Intensive mothering and intensive parenting (Hays)
A cultural standard that says good parenting, mainly by mothers, is ‘child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive’, in Hays’s words. It asks parents, and mothers above all, to put the child’s needs first in time, money and attention, even as mothers are also expected to work for pay.
What drives it
The standard sets a bar that leaves every parent short of it, and it hides the cost by calling it love. Useful for identification because a parent’s exhaustion or guilt may come from the standard more than from their own child, and naming the standard lets them see it as a choice their culture made.
How it shows
Work
Taking calls about the school fundraiser during a client meeting. Turning down work so as to drive between three after-school activities. Using every day of leave for the children’s needs.
Relationships
Feeling judged at the school gate for a store-bought birthday cake. Partners who argue over enrichment classes they can’t afford. Grandparents who say ‘we just let you play outside’.
Self
Notice how many hours this week went to the children’s schedule, which of them you chose, and what you are afraid would happen if you did less.
What tells it apart
Overparenting (helicopter parenting): Intensive parenting is a cultural standard about how much parents should give. Overparenting is a style of doing too much for a particular child. A parent may hold the intensive standard and still give the child room.
Parenting styles (Baumrind): Baumrind’s styles describe warmth and control in one family. Intensive parenting describes what a whole culture expects, which may push any style toward more time and money.
Unrelenting standards/hypercriticalness schema: An unrelenting standards schema is personal and shows in every area of life. The pull of intensive parenting is more likely cultural when the parent feels it only around the children and among other parents.
A test
Ask where the parent learned what a good parent does, and what would change if they dropped one activity or one sacrifice. If the main fear is being judged by other parents, the intensive standard could be doing more of the work than the child’s needs.
Questions to carry
- Which of this week’s activities did my child ask for, and which did I sign up out of fear?
- What do I believe would happen to my child if I gave them less of my time?
Go deeper
- Read: The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child, Alan E. Kazdin with Carlo Rotella, 2008. Written for parents by a Yale psychologist who spent decades testing parent management training: praise and small rewards for the behavior a parent wants to see, built up in small steps. That approach has many controlled trials behind it with children referred for defiance and aggression, though Kazdin's own 1997 review said questions remained about how large, wide and lasting the effects are. The book itself does not walk through the studies. It carries the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies' Self-Help Seal of Merit.
- Study: Parental Burnout Around the Globe: a 42-Country Study, Isabelle Roskam, Moïra Mikolajczak and 93 others, Affective Science, 2021. Asked 17,409 parents in 42 countries, 71% of them mothers, the same burnout questions. Rates differed sharply between countries and ran higher where the culture is more individualistic, as in much of the West. Individualism counted for more than income inequality or the number and age of children. Most countries found parents through convenience or snowball sampling, so no country's figure stands for all its parents, and a survey taken once can't show that culture causes burnout. Free to read.
How strong the research is
moderate. Hays based the idea on child-rearing manuals by Spock, Leach and Brazelton, on history, and on interviews with 38 US mothers of mixed class and race backgrounds. In 181 US mothers of children under six (Rizzo, Schiffrin and Liss, Journal of Child and Family Studies, 2013), believing women are the essential parent went with lower life satisfaction, and believing parenting is very hard went with more stress and depression. A vignette study of more than 3,600 US parents (Ishizuka, Social Forces, 2019) found most rated intensive parenting as very good or excellent, across income and education. These studies are cross-sectional and mostly from the US.
Where it comes from
Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, Yale University Press, 1996. ‘Concerted cultivation’ is Annette Lareau’s term from Unequal Childhoods, 2003