Extreme Parenting Practices Are A Result Of Anxiety Over Wealth Inequality

Extreme parenting is when parents spend gobs of money to try to get their children into the best schools and extracurricular activities. They push their kids to overachieve and be supercompetitive. This stems from the anxiety of losing status or never attaining it in the first place. Matthew Stewart says that the fear is primarily in countries that have intense wealth inequality.

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Stewart: The things that people are going through to you know get their kids into you know national fencing competition and you know to curate every experience of their lives and to protect them from all conceivable risks. I mean some of it, some of it can be helpful to kids but a lot of it just clearly isn't. A lot of it's driven by this overwhelming anxiety. So that's what drew me into it and there's a pretty short and simple analysis that I think explains most of it, not everything. It turns out that if you look at the sociological evidence across countries, countries that have high inequality tend to develop these kinds of extreme parenting practices. And then in countries where there's a greater degree of equality or a higher sense of fairness the parents take a somewhat more relaxed attitude. I don't think that means that they're bad parents. I just think it means that they don't feel that intense pressure to make sure that the kids move ahead. And I guess the final really important aspect of this is that for a small group of people in our society it can make sense. So if you are in that 9.9, maybe in the top two or three percent you can afford everything you need for supreme parenting. You know you can get the nanny and maybe you can pay for the private school and you can buy that you know of an educational holiday in the Galapagos or whatever it is that you need to make sure that the little one is the perfect child. but it's pretty unrealistic for most of American society. And that the problem is that a huge part of American society has bought into that value system but they don't have the money to pay for it. And there's this kind of unwillingness to recognize that we're setting up a model that's supposed to work you know in some fantasy land but won't actually work in real life.

Emma: There's also just I mean to be the narcissism of it is a little perplexing. Like my child needs to be perfect, you know there's a striving and that's why I guess you can categorize it as an aristocracy in that sliver of the population. like that there is like this idea to not just keep up with the Joneses but to present this your child almost has a human trophy of your wealth or your status I guess. and it's just not that way even though those same standards are applied to the rest of the population it's just not the way it's unfeasible.

Stewart: Yeah I know you said a couple of things that really get me worked out very interesting narcissism. First of all, let me just say in a general way there's plenty of evidence historically and culturally that suggests that there is a strong connection between these kinds of narcissistic disorders and rising inequality. because people understand that as the competition gets more intense and as it gets less fair they need to build up these identities then protect them. and so you get this kind of narcissism in this context. Then the other thing that you mentioned which is really critical to understand is social mobility so the backstory about the United States is that this is the land of the free. and you can make it if you try. and you know we're super mobile is the story. The facts are completely different because it turns out that our social mobility is substantially lower than that of many other countries other than other countries that historically have had that social mobility. so we're lower than most European countries, certainly lower than Germany and the Scandinavian countries. were lower than japan. we're lower than Canada. and a significant aspect of that is it turns out that the least mobile people of all are the people in the top 10 and in the bottom 10. And as far as the top 10 percent goes it's pretty straightforward how that's happened.