You really, really, really MUST read this article from the Wall Street Journal on how the rich are outsourcing all routine parenting duties, including potty training. It’s a free link. And, above all, read the comments.
One snippet:
One nanny isn’t cutting it anymore. Wealthy working parents like Landis are employing teams of people to handle the work of raising their children, including specialists to potty-train their toddlers, teach their kids to ride a bike, manage school applications and pack their trunks for summer camp. Call it CEO parenting: treating the modern family as a small enterprise and delegating low-joy tasks.
And here’s a good one:
Seth Norman Greenberg, vice president of the household-staffing firm Pavillion Agency, said that he once placed a caregiver for a family practicing diaper-free parenting, expecting staff to read infant cues and rush the baby to the bathroom in time.
Want some cost estimates?
Potty-training consultants, who work intensively with toddlers over several days, charge anywhere from $600 to $4,500. Private bike-riding lessons, the kind of thing many parents handle on a Saturday afternoon, can run $80 to $450 per session. Don’t want to pack your kids up for summer camp? You can hire someone for $125 an hour. For families who want full-time dedicated staff, a travel nanny costs $120,000 to $170,000 a year; a private governess, a tutor who blends academics with social development, can today reach $200,000.
The rationale behind this? These high-powered parents can then design their encounters with their offspring in such a way that they are “high-impact” moments only—no boring, routine stuff for them.
Sigh.
Now, I will never, ever consider myself a particularly good mother—I’m a self-described utter failure at being a suburban housewife, never even once served as a “room mother” for a classroom and one who likely set the record for missing the most PTA meetings ever in my community during the years my three sons attended the local schools. I think I made one. Total.
Plus, I started graduate school when my youngest started first grade and, yes, it is true, they did spend some time as the often reviled “latchkey kids,” alone in the house after school when I had late afternoon classes and especially after I went back to work.
I’m a terrible cook, indifferent housekeeper, ignorant of home design or fashion trends, and the only household chore I ever excelled at was laundry—and I still like to iron.
But I loved being around my sons. Not necessary to play with them—I was no good at that either. But being in the same space with them, listening to them interact, watching them explore the world and seeing glimpses of it through their eyes, observing their minds expand, and their souls develop—all this was a source of endless joy. And those times cannot be planned, be “maximized,” be delivered on order.
They happen as part of living in the same house, bumping into one another, dealing with the inevitable irritations and unexpected joys, cooking, cleaning and taking care of necessary routine activities together. As I remember it, some of the very best conversations took place in the car where the kid who first called “shotgun” sat in the front seat with me, and I would often hear the most amazing thoughts and unique connections emerging from those ever-fascinating brains.
How can you plan the moments when the boys are all endlessly singing, “beans, beans, what a wonderful fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot,” and then laughing uproariously at the next odorous fart that emerges on a cross-country car trip? Or when I’d see the older boys take their youngest brother in hand and teach him some necessary skill for survival? Or when, during our “thirty-minute” cleanup routine where all four of us clean an assigned area as thoroughly as possible for one 30-minute period, they decide to put on a recording of The Three Tenors at the highest possible volume as a background to their work?
And yes, parenting is exhausting, draining, and expensive. Sleepless nights are the norm; the little ones do get sick; “worry” becomes our middle names. Having only a nuclear family structure does not work well. For most of human history, the tasks of childraising were shared among multiple family members, with more than one generation and a random assortment of relatives making up “normal” households.
Personally, I think the lack of ways to support parents is part of the reason for the scary drop in birth rates—it has simply become impossible to manage it without a larger community to share the load.
The very rich have, of course, always outsourced such tasks to outsiders: private boarding schools, in-house nannies and governesses are the norm, not the outlier. So this article actually describes nothing new, but the idea that these high-powered, fully “maximized” individuals think they can snap their fingers and create intimate, memorable times with their children in their weekly scheduled three-hour time slot is beyond ridiculous.
Frankly, I will always consider myself lucky that I didn’t have those kinds of resources when I was rearing my sons. But I did have a mother who stepped in to help me keep my sanity when I needed it, and I could not have managed without her. She also had her mother, who lived with us for my entire growing-up years, and who made her life manageable.
As a society, it is imperative that we make changes so ordinary people can both savor the joys of parenthood AND actually survive it at the same time. That’s the real issue—we don’t need to outsource parenting; we need to make it possible—and we have moved in the opposite direction.
What are your favorite parenting memories? Could you have planned them? How can we better support parents?
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