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In 1933, the author Isadore Luce Smith made a bold declaration in The Atlantic: “A new type of parent has evolved.” These parents, Smith reported, hired baby specialists, pored over child-rearing books, and were obsessed with issues such as thumb-sucking. They bought only educational toys and carefully monitored their kids’ progress in nursery school. They were raising their children to be, in short, “supermen and superwomen.”
Nearly a century later, the phenomenon Smith wrote about has become an ideal for parents in America. It’s called intensive parenting, and it’s defined by the amount of time, labor, and money it demands. That work could involve anything from reviewing flash cards with a 4-year-old to buying expensive baby gear—so long as it’s all done in the child’s interest. Most experts pinpoint the mid-to-late 20th century as the moment when the method started to take over in earnest. But this parenting philosophy had critics even earlier: An unsigned 1902 Atlantic article about “strenuous parentage” expressed concern for “the poor parent!” Spending so much time with one’s kids would surely leave parents worn out, with barely any time for themselves, the writer contended. More than a century later, it’s clear that they were right.
The U.S. surgeon general has declared parental stress a public-health issue. Parents report feeling isolated, exhausted, and overwhelmed. To deal with this strain, they’ve sought advice—lots of it. “Our generation was full of respect for the printed word. We bought all the standard books in the very newest editions,” Smith wrote of parents in 1933. By the turn of the century, their devotion to expertise had only grown. In 2003, the writer Sandra Tsing Loh, then a new mother, reported for The Atlantic that parents in 1997 had five times more child-rearing books to choose from than parents in 1975. She confessed that she’d turned to the experts for guidance, too—but that her “wobbly tower of self-help books” had left her racked with anxiety. Writing for The Atlantic in 2019, the sociologist Caitlyn Collins, who’d interviewed 135 middle-class working moms, concluded that although professional advice was supposed to soothe them, it ended up “being a source of stress.”
Parents today don’t have to stop at generalized advice. In the age of tech surveillance, specific data about their children are plentiful. Now there are apps that track when babies eat, sleep, and poop, and parents can buy special devices that monitor infants’ heart rates and oxygen levels, which seem better suited for hospital rooms than nurseries. Once kids grow up, location-sharing apps follow their every move, and online gradebooks can send real-time updates to parents’ phones. Put together, this is more information than anyone could realistically metabolize.
All of this pressure and surveillance takes a toll on kids too. Smith’s essay ends on the suggestion that, in approaching child-rearing so seriously, parents risked raising a generation of kids who would turn out to be “deplorably serious-minded, or prigs, or even nervous wrecks.” Whether modern parents are turning their children into prigs is a matter of personal judgment, but Smith’s third proposal actually isn’t too far off: Childhood anxiety has been rising for years. While it’s impossible to blame a single source, there’s a compelling argument that modern parenting has played a role. “The problem with kids today is also a crisis of parenting today,” Kate Julian argued in 2020. “We have a vicious cycle in which adult stress leads to child stress, which leads to more adult stress, which leads to an epidemic of anxiety at all ages.”
Critics of intensive parenting point out that many parents in recent decades put a lot of pressure on their kids from an early age, which was bound to stress them out. And when parents are too involved, children might not get enough space to learn how to solve problems on their own. “What can feel like good parenting in the short term might, paradoxically, threaten a kid’s ability to make safe choices in the long term,” Devorah Heitner wrote in 2023.
Today the parenting pendulum seems to be swinging once again, this time from high-pressure helicopter parenting to the more emotions-focused “gentle parenting,” which largely eschews punishments in favor of working with a child to understand their feelings and behavior—a shift that many welcome. But make no mistake: Though this method may seem to promise a way around the draining nature of modern parenting, it still demands an exhausting amount of time, attention, and patience. Rather than challenging the norms of the intensive philosophy, gentle parenting merely reinforces them. Families haven’t found relief just yet.
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