that the busy schedules might pay off “job-wise” but expressed serious reservations: “I
think he is a sad kid”; “He must be dead-dog tired.”^129
Elite college admissions officers agree. A group convened at Harvard asked admissions
officers to allow space on applications for no more than four extracurricular activities,
and “applications should state plainly that students should feel no pressure to report more
than two or three substantive extracurricular activities.”^130 Pretty weak sauce, but
evidence that performance pressure on elite kids has gotten out of hand.
The all-consuming nature of elite parenting—typically synonymous with “elite
mothering”—comes back to bite women of the professional class, and not just in the form
of exhaustion. Remember the study of elite law firms in the previous chapter? The one
that found elite men are vastly more preferred for jobs than nonelite men? The same
study found that the reverse is true for women. While the female job applicants in their
study didn’t get nearly as many callbacks as the elite men, the nonelite women got more
callbacks than the elite women. Class privilege helps men at work; it seems to hold
women back. Why? Because elite women are seen as a “flight risk,” people who will opt
out of work to engage in the all-or-nothing elite battle to get their kids into a top college,
to start the cycle of competition and achievement over again.^131
Concerted cultivation is a strikingly recent phenomenon. Both my mother (b. 1918) and
my mother-in-law (b. 1923)—one affluent, one working class—thought my generation
was truly crazy. My childhood is captured by the wonderful Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books
published in the late 1940s and 1950s. These charming books tell the story of Mrs.
Piggle-Wiggle, an expert at curing children’s misbehavior. Mothers focus their attention
on adult things while kids engage in unstructured play. No mother is ever depicted
playing with her children. Nor do children expect to be entertained; they do an endless
stream of errands and chores for adults and are sent outside to entertain themselves. Only
one, a spoiled rich kid, has any organized activities: a piano lesson.
That’s how I was raised, and how nonelite kids are raised today. In contrast, Lareau
found that in the elite families she interviewed, kids expected adults to schedule their
time and spent “a significant amount of time simply waiting for the next event.” Lareau
concludes that Tyrec, a nonelite child she featured in her study, “needs no adult
assistance to pursue the great majority of his plans.” Because his group of neighborhood
friends “functions without adult monitoring, he learns how to construct and sustain
friendships on his own,” something elite kids rarely do. The informal play allowed
nonelite kids “to develop skills in peer mediation, conflict management, personal
- Why Don’t They Push Their Kids Harder to Succeed?