#58. Economic Inequality as a Driver of Intensive Parenting
When the gap between rich and poor is high, parents turn childhood into a period of resumé building.
Dear friends,
In my book Free to Learn and in other publications I have described how, in recent decades, we have turned childhood into a period of resumé building. We have increasingly deprived children of the free time they need to play and explore in the ways for which children are biologically designed, and, as a consequence, have deprived children of the opportunity to acquire the many strengths that come from self-motivated activities.
We start children in school at ever earlier ages. We start drilling them in what we mistakenly call “academics” ever earlier. We push them ever harder to go into the “honors” classes and to get all A’s (everyone is supposed to be way above average). We act as if failure to get into a “good” college is life failure. We even control what we call
their “recreation” by putting them into adult-directed sports rather than just letting them play freely in the ways kids are designed to play. After all, in principle, participation in an organized sports league can go on a resumé, while free play and exploration cannot.
By “we,” I primarily mean parents, as parents are the immediate pushers. I even hear from some school principals and teachers that they would like to offer more play at school and loosen up on the “academics” but that parents resist it. I hear from many camp directors that they would like to devote more camp time to free play, but parents won’t pay for that. Parents want lessons or other structured activities.
I think this trend toward ever more intensive control of children’s activities and increased pressure for superficial achievements has resulted from several societal developments, some of which I have written about before. But here is something I haven’t previously written about. In fact, I only began thinking about it a few weeks ago, after discovering an article and book by Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti (2019a&b).
Doepke and Zilibotti are both professors of economics, the first at Northwestern and the second at Yale. In an extensive cross-nation study, they documented a strong correlation between income inequality and parenting styles. More specifically, they found that parents in countries where income inequality is great adopt a more intensive and controlling style of parenting than do parents in countries where the income gap is smaller.
Their assessment of the degree to which parents were controlling versus permissive was based on an international survey of values (the World Values Survey), which, among other things, asked parents to select five values, from a longer list, that they deemed most important to foster in children. They found that parents in countries with high income inequality tended to select “hard work” and “obedience” at or near the top of their list, indicative of a controlling style, and parents in countries with lower inequality more often selected “imagination” and “independence,” indicative of a more permissive style.
An example of the sort of data they compiled is illustrated in the graph below (taken from their Washington Post article), which shows that parents in countries with high income inequality placed much greater value on hard work for their children than did those in countries with lower inequality. Comparable figures in their book show that parents in countries where income inequality is low placed more value on imagination and independence than those in countries where inequality is high.
The researchers found that this relationship between income inequality and parenting style also applies to changes over time within countries. For our purposes now, the significant observation is that income inequality has increased continuously over the past four or five decades in the United States, the period in which parents and society in general continuously tightened the leash on kids, permitting ever less freedom and requiring ever more attention to schoolwork and other resumé-building activities.
In 1980 the mean U.S. household income for those in the top 20% was 10.8 times that of those in the bottom 20%. By 2022, that ratio had risen to 17.2 (Tax Policy Center, 2023). The 1980s were a turning point because of economic changes promoted during the Reagan administration, which included much lower taxes on the wealthy and an undermining of labor unions. [I suspect now, with the most recent election, we will see even further increases in the income gap, and if Doepke and Zilibotti are right intensive parenting may increase even further.]
The logic behind the relationship between income inequality and parenting style is this. When inequality is low, parents assume their children will be roughly equally well off in material comforts in adulthood regardless of what direction they take in life, so it is best to allow them to enjoy their childhood, explore, discover their interests, and pursue a future of their own choosing. When income inequality is high parents worry that their children may fall into poverty if they don’t outcompete their peers, especially in the schooling mill, so parents become more likely to restrict free play and push schooling and other competitive, adult-directed activities that might eventually contribute to a strong resumé.
I can relate to this argument in my own life. When I was a kid in the 1950s, overall wealth in the US was lower than it is now, but job security was higher and the gap between the well off and the bottom 20% was much less than it is today. My stepfather and two of my uncles did not go to college, but they had union jobs that paid well enough to own a home (a much smaller house than the average house today), to support a rather large family (five kids in mine counting a cousin who lived with us), and (in the case of my two uncles) to also own a small cottage on a lake. It is no wonder that I felt no worry about my future, nor did my mother or stepfather. There was no pressure to go to college. In fact, I still remember when, at around age 15, I suggested that I might want to go to college, my mother’s immediate response was “Well, you know, we don’t have money for that,” and one of my uncle’s responses was, “Why on earth would you want to do that?” [Full disclosure, I did have a third uncle who had gone to college and was encouraging me to go.]
