The Parental Arms Race Needs to End
Recently, in these pages, Ivana Greco made her pitch for why parents should opt out of the escalating arms race around parenthood. Elizabeth Grace Matthew, in her contribution, similarly puts the onus on parents to make their lives easier by, well, acting like parents.
They are correct to make the case, but their solutions don’t go far enough. Just as parents who want to protect their kids from internet brainworms need state laws, not just individual actions, to improve the climate in schools, lowering the competitive pressures around parenthood may require systemic, in addition to individual, action.
To see why, let’s imagine a high-achieving, academically minded young man in the spring of 1966, one of the 1.32 million young men preparing to graduate from high school that year. He’s aiming high, inspired by the recently assassinated president’s stirring words about what he can do for his country, and wants to go to Harvard just like his political hero did. Given the Vietnam draft, Harvard’s admissions offices have seen quite a spike in applications, up by more than a third compared to the period before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
This young man would be one of six thousand applicants (all male, of course) gunning for a spot in the next year’s freshman class. After accounting for deferrals, waitlists, and other administrative niceties, the odds of getting into Harvard for our fresh-faced young man in the mid-1960s would be about one in three, the same odds of your rolling a five or six on a throw of the die.
Today, his grandson is applying to Harvard, competing to be one of the 1,675 lucky souls who eat their freshman year meals in Annenberg and dream of being funny in the pages of the Lampoon. The school has been coed for decades, and international students now take up one of every six seats. The number of applications has risen eightfold since the Vietnam era, to nearly forty-eight thousand last year, and the odds of being successful are now under five percent: the odds of rolling snake eyes with two dice.
Without sufficient dynamism, “success” in a meritocratic society feels like a reverse game of musical chairs: the number of chairs stays the same, but the number of players continues to rise. It’s harder today than it was in 1968 to get into Harvard, to get a spot on a Major League Baseball roster, or to buy an attractive three-bedroom house within commuting distance to a thriving American city, not because those conspiratorial elites took them from you, but because we haven’t expanded opportunities for success.
We could expand the Ivy League (M.I.T.-in-Flint still has a certain ring to it) or push to revalue what traits and characteristics we deem worth of esteem, as with the Manhattan Institute’s recent release of college rankings. We could expand the number of baseball teams (Mexico City, anyone?) and prioritize efforts to revitalize middle America. Part of the answer involves adding more chairs to the game of musical chairs, as well as, to push the analogy further than it can bear, helping some people recognize that their gifts are better suited to pin the tail on the donkey.
Until the incentives change, we must admit a certain logic to that of the self-avowedly “intensive” parent. “Helicopter parents” may be a cause of a culture in which achievement and status are given outsized weight, but they are also an effect. In a world where “success” is increasingly understood as zero-sum, we might have some empathy for today’s parents who are worried they are letting their kids down if they are not setting them up to succeed, even if that comes at a collective cost.
Elissa Strauss, author of the 2024 book When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, admits she “just might be an intensive parent,” partly because of the competitive pressures kids face in the real world. “[Intensive] parents are not doing a lot because of a psychological drive toward making sure their kids are the best of the best. They are doing a lot because society doesn’t do enough.” Greco would probably agree, acknowledging that high-intensity parenting “works” on its own terms, “in the sense that it makes it more likely that a child will ‘win’ the race of travel sports, cheerleading competitions, and college acceptances.”
That pressure seems to be felt most heavily by moms. In a 2022 poll conducted by YouGov on behalf of the Institute for Family Studies and the Ethics and Public Policy Center, we found that three in five moms said parenting today felt harder than it did a generation or two ago. Dads, on the other hand, were nearly as likely to say that parents today have it easier than they did in the 1970s.
