In the past couple of weeks, everyone and their mother is going on about two recent articles on parenting. The first, “Meet the Twiblings,” was a personal account by Melanie Thernstrom of reproduction as anxiety. The second, in the Wall Street Journal, was by Yale law professor Amy Chua on how “Chinese Mothers Are Superior” and is a study in reproducing anxiety.
Thernstrom, in her early forties at the time and married to a man five years younger, was
haunted by the thought that if we didn’t have children—even though he loved me and even though that love might blind him to the truth—in some sense marrying me would have turned out to be a mistake.
In other words, reproduction was necessary for her marriage to survive. And so she did what any other peri-menopausal but apparently quite wealthy woman would do. She found an egg donor, two surrogate mothers, took her husband’s sperm, and reproduced “twiblings”—i.e., twins who were outsourced to two different wombs. Needless to say, the whole article is anxiety producing: Adoption is impossible, but not having a child is equally impossible.
Chua too is a also a bundle of nerves. She is worried that her children will not be the smartest in their class, go to Ivy League schools, and reproduce her haute bourgeois lifestyle. And so she responds by not allowing them to have play dates or sleepovers, by not allowing them to watch TV or play computer games, and by not allowing them to decide what they will and will not spend their time and energy pursuing. In other words, they must be exact replicas of her wishes. This is why Chua gleefully recounts how she once forced her then 7-year-old daughter to sit at the piano, not even getting up to go to the bathroom, for hours upon hours until she was able to play the piece perfectly. The reason for this sort of parenting, according to Chua, is to produce
stereotypically successful kids … math whizzes and music prodigies…
Forget happy and kind adults. The point is to end up being a law professor at Yale, not some chillaxed yak-farmer in Vermont.
All of this reproduction anxiety is probably situated in the declining prospects for most Americans. No doubt the fact that 80 percent of us are worse off than we were in 1980 is making us worry more and more about our children. But the result of all this anxiety is NOT happy and well-adjusted adults. Today, NPR reported on a dramatic increase in college students suffering anxiety and depression. Ten percent more of them are taking anti-depressants than they were 10 years ago. According to the report, the reason that there are so many more college students suffering mental illness is because of
the success of treating younger high school-age students. Today, there are more effective public and private sector counseling programs for children. As a result, health experts say, more students with learning disabilities and emotional problems manage well during high school years and then go on to college.
Um, maybe. But maybe rather than effective psychological treatment, what we really have is a dysfunctional culture of parenting—whether “Chinese” style or “Western.”
The real problem is treating children as commodities, to be produced and then molded into success stories, where success is defined as a reproduction of upper and upper-middle-class lifestyles. Maybe people who reproduce from a place of utter terror and then reproduce that terror over and over again by treating their children as “projects” who must be forced to be successful (not happy or well), is a way of reproducing anxiety. And maybe rather than responding to diminished opportunities to be wealthy with anxiety, we could respond by re-imagining wealth not as “success” but as “time” and “creativity” and “connection to others.” But then again, telling your kids to be kind and good people wouldn’t motivate them to drive themselves crazy to get into the “right” college and get the “right” job. And that would be considered really bad parenting.
18 Responses to Reproducing Anxiety
record - January 17, 2011 at 9:23 am
Reimagining wealth is a powerful idea. Mortality makes time the real economy.
dank48 - January 17, 2011 at 10:55 am
Nice article. A quarter century ago I was an expert on child-rearing. Then our daughter came along.
It seems to me that the heart of the matter is the question Who is this about? Hint: it’s not about the parent(s).
trendisnotdestiny - January 17, 2011 at 11:17 am
dank48,
That is funny… truly funny comment about the difference between theoretical and applied knowledge…..
Dr. Essig, the title is well placed… also, I wonder if there is not some anxiety contagion effect that occurs where the competition to succeed in the global marketplace gets displaced onto many parents that would otherwise do things differently: isomorphism!
stinkcat - January 17, 2011 at 11:35 am
“No doubt the fact that 80% of us are worse off than we were in 1980 is making us worry more and more about our children.”
I like how Laurie turns this silly made up hypothesis into a “fact”. Are 80% of us worse off today than in 1980? Let’s see, most of us have more cable channels, access to cheap cell phone technology, bigger houses, higher quality health care and Laurie wants us to think it is a fact that 80% of us are worse off?
trendisnotdestiny - January 17, 2011 at 11:53 am
stink,
I think we can use other metrics like debt-to-equity ratio, average US retirement savings, % of home equity, and thousands of other economic indicators that clearly demonstrate that the late 1970′s were the end of the golden era of economics and the 1980′s brought in a new era of neoliberalism (which by is designed for capital accumulation and socialization of losses)….
Cable channels, flat screen televisions, bigger houses and higher quality healthcare- (more expensive) are not necessarily indicators of wealth. In fact, in each of these examples there is a huge majority of the US population that is unaccounted for…
You may not be worse off or you may not know how bad things really are, but I suspect you will cling to your own narratives that things just keep getting better…..
stinkcat - January 17, 2011 at 12:40 pm
“Cable channels, flat screen televisions, bigger houses and higher quality healthcare- (more expensive) are not necessarily indicators of wealth.”