I understand Doepke & Zilibotti’s argument, and it helps me understand today’s intensive parenting. High income inequality is harmful for many reasons, and its effect on parenting style appears to be one of them. However, my own research suggests that the logic leading parents to believe that intensive parenting will improve their kids’ futures in today’s economy is built on certain societal myths, not reality. But more on that in a future letter.
Further Thoughts
And now, what do you think about this? This substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your questions, thoughts, stories, and opinions are treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree. Readers’ comments add to the value of these letters for everyone.
Do you think economic concerns played a role in how your parents treated you when you were young, or how you treated or are treating your own kids? Did your parents worry much about your economic future and, if they did, did that affect their parenting style? And does worry about your own kids’ economic future influence your parenting style?
In my last letter I presented the view that “good enough parents,” which I claimed are the best parents, are much more concerned with their children’s present happiness than with their future, and I claimed that happiness in childhood is a key to a happy, successful adulthood. Do you agree or not?
If you aren’t already subscribed to Play Makes Us Human, please subscribe now, and let others who might be interested know about it. By subscribing, you will receive an email notification of each new letter. If you are currently a free subscriber, consider converting to a paid subscription. I use all funds that come to me from paid subscriptions to help support nonprofit organizations aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives.
With respect and best wishes,
Peter
References
Doepke, M., & Zilibotti, F. (2019a). Love, money & parenting: How economics explains the way we raise our kids. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Doepke, M., & Zilibotti, F. (2019b). The parent trap. The Washington Post, Feb. 22, 2019.
TPC (2024). Tax Policy Center statistics: Household income quintiles, 1967-2022. Available at https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-quintiles
As an Indian, the issue here isn't just economic inequality. It's what it takes to get to college. If getting into college only meant grades and SAT/other exam scores (as it does in India) that students take in their last year of high school, then there's no real incentive to forcing your kid into swimming lessons at age 4. It also shows a direct correlation between effort/knowledge/ability and getting into college, so there isn't as much uncertainty, and every activity doesn't become toxic with high competition. You can still play sports or learn an instrument for fun.
In the US, college admissions requires you to have some combination of volunteer experience, internships, excellence in sports, musical ability, along with great grades and SAT scores, as well as an insightful essay. To excel in sport/art, you end up needing to work on them from an early age so you get to compete in the leagues that allow you to display excellence. There's no room to just pursue an activity for fun. Every single activity a child does is looked through the lens of "does this help with college admissions?".
The origin of such policies is from wanting to keep Jews out of elite American universities, and now it's taken a life of its own as everyone tries to game it. Add legacy and affirmative action policies and I particularly find high school students in my Indian-American community most stressed about this all. Their parents wrote competitive exams with a 1% success rate and they still didn't find themselves as stressed as their kids. I know in China and South Korea (and to some extent in India), cram schools to prepare for these exams are considered an example of why kids can't be kids, but at the end of the day, the exam is just an exam and it doesn't matter if you've been preparing for 10 years or 1 year, you have the option to chill for most of your life and then cram for a year.
I blame the American college admissions process for all of this. I feel as an academic, you ought to need to analyze your own institution's admission policies and process to figure out how each aspect directly leads to children's childhoods being an unending exercise of box-ticking. This is actually something actionable - how would you design a college admission policy so kids who still have a childhood still have a decent chance of getting in?
I've been saying this for a long time. Want to improve quality of life for kids? Let them have more free play and less pressure? Then we need to decrease parental anxiety about their own furure so they can stop over worrying about their children's future. We need to create more time for parents to have free play. We need to level the playing field so parents don't fall into the trap of believing that pushing their kids is their only hope for a future without homelessness. We need parents to have a life with work and play time. One job, not three. Healthcare, a sense of safety about retirement, the occasional vacation, time for hobbies. Most people don't have that life. They work and work with little rest or play. Naturally they think they must "prepare" their kids for the endless scrabble.
It's not true of course. The things kids most need to prepare for the future are mostly intangibles. A sense of self worth. An internal motivation to learn and grow. Open mindedness to learning new things. Curiosity. Caring. Emotional self awareness and empathy. The ability to set boundaries, meet their own needs, give to others. It's these capacities and others like them that allow a person to step into the future and learn whatever they need to learn.