Help! Modern Parenting Has Become An Intense Full-Time Job I Never Wanted
Jayakri | Shutterstock When I was a child, the last day of school filled me with great joy. Ten long weeks stretched ahead of me, ten weeks of sleeping in and taking trips and eating disproportionate amounts of ice cream.
My parents, both teachers, also got to experience that tingle of anticipation — the tingle I haven’t felt since I was 20 years old. After I graduated from college and entered the working world, summer simply meant more work, which I found depressing in its own right. But it wasn’t until I became a parent, and especially a parent of two, that the prospect of summer came to fill me with great dread.
For years, when my kids were smaller, and I was still commuting to an office, summer meant piecing together weeklong camps for staggering amounts of money — a project I often started in February because I learned the hard way that camps fill up quickly.
Now that my kids are older and I work from home, summer means an occasional sports camp, for an even more staggering amount of money, and a lot of weeks during which the kids hang out around the house while I attempt to work. My daughter was hoping to find a job this summer, but the options for 14-year-olds are few and far between.
My almost 11-year-old son, meanwhile, had planned to spend most days with neighborhood friends at our community pool. He spent many happy summer afternoons at the pool last year, and I spent many happy afternoons actually getting some work done.
The pool sits at the corner of a high-crash intersection (great location for a community center, amiright?), which initially gave me pause. But, I reasoned, he would be accompanied by a 12- and 13-year-old, and the prospect of him using his own two feet to walk the 10 blocks and then subsequently spending two hours socializing and moving his body was enormously appealing.
If they stopped for milkshakes at Burgerville on the way home, the outing could take up to four hours, and it would cost a grand total of $8.25. Compare that to the $75 it would have cost me to put him in a half-day summer camp, not to mention the finding of said camp, the registering for said camp, the filling out of endless forms for said camp, and the driving I’d have to do to get him there and back.
This summer, he was excited to spend more happy afternoons at our community pool. And then we got word that kids under the age of 14 can no longer go to public pools unless accompanied by someone who’s 18 or older. There goes the golden opportunity for him to practice independence and engage in mixed-age outdoor play with other neighborhood kids. There goes my focus. There goes my energy. There goes my time.
The order was issued by the Oregon Health Authority after a 12-year-old fatally drowned in our neighborhood pool in the summer of 2023. This was a devastating tragedy, to be sure. It was also the first fatal drowning in a Portland public pool since 1985. By my rough calculations, that means that a 10-13-year-old’s risk of drowning in a Portland public pool on any given day is about 0.0004%.
Considering those odds are far lower than the odds my son will die in a car crash if I were to drive him to the pool, it’s a risk I’m willing to take. But alas, it’s not up to me.
'Intensive parenting' is now our catch-all term for the over-involved and over-protective approach to parenting
tabitha turner / Unsplash+
Intensive parenting is also widely regarded as today’s dominant approach — in the United States, at least. It has its roots in helicopter parenting, but instead of simply hovering, intensive parenting involves more smothering, rooted in the belief that a child’s life must be fully optimized and orchestrated by mom or dad.
Our cultural conversations around both helicopter and intensive parenting describe them as “parenting styles” — as though we, as parents, stood in front of a mirror, tried on some different looks, and said, “Yes, this one! Neurotic, paranoid, and perpetually exhausted really brings out the green in my eyes!”
When describing the origins of these so-called “parenting styles,” some articles vaguely point to fears about the “modern-day economy,” and some acknowledge the unique pressures of parenting in the 21st century. But the pervasive cultural narrative out there seems to be that a bunch of parents started hovering over their kids, then decided that hovering just wasn’t cutting it, and felt compelled to take the coddling to the next level.
What actually happened, of course, is far more complex. Lenore Skenazy of the Free Range Kids movement largely attributes the emergence of helicopter parenting to “stranger danger” fear-mongering, starting with highly publicized kidnappings in the ’80s and ’90s.
Of course, when compared to all the other dangers lurking out there, kidnappings have always been, and remain, highly statistically unlikely — almost four times more unlikely, in fact, than your chances of having conjoined twins. But it’s hard to analyze statistics when missing children’s faces are staring you down from the backs of milk cartons as you eat your breakfast cereal.
Around the same time, 24-hour news networks were rising to prominence, and all the overblown threats to our children’s health, safety, and well-being, which were previously only reported on at dedicated times, became omnipresent. They also became more speculative and more sensationalist because, hey, 24 hours is a lot of time to fill.
Enter the Internet, followed by smartphones, which not only exponentially increased the speculation and sensationalism but also enabled us to carry all this so-called “news” around in our pockets so we could enjoy unfettered access.
Today, three in four Americans worry about violent crime a “great deal” or a “fair amount,” even though it has been trending downward quite steeply since 1990. We’ve also got a lot of other things on our minds. Smartphones have made us all more anxious for all kinds of reasons, from the anticipatory anxiety of notifications to sleep disruptions to the fear of missing out. Everything is out to get us; everyone else is living better lives, and as I’ve learned during six years of writing online, people on the Internet can be really mean.
