The parenting gap
Rising economic inequality has created an arms race in parenting, deepening divisions in society
by Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti
@mdoepke
In recent years, parenting appears to have turned into a contact sport. Stories abound of ‘helicopter parents’ monitoring their children’s every move to give them the best chance to out-compete their peers. In 2011, the ‘tiger mother’ Amy Chua made worldwide headlines with a philosophy of pushing children to success, demanding perfect grades and hours of piano and violin practice with barely any room for fun. The race to the top starts early. In many cities, well-off families engage in an intense competition to secure spots for their children at top preschools, which then feed into top elementary schools, high schools, and ultimately elite universities and graduate schools. The 2008 documentary Nursery University shows how anxiety-ridden parents in Manhattan navigate this frantic process, rushing from interview to interview with their blissfully unaware toddlers and falling into despair upon being rejected by a prestigious preschool.
The rising intensity of parenting goes beyond anecdotes. Time-use data show that in a number of industrialised countries, today’s parents spend much more time on childcare than was the norm a few decades ago. In the US, mothers and fathers in 2005 each spent about six additional hours per week with their children compared with parents in 1975, implying an additional one hour and 45 minutes of parent-child interaction per day. Most of this additional time is spent on educational activities such as reading to children and helping them with homework. The average weekly time spent by parents on education-oriented interactions has risen in the US from less than two and a half hours in 1975 to almost eight and a half hours in 2005. Other countries display similar patterns. Italian parents, for example, spent about three hours per week on education-oriented interactions in 1989, which rose to eight and a half hours in 2009.
Much of this transformation can be explained by changing economic incentives. Most parents love their children and want them to do well. Their parenting choices reflect a desire to prepare their children for the life that awaits them. If there is a change in the values, attitudes or skills that are preconditions for success in the economic environment, parenting will echo this change.
Industrialisation and the accompanying rise of occupational mobility and formal education provide one good example. In earlier times, most children would adopt the occupation of their parent (the son of a farmer becomes a farmer, the son of fisherman becomes a fisherman), so they would learn many of the skills important to their success within their own family. These economic conditions were reflected in a high prevalence of authoritarian parents, who demanded obedience and often used corporal punishment to achieve their aims. In large part, this approach was made possible by the economic conditions: given that children mostly learned from parents, the parents knew what the children needed to learn, and they could exert direct control through their daily work together. In today’s economy, such an approach would be hard to sustain. In times of rapid economic change, many children adopt an occupation different from that of their parents, and the rise of formal education means that children acquire crucial skills in settings where parents cannot directly control their behaviour. Instead, many parents now aim to adopt a parenting style that enables children to succeed on their own.
What, then, can explain the recent rise in the intensity of parenting? Rising economic inequality is the culprit. In most advanced economies, inequality has risen sharply since the 1980s after a period of historically low inequality in the 1960s and 1970s. In the US, for example, the ratio between the top and bottom 10% of households on the income scale has more than doubled (from nine to more than 18) between 1974 and 2014. In the UK over the same period, the same ratio has increased by more than 50%. Even traditionally more egalitarian countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden experienced rising inequality, although inequality remains low compared with the US and UK.
This trend is making education increasingly important. In the US and many other countries, the gap between the average wages paid to workers with and without a university degree has risen substantially. For workers with little education, prospects are increasingly dire, not just in terms of wages, but also in the probability of finding secure employment in the first place. Inequality is rising in other dimensions, too. There is a widening gap in the health and life expectancy of more- and less-educated workers, and a rising ‘marriage gap’, with rates now much higher among university graduates than less-educated people.
From the perspective of parents, the rise in inequality has upped the stakes in parenting. Presumably parents always preferred that their children apply themselves, finish their homework, and do well in school. But when inequality is low and a child’s future success does not hinge as much on them out-competing their peers, parents can afford a more relaxed attitude. That is what our own childhoods were like: when we went to school in Italy and Germany in the 1970s, it would have never occurred to our parents to check whether we did homework, or to push us to excel in extracurricular activities that might give us a leg up in university admissions. Instead, we spent our afternoons playing with friends and there were few expectations placed on us other than returning home at night and performing some basic chores. Our parents’ nonchalant attitude made perfect sense given the economic conditions they lived in: unemployment was low, the wage gap between university graduates and, say, factory workers was small, and admission to university was not competitive. In Germany, for example, in the 1970s the wages of university graduates exceeded those of less-educated workers by less than 30%. In addition, university studies took on average more than six years, whereas other workers could start to earn money right away. Given these circumstances, there was little reason to push children, and it made sense to our parents to let us follow our own inclinations. Today, given the much higher stakes, parents feel they can no longer afford to be relaxed, resulting in time-intensive, frantic parenting for this generation of helicopter parents.
