The Transformation of Parenting
It seems perversely typical for US culture that the hardest job out there is the one we either do for no pay or farm out to strangers. One we cram into brief periods of shuffling off to activities or dinner and bedtime. A job where the people who are most invested get the least training, and who we have gradually cut off from extended support. While amping up the pressure to be in complete control and not make any major mistakes at it.
I’m talking, of course, about parenting. A job with the pressures and stakes of a surgeon but with no pay or formal training. We don’t even get a box.
We are set up for failure.
In this essay I’m not going to talk about the science of good parenting. There are plenty of good resources, and I have a different purpose here. Instead, I’m going to focus on psychological aspects of the sociology of parenting with mainstream American pressures.
Industrialized Parenting
America is highly industrialized. We automate how we grow, process, prepare, and deliver food. We automate our machinery, we automate our bureaucracy, and we automate our workforce. Workplaces like Amazon are the direct descendant of Henry Ford’s innovations. We turn workers into extensions of the machinery, rather than vice versa. Please take a moment to consider how strange this is. Perhaps imagine all of your grocery shopping and food preparation as steps to feed a microwave. Chaplin famously satirized this feat in Modern Times, beautiful though a bit painful to watch.
In retrospect, it seems inevitable that when one-paid-worker households became two-paid-worker households, parenting would become industrialized as well (not to mention the squeeze on one-parent households!). We screen day cares, nannies, preschools, camps, after-schools, and schools to meet a variety of quantitative standards, wherein we mechanize caregivers and teachers to fit a variety of standardized tests. We are inching towards the ideal hoped for 76 years ago by B. F. Skinner, as described in Walden Two.
We’ve made parenting a task we consider only when the children are right there in front of us: playing contentedly or making a mess or stalling when we need them to get ready to go out or whining that they are bored. And no, I’m not counting as parenting those other mechanized times. When you have to book the camps, arrange the playdates, turn in the school forms, etc. Those are being a parent, but not parenting.
Maybe we need a definition here: what is parenting? The label often used for the one(s) doing the parenting contains the crucial elements: “caregiver.” Care as in compassion, kindness, i.e. our values; and giver, as in a process of instillation. We pass on our values, such as responsibility, integrity, tolerance, justice, etc., and not just by doing it ourselves and hoping it magically transfers but through an engaged, careful process of teaching. So many traditions recognize this and talk about parenting as where we carry the wisdom of our ancestors and have a chance to positively impact generations to come.
And this is the responsibility that we try to cram between the hours of 6-8am and 6-9pm weekdays.
But wait – it gets harder than that. Stay tuned…