American parents spend more time and money on their children than ever — and that was before the pandemic. Now, with remote school ending for the summer and a far-from-normal fall expected, parenting is becoming only more demanding.
It’s not just that children need more supervision, with their usual activities closed. Unlike previous generations of parents, today’s feel pressured to use time with their children for active engagement and continual teaching. Now that pressure is compounded by fears about missing months of education, and about widening gaps between children whose parents can provide significant at-home enrichment and those whose parents cannot.
Three-quarters of parents of children under 12, and 64 percent of parents of teenagers, said it was more important to do parent-led educational activities with their children this summer than in previous summers, found a new survey by Morning Consult for The New York Times. Sixty-four percent of parents of children under 12 said they felt pressure to do this, an increase from 58 percent earlier in the pandemic. Just 17 percent said they did not feel this pressure.
These days, Madeleine Senger, 13, sets her alarm for 6:30 a.m. and begins the day reading, then practicing piano. Some days she has virtual classes from her home in Denver — online camps, book club and cooking class, in addition to online tutors for math, Spanish, piano and writing. Her parents hired a Spanish tutor based in Guatemala as well as several teachers from her school to do individual or small-group classes. Madeleine also joined a start-up children’s newspaper, the Corona Courier.
“We want her to be happy and at the same time learn and avoid the summer slump, and the slump from the end of last year and what we expect in the coming year,” said Madeleine’s father, Joel Senger, a school librarian.
Madeleine already excels at school, said her mother, Alexis Senger, a consultant and lecturer on higher education budgeting policy. But, she said: “We want to prepare her and keep her active and engaged. College is going to be the only way to survive in this future where none of us know what will exist.”
Social scientists call this intensive parenting. They have found it has become the expectation of most parents, across race and class divides (although richer parents are more able to carry it out). Unlike helicopter parenting, which was more about keeping children physically safe, intensive parenting is about enriching them with one-on-one attention and extracurricular activities.
Intensive parenting grew in part from discoveries about how much children’s early experiences shape their outcomes. It’s also fueled by financial anxiety, with more pressure to get a degree from a good college and land on the right side of the economic divide amid rising inequality — a competition the economists Valerie and Garey Ramey termed “the rug rat race.”
The pandemic has heightened both concerns. Many parents are nervous about the long-term effects on children of isolation, anxiety and a long break from academic and extracurricular activities. Their economic future has become only more uncertain. Additionally, allowing children to do things outside the house carries the risk of contracting coronavirus.
“The stakes really are very high,” said Matthias Doepke, co-author of “Love, Money and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids,” and an economist at Northwestern. “Whether your kid goes to college matters tremendously these days, and learning losses, when they occur, are hard to make up later on. If school is not available, it’s going to be on the child and parents.”
Now, as a generation of hyper-scheduled children enters a fourth unscheduled month, many parents are taking on added responsibility. Sixty-one percent of parents of children under 12 said they or their spouse was providing most of their children’s summer enrichment. Just 14 percent said their children would not take part in education or enrichment this summer.
The results — from surveys of 1,954 parents, conducted June 16-20 and April 9-10 — were largely consistent across demographics. Women and people with college degrees were slightly more likely to feel pressure to lead educational activities, and rural parents were slightly less likely, but the differences were small.
Black and white parents were equally likely to say parent-led educational activities were more important this summer. Latino parents were much more likely to say so, but also more likely than white or black parents to value freedom and independent play. This is consistent with research, said Linda Citlali Halgunseth of the University of Connecticut. “Immigrant parents in general made extreme sacrifices to come to the U.S. so that their children would have better futures,” she said. “Latinx parents value hard work, and they do not like to see their children idle.”
Parenting is intensive in a different way for parents who are black and single like herself, said Dawn Demps — especially with the growing movement against police brutality and entrenched racism. Ms. Demps, a graduate student in education at Arizona State University, said that teaching her three children life skills and talking about current events was most important right now, and that her top concerns were their emotional health and physical safety.
