From Hands-Off to Helicopters

When it comes to raising children and managing a career in the United States, there are few institutional or community supports in place. But there is no shortage of advice. Parenting books, mothers-in-law, colleagues, judgy peers, and random senior citizens at the market all lie in wait to tell you what you’re doing wrong and how you should be raising your child: Breast is best. You can’t be a parent and be on the partner track. No screen time. Asking for a reduced schedule is career suicide. Put some socks on that baby! American parents now work more hours and spend more time with our children than we have at any time in recent history (college-educated parents spend twice as much as they did in 1965). This was true before the pandemic, and it’s ridiculously true now, with our children as our coworkers and us as their teachers and playmates and full-time caretakers. No wonder we’re tired. How did we get here, where we’re logging long hours at work; overseeing our kids’ education, athletics, and other activities; and managing the household — all at the same time? Sir and Lady Baden-Powell at the christening of their infant, being held by the wet nurse. (Photo: PA Images via Getty Images) Popular use of the verb “parenting” dates only to the 1970s, and with good reason: Much of the time, throughout history and around the world, parents weren’t the ones doing it. Preoccupied with the larger task of survival, they outsourced day-to-day childcare to slightly older children, relatives, and hired help — particularly in Europe. This kind of communal child-rearing, known as alloparenting, was largely impromptu. When no one else was handy, parents relied on full-body swaddling to keep infants safely immobile. Sometime after the Middle Ages, however, more-formal institutions emerged. In France, a network of placement bureaus dispatched infants to live with wet nurses in the countryside until they were two or three (or sometimes as old as seven). Of the 21,000 infants born in Paris in 1780, for example, 17,000 were dispatched to country wet nurses. Things were different in America. Because of their religious beliefs, and because there were fewer resources than in Europe, Puritan parents spent more time with their children than had ever been the norm. American parenting was largely overseen by fathers, as women weren’t considered trustworthy enough to steer children’s moral development. To historian C. John Sommerville, the Puritans were “the first modern parents”; to anthropologist David F. Lancy, “the first anxious parents.” In any case, they were invested and involved (albeit with a great deal of help from servants and enslaved people). The Industrial Revolution brought major changes to America and Europe, however, as men spent longer hours at work and women took charge of the kids — or increasingly hired nurses and nannies to. The popularity of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management suggests how common this was — the 1861 best seller told mothers not what to do themselves, but how to instruct the staff. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visits the childcare school of Vassar in 1933. (Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images) By the late 19th century, American parents were again encouraged to do much of the parenting themselves. Families were smaller and children became, in sociologist Viviana Zelizer’s phrase, “emotionally priceless” creatures whose care was too important to outsource. The 20th century was to be the “century of the child,” and in Ellen Key’s 1900 book of the same name, she called on mothers to be “as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.” Unfortunately, this was not a paying gig. For the many women who still had to work, childcare options were few. A turn-of-the-century movement by philanthropic institutions to open day nurseries for low-income families helped some. But Black families were largely left out, as most programs were open only to whites. By 1930, there were only 40 day care centers for Black children in the entire country. There was little support for day care in general, and during the Depression a quarter of the privately funded centers closed. This was at least partly by design, as the federal Aid to Dependent Children program, passed in 1935, encouraged mothers to stay at home. Historian Mary Frances Berry argues that the Depression saw “a general assault” on childcare: If mothers were free to work, it was feared, they would take jobs away from men. Even in 1933, when the U.S. briefly offered a comprehensive childcare program for the first time in its history, as a Works Progress Administration venture, the goal was not to help working mothers but to create jobs for day-care staff. Still, it filled a vital need. With centers in almost every state, the program served tens of thousands of children in its first four years, though some locations were segregated. During World War II, the Lanham Act revived and expanded the program so that parents could join the war effort: fathers to fight and mothers to work. Over the course of the war, more than 3,000 Lanham Act day care centers served approximately 600,000 kids of all backgrounds. Centers were heavily subsidized, with the federal government covering 50% of operating expenses and local government funding much of the rest. Parents paid 50 cents a day (around $8 today). Some centers were open 24 hours a day, six days a week, to support parents in manufacturing, and they provided not only affordable care but also services such as grocery shopping, laundry, and meal prep. But the relief for working parents was short-lived; when the war ended, the centers were shuttered. Two boys at a Black Panther Party–sponsored program that offered free breakfast for children in New York City during the winter of 1969. (Photo: Bev Grant/Getty Images) The shutdown was unfortunate for working parents, coming right when the baby boom began. Families were