Upper-Middle Class American Parenting

The Annex Sociology Podcast examines an article in the New York Times Upshot’ discussing a high intensity parenting style. This parenting style constitutes of parents spending more time on hands-on child care that amount to five hours per week. Within this time, parents schedule their children to do crafts, attend musical lessons and games, read to their children and spend more time with homework help. This style is resource heavy, money heavy, and time heavy. But is not scheduling your kids in enriching activities disregarding them? The group compares free-range parenting and intensive parenting. Joe brings up a point of parent identities’ becoming more salient due to parents overlapping their worth to their parenting. Leslie shares her personal experiences of how she was raised in Brooklyn, NY, as well as to what her own parenting style is. Gabriel and Joe touch upon the difference of cultural capital and of a skill; which are children funneling their enriching experiences into? Hear us out and tell us what you think.

Discussants

Kristina Scharp is an Assistant Professor of Communications at the University of Washington. Her forthcoming articles include “Making Meaning of the Parent-Child Relationship: A Dialogic Analysis of Parent-Initiated Estrangement Narratives” in the Journal of Family Communication, and “‘You’re Not Welcome Here’: A Grounded Theory of Family Distancing” in Communication Research.

Joseph Nathan Cohen co-hosts The Annex and directs the Sociocast Project. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, Queens College. He wrote Financial Crisis in American Households: The Basic Expenses That Bankrupt the Middle Class (2017, Praeger) and co-authored Global Capitalism: A Sociological Perspective (2010, Polity). Twitter: @jncohen

Leslie Hinkson co-hosts The Annex. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. Her recent book is Subprime Health: Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine(2017 University of Minnesota Press).

Gabriel Rossman co-hosts The Annex. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the