The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it's pretty successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults.
Jennifer Senior, who chronicled intensive parenting in "All Joy and No Fun," attributed the guilty feeling that parents — mothers especially — can't spend enough time with their children to a nostalgia for the past and a continuing ambivalence about working mothers.
Triple P works at multiple levels, ranging from media and communication strategies (TV, Web, radio, newspapers) to brief individual consultations and group sessions to intensive parenting and family interventions for serious difficulties.
Low-income mothers, who have traditionally not been associated with time-intensive, middle-class "helicopter parenting," Milkie said, not only have more financial and day-to-day stress, but may also feel stressed that they don't have the resources to keep up with intensive parenting expectations.
"There are a lot of cultural pressures for intensive parenting — the competition for jobs, what we think makes for a successful child, teenager and young adult, and what we think in a competitive society with few social supports is going to help them succeed," Milkie said.
This pilot project will evaluate the efficacy of an intensive parenting intervention, (NOURISH; Nourishing Our Understanding of Role modeling to Improve Support and Health), targeting racially diverse parents of overweight children (ages 6 11).
Although China represents a very different cultural and institutional context, North American forms of intensive parenting may have a counterpart in the enormous investments financial, time, and emotional that Chinese parents have made in their (usually) only children's education and development.
These days, "intensive parenting," "natural parenting," and "attachment parenting" are generating a lot of attention and controversy.
We've got to stop the culture of intensive parenting that pushes us to do some seriously crazy shit.