But wait, there’s more! As the news media and Big Tech have been busy upping our collective anxiety, we have fewer and fewer people to turn to for support. The past decades have seen dramatic increases in car-dependent suburban living alongside steep declines in friendship, community engagement, and extended family networks. As we’ve lost physical “third spaces” outside our homes — unless you count strip malls (which I don’t) — we’ve also lost access to support networks inside or near our homes.
Meanwhile, the institutions that serve our children have become mired in risk aversion and lawsuit paranoia — to the great detriment of the children they are tasked to serve. And our society, which has never been very good at prioritizing the well-being of our children, has shifted from unenthusiastic tolerance to active hostility, decrying their presence in public places, shaming parents who can’t “control” them, and banning them from weddings and other social events.
Your child, your problem is the guiding mantra of the day
Perhaps nothing illustrates the prevailing mentality better than this comment on my recent Substack Note lamenting my city’s new pool rules:
The community isn’t responsible for raising your kids. You made the choice to have kids. You take care of them or build a village of your own to help. You can’t force others (esp strangers) to look after your kids for no money. Kids are absolutely feral these days. They need to be supervised.
We’ve lost any sense of collective responsibility for raising the up-and-coming generations who will care for us all as we age. Since our children are exclusively our problem, when they “misbehave,” we are exclusively to blame. But never fear! The Parent Expert Industrial Complex will teach us how to do it right. We should pay no mind to our intuition or the collective wisdom of prior generations.
While the nature/nurture debate will never be fully resolved, convincing research from scholar and author Judith Harris, amongst other prominent scholars, suggests that parents have far less impact on our kids’ outcomes than we are led to believe. But that is decisively not the message that society screams at us.
We are told, time and time again, that it is our job, and our job only, to shape, mold, and curate our tiny humans, and no matter how we approach this monumental, unpaid task, we are probably doing it wrong.
Back in 1975, bookstores boasted no “Parenting” category. According to Anne Cassidy, author of Parents Who Think Too Much, “books about child-rearing were listed under ‘Children–management.’” Today, there are tens of thousands of parenting books in circulation, not to mention the countless parenting how-to posts and articles whirling across the Interwebs, all with their winning formulas for raising successful, happy, and well-adjusted children.
Provided, of course, that you never yell at your kids or reveal that you are human in any other way, and that you are willing and able to dedicate 10-15 hours a day to this endeavor we call “parenting.” Oh yeah, and it helps to be French. Or Scandinavian. Or Japanese. As Substack author Janelle Hanchett points out in her excellent essay, “They aren’t better parents because they’re culturally superior” (well worth a read in its entirety):
Having raised kids for 18 years in the United States and the past 5 years in the Netherlands, I feel qualified to assert that discussing a problematic “culture of parenting” in the USA is a frivolous, misleading, and irrelevant focus that does nothing but deflect from the real problem, which is that America hates people.
Her essay primarily focuses on the structural and institutional differences between the Netherlands and the United States that contribute to different outcomes in our parents and children. Scandinavian parents “are not better people,” she says. “They live in societies with better policies.”
Among these are free healthcare for children, schools not funded by local property taxes, universal pensions, labor rights, government stipends for each child, childcare subsidies, unlimited paid sick days, paid leave to recover from burnout, and “daddy day,” which “allows fathers to take a weekly half or full day off work, paid in full or at 70%, to spend with their kids.”
The United States isn’t different because we lack some of these things. We lack ALL of these things. Every. Single. Last. One.
Our government gives absolutely no indication that it cares about our children. Big Tech, real estate developers, and pretty much every profit-driven industry have made it very clear that they don’t give two craps, let alone one. Parenting experts care inasmuch as they can convince you to buy their life-changing book or attend their next life-changing course. And adults at large are indifferent, judgmental, hostile, or any combination thereof.
Against this backdrop of dots that we largely leave unconnected, we delight in casting today’s parents as over-involved, over-protective, and needlessly overwhelmed.
You’d think, with all the talk about intensive parenting these days, that my opposition to my hometown’s new pool rules would place me in the minority — but you'd be wrong
Getty Images / Unsplash+
The general response amongst parents has been outrage. Apparently, I wasn’t the only adult trying to work and hack ways for my kids not to be on screens for eight plus hours a day. Apparently, my son wasn’t the only pre-teen or young teen who had spent many happy independent and interdependent hours at a community pool. Now, I and countless other parents either have to take time off work to chaperone them or locate and coordinate with another adult who’s willing to take them.
As a single parent who already has my hands full, I often find myself backed into a corner. I can either expend time and energy I don’t have protesting and petitioning, or I can expend time and energy I don’t have supervising my children and coordinating their supervision.
This is not even to mention all the communications regarding our children that we must contend with daily — the emails, the texts, the app notifications! While researching a story about the mental load last year, I counted the number of communications I had received in one month regarding my two kids’ schools and sports practices.
