19 November 2008
The Child Trap Also Threatens Our Security
One reason for the rise of overparenting described in a collection of books reviewed by Joan Acocella in the November 17, 2008 New Yorker is that adults, the supposed victims of this “child trap”, have come to believe life is a zero-sum game. The “sheer selfishness” of these parents and the children they rear, which Hara Estroff Marano points out in “A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting,” leads naturally to the decline of altruism in the motivations of college students that Madeline Levine describes in “The Price of Privilege.”
The teacher who tells Richard Arum, “It all depends on who you grab,” in “Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority,” has learned that the best way to achieve order in the classroom is by abandoning the middle class pupils and directing attention to the kids near or below the poverty line. Relying on the instinctively altruistic lower income classes may also be the best way to preserve society’s ability to benefit from positive collaboration. Is it really alarming, as Steven Mintz claims in “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood,” that the percentage of poor children in America is greater today than thirty years ago? While the middle class, in its zero-sum game rat race, has limited the size of its families so they have more to share with each other, the lower classes split their more meager incomes among larger numbers of offspring who aren’t compelled to put the goal of material gain ahead of excellence for its own sake.
Our real worry should be that the selfishness of our wealthy society will not invite another impulsively violent reaction from a less advantaged corner of the world. And it will not necessarily come only from Islamic fundamentalists.
One reason for the rise of overparenting described in a collection of books reviewed by Joan Acocella in the November 17, 2008 New Yorker is that adults, the supposed victims of this “child trap”, have come to believe life is a zero-sum game. The “sheer selfishness” of these parents and the children they rear, which Hara Estroff Marano points out in “A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting,” leads naturally to the decline of altruism in the motivations of college students that Madeline Levine describes in “The Price of Privilege.”
The teacher who tells Richard Arum, “It all depends on who you grab,” in “Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority,” has learned that the best way to achieve order in the classroom is by abandoning the middle class pupils and directing attention to the kids near or below the poverty line. Relying on the instinctively altruistic lower income classes may also be the best way to preserve society’s ability to benefit from positive collaboration. Is it really alarming, as Steven Mintz claims in “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood,” that the percentage of poor children in America is greater today than thirty years ago? While the middle class, in its zero-sum game rat race, has limited the size of its families so they have more to share with each other, the lower classes split their more meager incomes among larger numbers of offspring who aren’t compelled to put the goal of material gain ahead of excellence for its own sake.
Our real worry should be that the selfishness of our wealthy society will not invite another impulsively violent reaction from a less advantaged corner of the world. And it will not necessarily come only from Islamic fundamentalists.
Comments:
Post a Comment
