spared extensive parental meddling in her life. She notes that at the time, parents did not think they could fundamentally shape their children. Instead, they accepted that children were who they were from birth: “The smart one. The sweet one. Even the bad one. There was only so much a mother could do to mold the clay she’d been dealt.” Although her mother was the furthest thing possible from an intensive parent, Ms. Quindlen notes “she always felt like a safe place.” That, it turns out, was enough. 

Is it possible to be considered a good parent today if your top priority is not perfecting your children, but rather simply being their “safe place”? I don’t know the answer, but it seems to me that being a warm and loving parent that children feel safe with is both a worthy and challenging goal. I have often reflected that many of my worst parenting mistakes happened when I tried to convince my kids to be other than the people they are. To draw on Ms. Quindlen’s analogy, the most miserable I’ve ever been as a mother is when I’ve tried to play potter and viewed my kids as clay, and then grew frustrated as they reasonably resisted. This isn’t to say that there aren’t things I try to accomplish with my kids. It’s important to me that they pitch in around the house, that they’re polite to me and other adults, that they’re kind to their siblings and friends, that they get their schoolwork done, and so forth. They have goals and interests of their own that I try to support, which sometimes, alas, includes doing an annoying amount of driving for extracurriculars. Still, I no longer hesitate to veto proposed kid activities if it’s not in the family budget or the logistics are too complex. 

I’ve given up on the false promise of perfectionism that intensive parenting entails. Instead, I’m aiming to be a good enough mother. One blessing of having four kids is that it’s almost impossible to do anything else. For those who want to have another child, but are deterred by intensive parenting, take heart. That additional child might indeed make intensive parenting impossible, … and you will probably be profoundly grateful. This doesn’t mean your children won’t succeed, even perhaps spectacularly. But if they do, they’ll do it on their own terms, without destroying your family life in the process. Instead of intensive parenting, consider Ms. Quindlen’s vision of parenting as a safe place, where your job is not to make your kids successful, but rather to provide a loving home base for them to develop their own vision of what it means to succeed. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.