The grand total? Drumroll, please… 229 communications. Fifty-two emails, 130 WhatsApp messages, and 47 text messages. That total doesn’t even include all the notifications for the apps we’re told we have to download to get vital information about sports and school. BAND, Honeycomb, ParentVue, and Canvas, just to name a few.
I think back to my parents, who got a weekly Tuesday note home, which my teacher pinned to my shirt in my early elementary years — one piece of paper with text on one side that they read once a week. And while I’m sure there were a few phone calls and other forms of communication here and there, I’m also sure there weren’t 229 of them.
A generation ago, the majority of parents operated in daily realities in which their built environments, institutions, and social systems — while far from perfect —enabled both autonomy and interdependence. According to a series of books published in 1979 that offer checklists of age-appropriate milestones, a six-year-old should know their left from their right and be able to “travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to the store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home.”
Whenever I watch movies from my childhood, I feel intensely jealous of the mothers. First, they are hardly ever around. The kids are left largely to themselves, cruising around bike- and pedestrian-friendly streets on a variety of wheeled contraptions and their own two feet. No one is reporting their parents for child neglect, or making them sign waivers, or forcing them to chaperone.
Every June, as the reality of 10 weeks with no school descends upon me, I think about The Sandlot, in which a family moves to a new town and the mother simply sends her 12-year-old out to play for the summer. He finds a group of kids who have self-organized a baseball team and spend hours practicing without any form of adult supervision.
Then there’s my all-time favorite, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, in which a single mom of four takes off to Australia for an entire summer and leaves her kids in the care of an elderly woman they’ve never met before. The mom checks in now and then by phone but never once speaks to the so-called babysitter, who, unbeknownst to her, is no longer living.
The list goes on and on — movie after movie depicting parents living their own lives while their kids effortlessly congregate with other kids
If you go back one generation further, stories abound of children exploring the world together while adults collectively kept an eye on them. My ex-husband’s uncle once reminisced about his childhood spent roaming the streets. His neighborhood was rough, he said, but there was so much love. Everyone knew his curfew, and if he was late getting home, he’d get whoopings from three other mothers before his mother even got a chance.
So, okay, parenting has evolved in some positive ways, too. I’d be supremely pissed if any of my neighbors took it upon themselves to whoop either of my children. But his story has stayed with me for years — the idea of adults pitching in to keep an eye on the neighborhood’s children and make sure they got home at a decent hour.
Research professor and Substack author Peter Gray recently presented new data, revealing that 14-year-olds today “have less outdoor freedom than 5-year-olds had a few decades ago.” A survey of 24,000 American parents across the United States found that “58% of 10-year-olds, 27% of 14-year-olds, and 16% of 17-year-olds cannot leave their own yard without adult accompaniment. And… 98% of 10-year-olds, 91% of 14-year-olds, and 62% of 17-year-olds cannot leave their own neighborhood without adult accompaniment.”
Statistics like these are both shocking and entirely unsurprising. Shocking because they starkly illustrate the shrinking spaces to which our children find themselves confined, and unsurprising because what other outcome would we expect?
We live in a society with 24/7 access to sensational (and increasingly false) news stories that tell us pretty much everything is out to get us. We live in built environments that physically isolate us and in nuclear family structures that lack the network of alloparents humans have relied on to raise children for over 200,000 years.
Out in the world, our children are treated either as legal liabilities or as nuisances who must be contained and controlled. We are surrounded by blathering parenting experts trying to capitalize on our collective anxiety by instructing us to ignore our intuition (not to mention ancestral wisdom), to maximize every possible opportunity for our children’s learning and success, and to squarely blame ourselves for “doing it wrong” if we don’t achieve the desired outcome.
We live at the mercy of profit-driven companies that ask parents to prioritize paid labor over the labor of raising small humans and that will prioritize a buck over a child any day of the week. We live under institutional policies that explicitly limit our children’s opportunities to learn, grow, and pursue independence. Meanwhile, institutional policies that support their health and well-being, not to mention that of their parents, are virtually non-existent.
Parenting has become an undoubtedly intensive experience
But contrary to popular opinion, there is no autonomously existing “culture of intensive parenting” that we can choose to opt in or out of. Sure, some parents out there match the stereotype, but the vast majority of what we label as “intensive parenting” is merely a response to the increasingly inane policies, practices, and attitudes that require us to manage our kids’ lives.
The vast majority of parents I know would like nothing better than to be less involved in the logistics of their children’s days. They would like less communication from the schools, less pressure to enroll kids in after-school activities, and fewer afternoons spent carting them around.
I, for one, am trying my darndest to opt out. I’m foregoing the nuclear family structure, building my village, abstaining from the parenting books, and sending my kids out into the world without adult supervision.
But my parenting experience is still far more intensive than I’d like it to be. I’ve learned the hard way that it requires a great deal of intention and energy to invest less intention and energy into my children’s lives.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
