The Playdate: Parents, Children and the New Expectations of Play

"We talk about ‘helicopter parents’ a lot, this idea of parents hovering over their children. That book is sort of a study of The Real Helicopter Moms of New York City . It’s an ethnography, as well as including some personal elements – because she is a parent of a child in New York City right now, engaged in the same sort of concerted cultivation practises that she’s talking about. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It really clarified for me where this helicopter mom-thinking is coming from and how much anxiety is tied up in it, and how much in practise it really resembles known patterns of Neoliberalism. So removing playtime from the park, and putting it at some play centre that you pay for is really, really textbook enclosure behaviour. She uses this language, it’s not a connection I’m making: this commons of social development and of child sociality that is a commons, a resource that belongs to everyone, and the social forces that are compelling richer families to enclose that commons and how it’s happening. I think she gives a really compelling account of how that works, practically, psychologically, materially, from a lot of different angles. Definitely have been parented. I think it’s a little too early to say what will be the dominant Millennial parenting style. I do, because I think those are the people who create society, in a way. Those are the people in whose image American society is created. So even though most people don’t do that kind of parenting, it’s not average, nor is it necessarily desirable, but it is considered the standard now because those are the people who make television shows, for example, or movies or the laws. So, as I talk about it in the book, parents who emphasize kids playing on their own and developing their own social ties based on their interests or feelings rather than their parents’ perceptions of their economic interests find themselves not just socially excluded but even at risk for criminalization. Well, if you let your nine-year-old go to the park to play by themselves, there’s a chance that you will be arrested. It’s one of the ways you can distinguish our cohort from past ones – we have a significantly lower baseline of social trust. And it makes sense. If everything is structured around competition, how can you trust anyone not to take advantage of every opportunity they have? “If everything is structured around competition, how can you trust anyone not to take advantage of every opportunity they have?” We’re raised with this idea that if you don’t do it, somebody else will. If you don’t take it, somebody else will. Whatever advantage you have, you better take it while you can because there’s a big race. How in that environment do you develop social trust? You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t trust people. It’s adaptive. It’s in your interest not to trust people."