I said nothing about wealth, what I was talking about was well-being. Laurie said that 80% of us are worse off than we were in 1980. Is housing quantity and quality a measure of wellbeing? If it is, then most of us are better off, because most of us live in bigger and higher quality houses today than we did in 1980. Does having access to inexpensive cell phones make us better off? If the answer is yes, then we are clearly better off because back then cell phones were practically nonexistent. For a lot of measures of wellbeing we are clearly better off.
Some of the measures are more debatable, such as a debt to equity ratio. Does a higher debt to equity ratio make us worse off, only if you assume that the people borrowing the money are stupid. If you assume people are smart enough to manage their own affairs then people will borrow more money when it makes them better off.
The main point however, is that if Laurie wants to suggest that we are worse off today than we were 30 years ago, she needs to prove it.
mainiac - January 17, 2011 at 12:58 pm
…Ovarian Anxiety of Influence meets Bourdieu? LOL
wbgleason - January 17, 2011 at 1:07 pm
Opinion and Ideas? Or at least that is what it says at the top of this page.
I don’t think that every sentence in a brainstorm piece has to be referenced. It is Laurie’s opinion that 80% of us were better off in 1980. I don’t think she’d have a very tough time getting a large fraction of us to agree with her.
I don’t use a cell phone or watch tv. The house I live in is smaller than the one I had in 1980. And the quality of my healthcare is certainly worse. In 1980 people of modest means could still buy a house. Thirty-nine percent of the jobs in Minnesota (Minnesota!) pay less than the a family supporting wage. Link: http://bit.ly/hJY4W0
I’m there with Laurie.
trendisnotdestiny - January 17, 2011 at 4:47 pm
Apparently stink,
The housing crisis, state and local budget defaults, and a jobless rate closer to 20%, thousands of Americans with offshore bank accounts and corporations report record earnings (while insolvent; relying upon the public backstop) has escaped your notice.
You might take a look at the systemic amount of debt that all segments of society have acquired since the repeal of glass-stegall and the Omaha decision allowing for the interstate transfer of interest rates (effectively changing the laws on usury): personal, familial, municipal, federal, and corporate.
In 1980, we had just gone from being the worlds’ largest creditor nation to the world’s biggest debtor nation in less than two years under Reagan… Having been an insider in the financial services industry during the latter part of this, the sole reason that markets appreciated the way they did from 1985-1999 is due to borrowed money pushing too few stocks. The 1990′s signify a time that borrowed money drove up stocks to point of generating a 32% ROR from 1991-2000….. Money doubles every 2-3 years (stock bubble leading to a real estate bubble); these types of abnormal returns are not ‘better off’ for families long term. They create an environment of risk-taking and risk-shifting behaviors that favors monopolistic institutions that have been preparing for the next grift (ala technology, real estate, oil, precious metals etc).
Or if this doesn’t satisfy you, you could look at the number of casinos of our culture; along with payday lenders, fraudulent accounting gimmicks, or number of belly-up banks from the years before and after 1980. These structural changes all point to a better time before 1980 and a saturation after….
In direct response to your vague attempt at redressing wealth or any metric, ‘bigger homes’ does not really reflect better off (as it would be pretty easy from 2004-2007 to purchase a bigger home via no-doc, ninja loans). But the question is would people be better off?
Also, a longstanding low interest rate environment drove housing prices up artificially to a point where the house became the asset; something never intended by a market that had historically grown by 2-3%/year began growing in the double digits. So a home purchased in 1980 may be ‘smaller’ but the owner may have more equity and less risk associated with default. In most families, this allows families to be better off (stable prices and less pressure to use it as investment)….. This whole conversation belies the fact that we have a high percentage of people in the last decade (above 15%) that have either filed for personal bankruptcy or had their home foreclosed. When you couple this with an historic period of job losses, it is not hard to glean that people may be struggling. While I am all for people being held to account for their actions, this is a larger systemic problem brought about my neoliberal economics; something widely and openly discussed by Laurie and her colleagues here.
In 1980, however, it was no picnic. Inflation and interest rates were in the high double digits (and petrodollars and global economic/socio-political factors were driving up the prices of commodities). However, this period of the neoliberal turn masks how the boom and busts were cover for removing the social safety net; a goal of industry and conservatives ever since the New Deal. The economic cycles of the late 70′s and early 80′s were characterized by inflationary pressures, true, but what we are about to enter now in this present era of tech gadgets, bigger homes and television is called hyper-inflation (where previous debt loads become too heavy causing default — see Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal etc…) Its coming to our shores. Stink, I do not believe you will be able to sell your TV or your bigger home when our currency is hyper-inflated (see QE1, QE2, & POMO). In the last month, physical silver sales have had their biggest increase in at least a decade. This does not bode well for the US dollar since (gold and silver are often used a back-up plan in case the dollar loses its status as world reserve currency and its ability to pay back its creditors (see the debt ceiling)….. Silver was at around $17 last year and has almost doubled in a year (all while having its price suppressed by JP Morgan). Why do you think that is? Brother or Sister, it is not because we are better off. Do your homework….
