Joan Acocella looks at a a few books about child-rearing and explores the zeitgeist through the lens of our current parenting practices. The piece looks at the complex relationship between shifting behaviors, norms, and pressures, the products and services that emerge to serve them, and the medium- and long-term societal consequences. Fascinating stuff.
When the student goes off to college, overparenting need not stop. Many mothers and fathers, or their office assistants, edit their children’s term papers by e-mail. They also give them cell phones equipped with G.P.S. monitors, in order to track their movements. In Marano’s eyes, the cell phone, by allowing children to consult with their parents over any problem, any decision, any “flicker of experience,” has become the foremost technological adjunct of overparenting.
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Students provided with such benefits may study harder and, upon graduation, land a fancy job. On the other hand, they may join the ranks of the “boomerang children,” who move straight back home. A recent survey found that fifty-five per cent of American men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, and fourteen per cent between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, live with their parents. Among the reasons cited are the high cost of housing, heavy competition for good jobs, and the burden of repaying college loans, but another factor may be sheer habit, even desire. Marano and others believe that, while hovering parents say that their goal is to launch the child into the world successfully, the truth lies deeper, in some dark dependency, some transfer of the parent’s identity to the child.
