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Childhood became resume-building
Where it started
Researchers coined the term intensive parenting in the 1980s for parents who manage their children's lives, track what they do, worry about the effects of this and that, and gear their lives toward the most expensive college they can get into. At first it was mostly a practice of very wealthy, successful parents who could afford to hire help. By the 1990s it was spreading to people who could afford neither the money nor the time its prescriptions demand, and who felt guilty when they couldn't do it.
Inequality's role
One factor in the spread is the widening gap between rich and poor that began in the 1980s, with the decline of labor unions and tax changes that favored the rich. Two economists compared nations over time and found that the greater the gap, the more parents believe they must put their children on a track to good jobs. That belief includes hard work in childhood, doing well in school, and excelling at extracurriculars, so childhood becomes a time of resume-building with the parents in charge of building it.
College pressure
The pressure reaches beyond grades. At elite colleges where every applicant has a 4.0 and top SAT scores, the colleges look at what students do outside school, such as which clubs they preside over and which sports teams they star on. Kids then feel pressure to join all of it and to perform in all of it.
Why does inequality push parents toward intensive parenting?
Economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, in their 2019 book Love, Money, and Parenting, argue that where the payoff from education is large and the gap between winners and losers is wide, parents shift toward hands-on, achievement-focused styles. Garey Ramey and Valerie Ramey, in a 2010 paper called The Rug Rat Race, reported that time spent on childcare by college-educated parents in the United States rose from the mid-1990s. They tied the rise to competition for college admission.
How did colleges start weighing activities outside class?
Sociologist Jerome Karabel traces the history in his 2005 book The Chosen. He describes how Harvard, Yale, and Princeton introduced admissions criteria in the 1920s that weighed character and extracurricular involvement alongside exam scores. Admissions offices today still describe their review as holistic, looking at a student's whole record.
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