I appreciate anyones’ skepticism here as we all benefit but lets not shroud it parsed in willful ignorance…. Or maybe you are doing a lot better than most! Either way Laurie need not accommodate your speculation.
stinkcat - January 17, 2011 at 4:53 pm
Bill,
It could be that you are worse off today than you were 30 years ago. However, generalizing from yourself is a very bad thing to do. You may well live in a smaller house, but most people live in larger houses, otherwise the median house size would be going down rather than going up.
trendisnotdestiny - January 17, 2011 at 5:27 pm
stink,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/business/financial-crisis-in-europe/
swish - January 17, 2011 at 5:31 pm
Generalizing from yourself — including your observations of those immediately around you — is a bad thing to do.
If we see houses getting bigger, but fewer of them, replaced with condo and apartment buildings, does that affect the “median house size” in any way? If more people are renting those big houses, unable to afford to buy them, or perhaps sharing them with more people, does that count as being better off? If the larger house with lots of cable TV channels is one’s parents’ home, is that an improvement? If those bigger houses and the well-off people who live in them are all in neighborhoods like Stinkcat’s, does that make us all wealthier?
As you might guess, my observations make me believe that Americans are mostly worse off … and I’d say the difficulties began long before the fall of 2008. I know quite a few people with no cable, no flat screen TV, and no healthcare. However, my anecdotal evidence doesn’t prove any more than Stinkcat’s. Anyone care to provide some data?
dboyles - January 17, 2011 at 5:36 pm
Clearly, Chinese mothers have a set of methods by which to acculturate their children, while the US pharmaceutical industry thinks it has yet another.
“The point is to end up being a law professor at Yale, not some chillaxed Yak-farmer in Vermont.”
—Just what strategic practices would a Chinese mother resort to in order to create a successful yak-farmer?
“NPR reported on a dramatic increase in college students suffering anxiety and depression.”
—I thought antidepressants were to be like ADA legislation–bring people up to a functioning level, but from then on its all bets what will happen. Evidently, antidepressants aren’t even doing the former since anxiety and depression are yet rampant? Must be time for “Abilify.”
“As a result, health experts say, more students with learning disabilities and emotional problems manage well during high school years and then go on to college.”
–Is this because students are given false security earlier than they once were?
–Is the psychological assistance given students perhaps of no more value than that of either ADA or antidepressants? It takes only one person to change a light-bulb, but the light bulb really has to want to change. If it doesn’t a Chinese mother may do the trick.
kathrine9 - January 18, 2011 at 11:37 pm
I think anxiety parenting definitely needs to be addressed by parents. Helping a child to develop the skills to excel in life is applaudable, no doubt about that. But standing over a child 24/7 to ensure excellence in all things, (not to mention, deprivation of social contact), is, I think, a form of abuse. What I would like to know is how such a parent feels when their child doesn’t feel that they are perfect (ie ‘fails’ in something or makes some kind of ‘mistake’) and commits suicide? What does that do to the parents philosophy of excellence? Does it change at all? Would they have done anything differently?
copesan - January 19, 2011 at 2:50 pm
I am not sure how the most successful and affluent generation perhaps ever ended up being parents who cannot teach their children responsibility and manners. In particular, the college admissions process has become a sophisticated form of emotional child abuse.
elffuts - May 25, 2012 at 4:29 pm
…Kansas State Annual Academic Chairpersons’ Conference, in Orlando…
Ever heard the word boondoggle???
haroldfs - May 26, 2012 at 10:26 am
I was chair of a department of languages and literatures at a respected west-coast instituion, and I could have used some training, too. What I dreaded in advance was having to deal with budgets, but it turned out that I had no power to control the budget, so that wasn’t the problem. What I wasn’t prepared for was personnel issues, such as having to try to get a tenured professor to retire, and dealing with interpersonal rivalries between members of various areal sections of the department. Things like backstabbing, poison-pen letters and the like that I had no control over, which undermined morale and made people look foolish. After 5 years I was ready for a change.
awegweiser - May 27, 2012 at 11:59 am
Some considerable time ago I spent 5 years as chair of a department. Those times were relatively tranquil and things mostly went quite smoothly. Administrators were civilized and intelligent (mostly) and funds flowed adequately from a State not yet governed by cretins and dolts. Subsequently I wanted to go full time back to the classroom and let someone else deal with running things. Others then took the chair and it went rather well for a substantial time until one really nasty, unpleasant and vindictive person took charge and the backstabbing, etc, as mentioned above, started. Finally and thankfully he too left the stage for good. As emeritus I sit back now and look back at things as they were, as they became and now I will attempt to find out how they are now.