The hypothesis of a link between inequality and parenting fits the evidence from around the world remarkably well; both over time and across space, higher inequality is closely associated with more intensive parenting. The intensity of parenting can be measured using the World Values Survey, which asks what values people believe are the most important in bringing up a child. Among the options for survey respondents are hard work, which is associated with intensive parenting, and imagination or independence, suggesting a more relaxed, permissive parenting style. The proportion of respondents who agree with intensive parenting is closely associated with the level of economic inequality in the country. In Sweden (where inequality is very low), only 11% of parents emphasise hard work, compared with about 45% in the UK and almost two-thirds of parents in the highly unequal US. More equal countries, such as Norway, Finland, the Netherlands and Germany, are similar to Sweden, while countries with high inequality, such as China, Russia and Turkey, are even more extreme than the US and UK. The same relationship is confirmed when we look at changes in inequality within countries over time, and when we control for individual characteristics of the parents.
Unfair advantage
Spending more time with children of course has positives, but putting great pressure on them to perform can cause harm. However, the real dark side of this trend is a divergence in parenting across income and education groups. Wealthy and highly educated parents react particularly strongly to the changed economic environment by redoubling their efforts to give their children a leg up. In contrast, less fortunate parents, given financial and time constraints (which are particularly relevant for single parents), are often unable to keep up. In the US, more and less educated parents used to spend similar amounts of time on childcare until the 1970s. But by 2012, college-educated parents spent one extra hour per day on parent-child interactions compared with less educated parents. This ‘parenting gap’ within society can also be observed in a number of other dimensions, such as the likelihood of both parents raising a child together, and residential segregation between richer and poorer parents in neighbourhoods that vary in safety, public services and the quality of local schools.
Today, there is a significant risk that this parenting gap turns into a parenting trap. In times when economic inequality is already rising in response to economic forces, the parenting gap between families from different socio-economic backgrounds accelerates the trend towards a more divided society. If children from poorer backgrounds have less and less opportunity relative to the children of rich, highly educated parents, social mobility and the ideal of equal opportunity for all are under threat.
The risk of a parenting trap calls for a policy response. The evidence from countries around the world shows that an escalating arms race in intensive parenting and a growing parenting gap are not inevitable, even given current global economic trends. In countries that provide strong support to families from all backgrounds and that push back against rising inequality, parenting gaps have not risen much, and families have more freedom to simply enjoy their time together and to promote children’s independence and creativity.
Arguably, the most straightforward policy intervention would be to address the underlying rise in inequality through more progressive taxation and increased redistribution of income. Given that parenting gaps are at least in part a consequence of lack of resources among poor households, such policies should help narrow the parenting gap. However, in reality this approach has limitations. Increases in taxation and redistribution can be distortionary and stifle incentives for work and entrepreneurship, and at the same time, the benefits are not specifically targeted at families with children. Political constraints also matter; in many industrialised countries, there appears to be little political appetite for increasing taxes.
A better approach is to use policies that address the parenting gap more directly. In part, this could be done using targeted financial support for disadvantaged families with children, parental leave policies, and subsidised childcare. However, the policy that shows the greatest promise is to make major investments in early childhood education. Research by Nobel laureate James Heckman and other economists and developmental psychologists has shown that children acquire many crucial skills in the first years of life. This is particularly true for non-cognitive skills such as motivation, perseverance and self-control, which help determine a child’s ability to acquire more formal knowledge later on. In large part, it is during this early stage when children from less-advantaged backgrounds are left behind. Research has also shown that programmes providing access to high-quality daycare and preschool are highly effective at improving disadvantaged children’s skills and long-term success, not just in terms of test scores, but also in dimensions such as health, the propensity to commit crime and future relationships. Given these findings, universal provision of high-quality preschool is the single most promising policy to address the parenting gap. This policy has been pursued with success by Scandinavian countries, which combine high female labour force participation, high fertility (by European standards) and a childcare and education system that grants the most equal opportunities to children among Western nations.
The needed policy change is large and does not come cheap. But we believe that addressing the risk of a parenting trap is crucial for maintaining social cohesion and supporting social mobility in times of rising inequality. Just as many societies around the world introduced universal public schooling once the importance of human capital and education in the economy became too obvious to ignore, the new challenges of our age call for a similarly forceful response. A strong policy intervention based on the insights of the economics of parenting can go a long way towards restoring the promise of equal opportunity for all.
Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti are the authors of the forthcoming book Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids
This article first appeared in the RSA Journal — Issue 2 2018
