“Intensive Parenting Is (Probably) Incompatible with Having Many Kids” by Ivana Greco was part of an essay series on the unique challenges of parenting in wealthy Western nations. Here is an excerpt from Ivana’s insightful essay on the trend of so-called “intensive” parenting:
Recently, I was taken aback when a mom on a local Facebook group vented about a group of people she thought shouldn’t be parents: those who couldn’t pay for their kids’ college education and put a down payment on their kids’ first houses. As is typical for moms on social media, this elicited plenty of angry controversy. Some chimed in to label the mom who posted elitist, while others agreed that good parents have plenty saved to support their kids in the transition to adulthood. I was in the former camp. It can’t be the case that only upper-middle-class Americans should have kids, I thought. Surely, the standard for good parents these days isn’t the ability to fully pay for college and then help their adult children buy a home? Obviously it’s wonderful when parents can do this, but we aren’t considering that the only good way to parent, right? And yet … this mom’s complaints are part of a larger trend in the United States toward intensive parenting.
Intensive parenting is a hot topic. It is also a squishy term. What is intensive parenting? Sociologists usually define it as “time-intensive, child-centered parenting, particularly for mothers and among middle-class parents.” Intensive parents often see themselves as engaged in a fierce competition to secure the best of everything for their children, so as to secure a successful future in a cutthroat world. Perhaps the archetypical example of an intensive parent is Amy Chua, who wrote the best seller The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Professor Chua, who teaches at Yale Law School, wrote about the high-pressure techniques she used to raise two tremendously successful daughters. Famously (or infamously, depending on your perspective), Ms. Chua told one of her daughters practicing piano: “If the next time’s not PERFECT, I’m going to TAKE ALL OF YOUR STUFFED ANIMALS AND BURN THEM!”
After a brush with death, Ms. Chua says she has some regrets: “the things I regret more are the harsh things I said to them and losing my temper.” Overall, though, she says she’s glad she engaged in intensive parenting: “most of it was worth it. I look around and see kids of twenty-five, twenty-eight, and some of them still live at home and don’t have jobs.” A very uncomfortable truth about intensive parenting is … it works. An essay in The Atlantic summed it up in a title: “Stop Pretending That Intensive Parenting Doesn’t Work.” The essay notes evidence that demonstrates intensive parenting “can mean a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars in future income.” While acknowledging that wealth does not equal happiness, the essay concluded that because income is so strongly tied to health and happiness, “[i]f you want to raise a happy and healthy person, intensive parenting works.”
I don’t disagree that intensive parenting “works,” in the sense that it makes it more likely that a child will “win” the race of travel sports, cheerleading competitions, and college acceptances. But we still should reject it. Why?
Read the rest of Ivana’s essay here.
The rest of the series is linked here.
In his essay “Anti-Semitism: Grave Sin and Civic Cancer,” George Weigel writes:
As my children will happily confirm, I am something of an ignoramus when it comes to popular culture, which means I am something of an ignoramus when it comes to the swift changes that our ever-malleable English language undergoes. Thus, it took me the better part of six months to finally get what “woke” means. And it was only a few weeks ago that I finally understood the image of moving or opening the “Overton Window”: an image for expanding the range of acceptable political language and ideas in order to advance a particular agenda. With my new knowledge of Overton Windows at hand, let me conclude by saying this: The Overton Window with respect to anti-Semitic language, tropes, images, and concepts has been opened far too wide over the past several years and it is our solemn duty to slam it shut.
It is our patriotic duty to our country, whose already-fragile civic culture is being further weakened by the Jew-haters, who are also making true learning difficult if not impossible in many institutions of higher learning.
It is our civic duty to our fellow citizens of the stock of Abraham, who, not without difficulty, have nonetheless been fully participant in the American democratic experiment for centuries, as witnessed by George Washington’s 1790 “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island,” in which the first president affirmed (in a reference to Micah 4:4) that, in the new nation, “every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
And for the Christians among us, it is our religious duty to those whom John Paul II called, at the Grand Synagogue of Rome, our “elder brothers” in faith.
Let us do our duty. Let us slam shut and then nail shut the Overton Window on anti-Semitism and thereby help give our country a new birth of freedom rightly understood.
Matthew X. Wilson shares a reasoned take on why young men are struggling:
Right-wing young men see a politics and culture that celebrates every identity but theirs, cultivates a totalitarian ideological culture that directly undermines their beliefs, desires, and life goals, and is set to leave them significantly worse off—socially, economically, culturally, spiritually—than their grandparents. Any successful attempt to reach these young men will need to seriously address these deeply rooted sentiments.
Read his full essay, “How to Take Disaffected Young Men Seriously,” here.
“The Fuentes Fallacy” by Spencer Klavan in Fairer Disputations:
[W]hen people describe Fuentes as a misogynist—which he is—or a racist—which he also is—those otherwise apt descriptors ring like the hollow pejoratives they have become after being so recklessly over-used for so long. They give Fuentes license to maintain that he’s being “canceled” for “just asking questions.” The right-wingers he courts are the ones most likely to be drawn in by this claim, because so many of their fellows really have been viciously calumniated for sincerely asking questions or acknowledging sensitive facts. “Now I’m being canceled by the Right,” Fuentes told Tucker—and when Tucker was in turn criticized for giving Fuentes such a sympathetic interview, he too positioned himself as a victim of right-wing cancel culture.
“Carl Schmitt: A Window into the Postliberal Id” by Thomas D. Howes in Civitas Outlook:
Unfortunately, the intellectual history Schmitt uses to link personal sovereignty with traditional Catholicism is shallow and questionable. It was not deism that desacralized politics so much as Christianity itself; it did this by recognizing a dualism between God’s kingdom and the earthly realm, what Augustine called the “City of God” and the “City of Man”—foreshadowed by the Stoic belief in two commonwealths, the civic polity and the broader world. Schmitt’s model, however, aligns more with that of the son of “god” (i.e., Caesar, what Augustus called himself) than with the Son of God, Jesus, whose kingdom, unlike Augustus’s, “is not of this world.”
“What Is Postliberalism, Anyway?” by Ross Douthat in The New York Times:
The only thing I feel sure of is that there has to be some form of synthesis, some incorporation of insights currently in conflict, some vision that stands a little bit above the current battle lines. And that any ideology, liberal or post-liberal, that feels certain of its prescription right now is doomed to see 21st-century reality slip further from its grip.
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