Adult Supervision Required: Private Freedom and Public Constraints for Parents and Children

6. Conclusion

Chapter 6 Conclusion During the twentieth century, demographic, cultural, and economic changes intensified the privatization of the family, with significant implications for both parenting and childhood. Parents have been granted (and are forced to acknowledge) greater autonomy in deciding what is best for their children and families, and children are readily recognized as individuated and emotional actors with greater freedom in the private sphere. Such privatization, however, also means that little public attention is given to either parenting as an activity fraught with political implications or children as participants in public life. This trade-off for parents and children indicates a deeper cultural shift in the ways that we conceive of private and public arenas of social life and of an increasingly individualized and psychologically driven concept of agency. The cultural frameworks of privatized family life in contemporary America inadequately acknowledge the real ways in which parenting is both a private and a public activity. Current cultural constructions of childhood also fail to recognize children as public actors. Full recognition of parents and children as public actors might mean, for example, that we could regard both parenting work and children’s education as forms of socially necessary labor and compensate these labors monetarily. It might mean providing for a social safety net so that the majority of children living in families headed by a single parent would not be impoverished . On a more realistic scale (but still a reach in the United States), we could recognize the public provision of benefits like health care, family care leaves, and universal preschool as necessary supports to parents and children. Taking children seriously as public actors might also mean directing considerably more funds toward improving the quality of public education, planning for built environments that take into account 149 children’s independent mobility, and providing more opportunities for children and youth to experience meaningful work and gain independence from their parents through mentoring relationships with other adults. Ultimately, the changes in the discourse of parenting that I have analyzed in Adult Supervision Required reveal that contemporary American culture provides readily accessible categories for understanding individuals as private and emotional entities but does not provide robust categories for imagining the individuals who make up families as public and civic actors. The Trade-Off for Parents Parenting in the twenty-first century is an expert-guided endeavor, but most parents today exhibit attitudes toward experts that have changed from those of the early twentieth century. At the start of the twentieth century, medical science was rapidly gaining cultural authority as advances in bacteriology and vaccination began to eradicate many deadly diseases. Physicians were soon joined by psychologists and other child scientists as childrearing advice shifted away from moral prescriptions toward the new scientific understandings of health and behavior. Although mothers in the early twentieth century were active in interpreting the new scientific advice, they largely regarded the advice of these men of science as holding authority, and many mothers strove to conform to the prescriptions they read in manuals, pamphlets, and magazines . This attitude toward childrearing authorities held until the postwar era, but by the 1970s larger social and cultural upheavals meant that people began to view the authority of both science and experts more skeptically.1 Although parents still seek out expert knowledge and rely upon it to help them make decisions, they are both more aware of contradictions among experts and more confident of their own right to determine what suits their own desires and what works best for their family structure. In collecting information and advice about children, therefore, parents today are likely to “take it with a grain of salt” and to feel a sense of autonomy over many parenting options. Many Americans now see a one-size-fits-all model of family as outdated . This does not mean that there are no cultural models against which families are judged; the two-parent, heterosexual, nuclear family is still the favored cultural ideal, and middle-class preferences still determine what is regarded as “mainstream.” However, the favored ideal no longer A d u l t S u p e r v i s i o n R e q u i r e d 150 insists upon the strictly gendered roles that characterized the breadwinnerhomemaker model that was culturally dominant for much of the twentieth century; instead, individual families feel considerable freedom to determine for themselves their roles of...