less likely to live near relatives who might help. Live-in nurses were a thing of the past, and an expanded private day-care system, a thing of the future. With men back from the war, social norms and unions encouraged women to stay home, and the term “day care” all but disappeared from public discourse. Families who needed childcare were left scrambling, and some unexpected parties stepped in to fill the void. In California, the Black Panthers opened free day care centers for its “panther cubs.” A radical activist Puerto Rican group, the Young Lords, helped open day care centers in Spanish Harlem. In 1974, Vicki Breitbart’s The Day Care Book offered solutions including communes and group marriage. Meanwhile, TV would serve as alloparent for a generation of latchkey kids. For a brief moment in 1972, it looked like the U.S. might address the issue, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act to fund a national day-care system. But this would go nowhere. President Richard Nixon vetoed it as, essentially, communist: It would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over [and] against the family-centered approach.” Day care then moved to a quieter, less obvious site of U.S. policy making: the tax code. Bipartisan support produced the child and dependent care tax credit, which was ostensibly aimed at helping low-income families, but largely benefited their upper-middle-class counterparts. Dawn Sciabaras and her daughter, Torie, work on Dawn’s computer during Sears’s “Take Our Children to Work Day” on April 26, 2001. (Photo: Tim Boyle/Newsmakers/Getty Images) Over the next few decades, the private day-care system would expand dramatically as need was driven up by divorce and an increasingly female workforce. In 1950, 34% of women worked; in 1980, 52% did. The number of American preschool-age children in day care while their mothers worked full time rose from 6% in 1974/1975 (a U.S. Department of Commerce report combined data for the two years) to 26% in 2011. Today, day care is enormously expensive — often topping $10,000 a year for one family — and hard to come by. As Pew Research Center’s 2015 “Parenting in America” report noted, 62% of parents with infants or preschool-age children have a hard time finding affordable, high-quality childcare. And even when they find it, they may feel bad for relying on it. Of fully employed mothers who have small children, only 22% think that having a fully employed mother is what’s best for kids. In the 1980s some companies, like Patagonia, began offering on-site nurseries, recognizing that the lack of reliable, affordable care was a stressor for working parents. And yet few companies have followed suit; according to the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2019 Employee Benefits Survey, only 4% of U.S. companies offer subsidized on-site care. The 1990s brought working parents some relief, in the form of the Family Medical and Leave Act of 1993, which grants unpaid leave for family or medical issues like birth, adoption, or caring for a family member with a serious health condition. More companies are offering paid paternity leave (30% in 2019, up from 17% in 2015), which can increase the likelihood that new dads take time off. And since the 2010 Affordable Care Act, companies must provide the time (in the form of a break) and space (in the form of a room that is not a bathroom) to allow nursing mothers to express breast milk. With more parents working and focusing on professional achievement, the drive to be successful seemed to bleed from work into home. Increasingly, hands-on “soccer moms” and “helicopter parents” scrambled to burnish their children’s résumés. This era also included the publication of books like Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which promoted the concept of parenting with a laser focus on academic and musical success. Some parents looked for shortcuts, as the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal showed, with wealthy parents using fraudulent means to help their children get into top-tier universities. Seth, right, and Nicole Kroll work on their computers while their son, Louis, entertains himself at their home in Boston on April 14, 2020. (Photo: Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) Research shows the extraordinary hours and efforts parents put in at work and with their families at home haven’t seemed to benefit the children. They may not have been good for the parents, either: Since the 1970s, parents have reported significant levels of unhappiness. And as a recent study, led by Jennifer Glass of the University of Texas at Austin, shows, the “happiness gap” between parents and nonparents is bigger in countries where families receive less support in the form of policies like paid parental leave and subsidized childcare. (American parents will be unsurprised to learn that the happiness gap is largest in the U.S.) During a previous massive disruption to our country — World War II — a federal childcare system played a vital role in the country’s success. So, it’s troubling that the current crisis imperils the few options we currently have. The pandemic has raised day-care operating expenses by 47%, and an estimated 18% of childcare centers have closed since March. Women are disproportionately affected by these developments: Over 80% of those not working in order to care for children are female. Given that nature abhors a vacuum and loves an alloparent, this is an ideal time for a federally funded childcare program to emerge again to help working parents return to their jobs. Canada recently announced a major investment in childcare; let’s hope we’ll follow suit. In the meantime, working American parents can only hope for the best, mute the Zoom call during tantrums, and when a toddler spills her apple juice on us after we’re already dressed for work, try to view the sippy cup as half-full.

From Hands-Off to Helicopters

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