It’s popular on the right to blame declining fertility on the “girlboss,” that too many women are going into the workforce and choosing career over children. The problem with this analysis is that the timeline doesn’t line up. The rise in female labor force participation largely occurred over a time period of gently-declining-to-roughly-stable fertility. This post–Great Recession drop in birth rates, on the other hand, is heavily concentrated among unmarried women, who have seen birth rates fall by over one-quarter, and marriage rates have been falling fastest among minority women and those without a college degree.
The “girlboss,” in other words, might get later in life than her predecessors, but many of them are still getting married and having a kid or two; it’s low-income women who are increasingly staying single and putting off childbearing. To put it another way, the share of college-educated women who have ever given birth has stayed flat since the late 1970s, while dropping by ten percentage points for those without a college degree. Marriage and parenthood are increasingly more correlated with college education, not less.
A new paper from the Brookings Institution’s semi-annual economics conference helps identify how the competitive pressures of the “rug rat race” are helping push birth rates down. The authors first identified the dynamic in the hypermeritocratic societies of East Asia, but find signs of that mindset taking root here as well. They find that counties with more upwardly aspirational residents, as measured by social media connections, have lower birth rates. Higher levels of social capital and social cohesion are also linked to lower fertility. And they find that the number of Advanced Placement exams—a commonly used proxy for localized academic pressure on students—“is strongly negatively correlated with state-level birth rates in recent years.”
As parenthood has transitioned from economic investment (hands on the farm, future earners to keep you out of poverty in old age) to more of a lifestyle good, it has picked up aspects of conspicuous consumption. People have children not for the dollars and cents, but for how their children’s accomplishments reflect back on them. And social media and the relentless desire to show off the Instagram-ready trophy shelf help put this impulse on steroids. In essence, parenthood is being put on a pedestal by, possibly, ballerinas on farms and others selling a highly curated parenting lifestyle or brand.
Intense competition among wealthy parents is nothing new; what’s new is that it’s no longer limited to the boarding school set. The authors specifically talk about Hispanic women, who have seen some of the sharpest declines in fertility relative to the pre-Recession trend. Take, say, a middle-class Hispanic woman who is fed unrealistic and unattainable parenthood trends featured on her algorithm, while also being fed a diet of social media’s usual instant gratification when it comes to wealth and consumption. Is it any wonder she might start to adopt the belief that parenthood is something best put off until it can be done well—or not done at all?
The absolute out-of-pocket costs of children aren’t what’s driving fertility decline; indeed, cross-sectional analyses show no visible link between oft-touted expenses like childcare costs and declining fertility. Instead, our decline in fertility is as much a product of affluence and increased opportunity as anything else. We should absolutely encourage parents to be, in Greco’s words, “good enough,” rather than perfect, and some of that will encompass some of Matthews’s prescriptions of discipline in things that matter (the type of person your child is becoming, that is, rather than the accomplishments they are capable of racking up). But we can also remove some of the incentives that reward such strenuous applications of parental energy and vigor.
Greco and Matthew, in their own ways, argue for a cultural shift that recognizes the escalatory and zero-sum nature of status competitions in parenting. We could experiment with other ideas on how to reduce the returns to excessive investment in youth activities. Should we consider an excise tax on youth sports leagues, or cigarette package-style disclosure on parenting magazines?
But we also need to tackle the other end of the spectrum, ensuring that even students who don’t take home the blue ribbon, the travel league championship, or the thick admission packet from a brand-name school have meaningful opportunities and chances to contribute and feel needed in their community.
Our efforts to make having a family easier in America should include aiming to reduce some of the anxiety around which bumper sticker proud parents can slap on the back of the SUV. This means creating more opportunities—in housing, in industry, in politics—to have a foothold, rather than trying to break into a stagnant and aging status quo. It includes exploring how to resurrect the economic vitality of middle-town America, breaking up the perceived hegemony of superstar cities, and making it possible for people to become a local elite, rather than looking to escape to New York or San Francisco as soon as possible. These goals may even end up leading to more babies, but at the very least, they would likely lead to a less stressful, more pro-family America.
Image licensed via Adobe Stock.