All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

The sociologist Annette Lareau was one of the first to take an in-depth look at this controlled pandemonium, capturing it in energetic detail in Unequal Childhoods, which became a classic the instant it was published in 2003. Looking at a dozen families—four of them middle-class, four of them working-class, and four of them poor—she couldn’t help but notice some crucial differences in parenting styles. Poor and working-class parents did not try to direct every aspect of their kids’ lives. She called their approach the “accomplishment of natural growth.” The style of middle-class parents, on the other hand, was something altogether different—so different she coined a term for it: “concerted cultivation.” “Concerted cultivation,” Lareau writes, “places intense labor demands on busy parents, exhausts children, and emphasizes the development of individualism, at times at the expense of the development of the notion of the family group.” Throughout the book she looks at middle-class parents with a sense of both empathy and mild, bewildered awe, but what seems to surprise her most is the psychologically insidious nature of middle-class parents’ engagement with their children’s lives. She uses a family called the Marshalls to make this point most vividly. “Unlike in