No, You Can’t Check Out Of Hands-On Parenting Just Because You’re ‘Tired’

A recent Essay Kara Baskin, mother, writer, and editor of The Boston Globe cheers on a new trend among parents that isn’t demanding academic perfection from their children and instead over-scheduling them for tutoring, music lessons and other enrichment activities.

In the face of a growing mental health crisis among youth and a changing economy, fathers and mothers are reducing the importance of many of these activities and easing the pressure on their children to attend an Ivy League. Baskin, speaking for these parents, says, “We are tired, our kids are stressed out, and our values have changed.”

As an Advanced Placement English teacher as well as a father and a millennial who grew-up in the midst the so-called “Millennial Era”, “Mommy Wars,” in which mothers (primarily those who worked and those who stayed at home) had innumerable arguments over the best way to raise children, I would agree with at least one of Baskin’s points.

She’s right that parents and their children have become less interested in crafting the perfect college resume and are instead looking to minimize the cost of higher education and maximize its utility. My students are more interested in vocational programs than when I began teaching fifteen years ago. And there’s thankfully much less social stigma attached to opting out of a four-year university and choosing to earn an associate’s degree at a community college and enter a trade.

But, I disagree with her argument. Yes, the world has changed, and parents, in general, have relaxed their expectations somewhat after the Covid-19 pandemic, but this isn’t the result of some collective epiphany of today’s parents, nor is it really a good thing. The problem of mental health and stress will be worsened if parents stop pushing their children.

Much of the problem in Baskin’s argument lies with her terms and her framing of the Mommy Wars. For no good reason, she conflates the different parent caricatures — helicopter parents, tiger moms, crunchy moms, soccer moms, free-range parents — each of whom take very different approaches to raising their children. Parents might sometimes claim their method is the best. Self-described Tiger mom Amy Chua probably takes the cake for this), they would often learn from one another and do what worked — usually finding some kind of middle ground between pushing children and giving them room to explore their passions and find themselves.

This means that there has always been a discussion about finding the ideal. “academic and social balance,” as one of Baskin’s parents puts it. Very few parents went to extremes with their kids — the tiger moms and free-range parents were always small minorities. The happy medium for most parents was to schedule children with lots of extracurricular activities while still being relaxed with expectations and heaping on the pressure.