“I think parents of color have other concerns than can my kid get into the best school,” she said. “They see everything that’s happening and they’re asking me about current events. Especially at this moment, I’m very aware that my children, especially my son, who’s 6-foot-1 and 15 years old, are perceived in a particular way.”
She and Carrie Sampson, a professor at the teachers college at Arizona State, said this was also a chance to give children something they weren’t getting in school: culturally relevant material, taught by a variety of adults in their lives. Both their children took an African dance class and take an online black social studies class. Ms. Sampson’s cousin is creating a virtual class about body image, and her sister-in-law is giving singing lessons. Ms. Sampson, Ms. Demps and colleagues wrote an article on Medium explaining why they thought continuing this type of family involvement in children’s education was important even after the pandemic.
Some parents have loosened their approach, giving their children more time for independent play, outdoor time and screen time. Twenty-nine percent said they were giving their children more freedom than usual, and 16 percent said independent play was more important during this time than parent-led teaching. They’re focusing on life skills, like making their own lunch, solving sibling conflicts or finding their way out of boredom.
“I’m trying to mix in school of life,” said Brandi Bovell, a natural health practitioner in Mechanicsville, Va., and the mother of two children, ages 5 and 9.
She brings them on outings for her business, and during the school year, she supplemented those with lessons, like watching a TED Talk by a hemp farmer before visiting a farm. This summer, they’ve paused structured learning, and instead are practicing skills like cooking and hanging the laundry outside to dry. She said she tries to gauge their mental health each morning, and if they’re feeling particularly emotional, she lets them have freer days — her son gets lost in a book, and her daughter has dance parties.
“Luckily I haven’t really felt pressure,” she said. “I definitely kind of let them do their own thing, and a lot of times it’s them learning on their own.”
Parents who were not able to work from home were almost twice as likely as white-collar workers who worked remotely to say their children would not be participating in education this summer. Experts say the disparities could worsen learning gaps; even in normal years, research has found that gaps between poorer and wealthier children narrow while school is in session and widen during the summer. Even short breaks from school, like after natural disasters, can have lifelong impact on learning.
Pichnimoul Neang is a food service coordinator at Providence health system in Portland, Ore., a job that requires her to go to work. (Her husband was laid off, so he is home with their two children, ages 8 and 10.) They’re reading, doing word puzzles and planting a vegetable garden, but she worries it’s not enough.
“As an immigrant, I do feel a little more pressure with regard to my children keeping up with school,” said Ms. Neang, who is from Cambodia. “I do not have enough time or information to prepare them for the next grade. I have been trying my best to support them in every way possible, but still I feel like I did not know the school system here and my English is not that great.”
Parents’ efforts to teach during the pandemic could avert some of the worst effects on children, experts say, and incorporating learning into a child’s life — turning baking into a math lesson and reading for pleasure — is valuable. Many parents say the additional time with their children has been a silver lining of coronavirus closures.
But experts also point to risks of high-pressure pandemic parenting. They worry about inequity, and about the mental health of both children and parents. Recent research has found that parents, especially employed mothers, feel immense guilt. They say it’s because they have to work, their children are spending more time on screens or they can’t substitute for teachers.
Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University, has been continually interviewing 66 mothers with young children. Those most stressed, she said, are those who feel pressure to do intensive parenting but cannot, because they are also doing demanding jobs or lack the money, space or time.
Researchers offer some reassurance. There’s value in letting children pursue projects they come up with instead of adult-directed ones, they say — and lockdowns could bring children long-term benefits, not just challenges.
“If you have a very intensive parenting model, that in many ways suffocates that intrinsic motivation for learning and curiosity,” said Helen Shwe Hadani, a developmental psychologist and fellow at Brookings. “Nonacademic skills are important, and we’re looking for kids who are creative and have grit and are resilient. Those don’t show up in SAT scores.”
