A friend shared this article with me and I found it very thought-provoking. I was surprised that lower income parents find parenting fun and rewarding significantly more often than middle and upper income parents do. The author attributes this differences to the “concerted cultivation” that wealthier parents are engaging in, all in an effort to ensure that their kids maintain their economic and class-based privilege — maintain the status quo. The final paragraph is pretty impactful:
Just don’t mistake refining their human capital — molding them into ideal bourgeois citizens — for parenting. Because that work is not an expression of love, not really. That’s fear. And if your greatest fear is your child becoming poor, or losing the privilege and power you’ve accumulated, then you should pause, stop telling yourself that “you’re only doing what’s best for my family,” and think more about why and how you’ve come to accept that everyday reality for others.
After reading this article I started to wonder to what degree the “concerted cultivation” style of parenting the author describes in this article is present in Germany as well. I feel like in general there is much less “cultivation” here. There are few private schools, and even the ones that do exist are mainly attractive to parents who want less cultivation, rather than more (e.g., the waldorf school). There are no elite colleges: most kids just go to the university close to their hometown. There are few summer camps, and for little kids at least mostly they are things like forest camp or horseback riding camps, not programming or robotics camps meant to give your kid a leg up. The only common after school activities seem to be sports and music lessons, although I do know a few kids who take private language lessons.
Pretentious Mama 