WHY ARE HELICOPTER PARENTS SO NERVOUS?

The most plausible explanation I’ve heard is that we got richer, and richer people can expend more effort protecting their kids. This certainly jibes with the observation that the most obsessively overprotected kids are the children of the affluent. Yet even this explanation raises a sort of “yes, but.” We haven’t gotten that much richer in the 30 years since I was in school, and yet parenting has undergone a radical transformation. Despite legions of women going back to work, parents spend more time with their children than they did a few decades ago. Can we really explain this in terms of people getting richer? Intensive parenting is most common among the group of parents who are working more hours than they used to, not fewer; from that fact, and their increasing incomes, I’d predict that they’d be paying other people more to supervise and manage their children, not to hear that they were doing so themselves.

So while the economic explanation rings true, “we got richer” doesn’t seem to be enough. Rather, we have to look at the specific way in which we got richer. Specifically, we need to look at the rise of the extensively educated professional class.

One of the things you might notice about novels from the 1950s and 1960s is how many of the affluent people in them are engaged in trades like selling insurance, manufacturing some dull but necessary article, or running a car lot. These people are rarely the heroes of the novel (even then, writers found it much easier to imagine themselves as doctors or lawyers or, for that matter, as rough-hewn working-class types than as regional office-supplies distributors). But it is telling that those novelists took for granted that the writers and professionals would be intermingled with the makers and sellers, something that comes across as distinctly odd to the residents of the modern coastal corridors. Few of my friends even run a budget outside their own households, much less a profit and loss statement, and very few indeed have ever gone on a sales call.

Our elites have declined in quality. But there’s more to it than that. Read the whole thing.