These high-end recreations are dead giveaways as to just which parents are being described. To be sure, elite parents do watch television with their children, stay in touch by texting, reward their children’s every effort and involve themselves in the minutiae of their children’s lives. And, to be sure, these links remain firm even when their children leave the nest for college. The privileged students at Middlebury College communicate with their parents more than ten times per week, mutually desired contacts which are initiated relatively equally by the students and their parents. But my study of a broader socio-economic range of parents revealed vivid class differences in parenting styles. If the elite can be described as “helicopter parents,” those with fewer resources follow a very different parenting style. The don’t say yes all the time; they use technologies of connection to make sure their children are where they are supposed to be rather than to share the latest intimacy; they block television programs they find offensive; and they place filters on computers to control access to the internet. In short, they place clear limits on their children’s activities. In a context of limited resources of time and money, anxieties about just what to order at Starbucks and how to feel okay about a loss at soccer give way to worries about how to keep children safe and how to make ends meet.

If the article gets it right with respect to some aspects of an upper middle-class style of “helicopter parenting,” it also utterly misleads. Intimacy, permission, praise and sharing do not mean that these elite parents “tend to avoid exerting parental control.” To the contrary: these are new, and intense, mechanisms of management and manipulation. Take all this watching television together — the centerpiece of the article. One upper middle class mother I interviewed was explicit about why she engaged in this practice: by watching with her children, she said, she could “project [her] values on them” and explain and interpret the characters’ words and behavior. Shared television viewing becomes a way to gain access to what it is that children think and feel, enabling ongoing, personalized control. Parents who are grooming their children to gain admission to selective colleges and to be winners in the race to the top feel a need for this sort of intimate control. Small wonder that these same children, subsequently, phone home to get parental approval for course selection in college, send assignments home to be edited by their fathers, and share the details of their latest romance with their mothers.

All parents want what’s best for their children, and all parents want to mold their children. Under the guise of sharing and intimacy, the intensive parenting strategy of the elite offers special opportunities to monitor, intervene in, and promote children’s progress. Elite parents have not relinquished the parental role, however much they act like their children’s buddies. They are buddies with agendas. And characterizing all parents as if they follow the practices of the elite ignores the very real and very different struggles of those more numerous but less visible parents a step or two down the socio-economic ladder.

Margaret K. Nelson
Middlebury, VT 05753

Margaret Nelson teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. She is the author of Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times (NYU Press, 2010).