THE ESSAY: I Think I Might Be an "Intensive Parent"...
Here's why I am okay with it
Attention writers who mother and mothers who write! Next month I will be joined by the brilliant author Nicole Graev Lipson for a two-part writing workshop. We will explore how to capture the fullness of motherhood in our writing without falling into the fairy tale or nightmare trap. Free for all paid subscribers! Learn more here.
When everyone else is the intensive parent
It often feels like everyone thinks everyone else is an intensive parent.
Is it the crunchy parents, increasingly associated with conservatives in our cultural imagination, who homeschool, avoid vaccines, breastfeed until kindergarten, seek out alternative health remedies and make their own toys and clothes? Or those parents, often associated with coastal liberals, whose kids have color-coded schedules, all designed to ensure elite college degrees and professional success in the future?
Parents who send their kids to preschool or aftercare sometimes claim that those who don’t are the intensive parents because those parents are around their kids all the time. And parents who don’t send their kids to preschool or afterschool often claim that those who do are the intensive parents because those parents don’t let their children have unstructured time.
Are the “free-range” parents who go out of their way to cultivate highly-curated moments of independence for their kids the intensive parents? Or are they the opposite? Are data obsessed parents intensive? Or preventing unnecessary emotionally-driven anxiety with research? And what about screens? Do kids with intensive parents get more, or less, screen time? You tell me.
And then on top of all these lifestyle choices, we can factor in the affective experience of parenting when deciding who is and isn’t intensive. Are intensive parents the ones who are too psychologically indulgent, overly sensitive to their kid’s emotional states? Or the ones who closely monitor their kid’s outputs, re-doing school projects at 1 a.m. because their kid didn’t use a stencil when drawing Saturn’s rings or demanding they practice corner kicks before the upcoming soccer playoff?
Are intensive parents cold or hot? Stern or sensitive? Does physical proximity determine one’s intensity? Emotional proximity? Or is it a matter of how much control a parent has over their child’s life?
As I see it, this malleability of the “intensive parenting” label suggests a logical, practical and even moral emptiness — one that ultimately does harm to parents. Or maybe I am just saying that because, according to some of these truly all-over-the-place metrics, I just might be an intensive parent and feeling defensive. Read my self-assessment below!
The label “intensive parent” does more harm than good
First, let’s dive deeper into my gripe with the whole “intensive parenting” phenomenon. We’ve already established there is no fixed meaning to what being an intensive parent means. Now let’s explore why this frame hurts more than it helps.
Most often, I hear folks refer to “intensive parenting” in an attempt to liberate parents. The vibe is “you are doing too much and it is because the culture tells you to, but you could totally be doing less and it would be so much easier.” Often, intensive parenting is (unfairly IMO) linked to anxiety and depression among youth.
But here’s what I see happening; my critique is two-fold. One, when we call out parents for being intensive we are devaluing the really hard work that caring for kids demands. Two, when we call parents intensive we are ignoring the systems and broader culture that make parenting so more demanding than it needs to be. Overall, the intensive parenting frame devalues the inherent hard work of care, and the conditions that make unnecessarily difficult. But instead of recognizing either of these factors, we parents, mostly moms, are repeatedly told to just “chill out, man.”
Let’s start with problem number one, and one close to my heart. Real care is intensive! This notion that care should be easy and require little effort is directly related to how care has been diminished and sentimentalized in our patriarchal and independence-obsessed culture. All of our meaning-making systems have made care small, tidy, something that happens during commercial breaks, and not the big friggin’ plot line that it is. (Yes, I have said something along these lines before. It is the thesis of my book. Forgive me.)
Back in the day, parents parented in an authoritarian style—think father knows best. There were rules, and the rules had to be followed, and little room was made for the interior life of the child. Many people who grew up this way didn’t feel adequately cared for. Then came along (this is all a gross simplification but bear with me) permissive parenting, in which parents and kids lived separate but parallel lives and, once again, parents didn’t take much interest in the inner-lives of kids. Also once again, many people who grew up this way didn’t feel adequately cared for.
Both authoritarian parenting and permissive parenting are much easier than what came next, and what experts consider the best kind of parenting. This is authoritative parenting, and it is one that combines warmth and attention with structure and rules. Guess what is very hard—dare I say, intense—to execute in daily life? Authoritative parenting. It requires deep thought, a cultivation of authentic connection with the kid, structure and rules, but also flexibility when necessary. It is an ongoing process, deeply relational, there is no one-size-fits-all formula (sorry, parenting influencers), and what works today may not work tomorrow. Figuring out the balance between independence and dependence with one’s kids, recognizing their needs and your needs and the system’s needs is truly a deeply demanding, and, I’d argue, rich and meaningful, experience.
Now problem number two. When I asked some parents if they thought they were intensive parents I heard from a few who said yes, we all are, we drive our kids everywhere, our kids never play on the street or make plans with friends on their own etc. Now this is true for many parents today. But is “intensive parenting” really the correct label here?
The decline of children’s freedom is a response, in part, to the rise of working moms which is, overall, a good thing. I wish there were more after-school programs that replicated the unscripted, nostalgic, Jonathan Haidt-approved cul-de-sac experience for parents who can’t get their kids home from school midday, or believe their kids are too young to spend 3 plus hours alone. The decline in children’s freedom is also a result of inadequate number of kid-friendly parks, city streets that aren’t safe for young children to navigate on their own, public spaces that are not welcoming to kids, and, yes, a kids sports culture that really jumped the shark. (That last one is, to some degree, on parents for sure. But as we know, it only takes a few dedicated zealots to change the game for everyone else.)
Upshot: at least half of what we call “intensive parenting” should really be called “unintensive parental support” or some such phrase. The parents are not doing a lot because of a psychological drive towards making sure their kids are the best of the best. They are doing a lot because society doesn’t do enough.
The other parents I spoke to who concede to being kinda intensive are those who are concerned about college acceptance. But before you nod along, in recognition, disgust, or both, consider this for a moment. In the 1980s, the acceptance rate to U.C. Berkeley was around 50%. In 2009, it was around 22%, and in 2025 it was closer to 11%. And it’s not just Cal. All schools, up and down the prestige ladder, are harder to get into than they used to be. There is so much more to say about this, more than I have space for here, but this is all to say, it’s hardly just that parents are crazy and want, need!, to brag about where their kids got into college.
In journalism there is generally a paragraph about this point in an essay known as a “to be sure” in which the author anticipates and responds to potential reader resistance. Here’s mine. To be sure there are parents who are too damn intense about parenting and are making it much harder than it needs to be and sometimes ruining things for the rest of us. I have met a few. And that’s the point, a few. The rest of us are just trying to care well, and survive caring in less than ideal conditions. And, to go back where I started, if a huge range of parent choices and styles can be called out as “intensive parenting” then the diagnosis is too fuzzy to yield any useful prescriptions.
My intensive parenting self-assessment
I often ruminate about whether or not I am an intensive parent, and this sometimes turn into a decent source of guilt and some low-simmering shame considering how taboo being “extra” as a parent is these days. (Even, again, when the systems demand a lot of “extra.”)
Pulling from the wide-ranging taxonomy of intensive parenting styles, I am most guilty of deep emotional investment with my kids and being a hyper-scheduler. By emotional investment, I mean I am very aware of their moods, am interested in their personal lives, think about obstacles they may face and do some behind-the-scenes trouble-shooting for them. Yes, I let them fail. No I don’t ever get involved with social conflict, barring the one time my kid was being verbally harassed by a peer. But do I think a lot about their psychological well-being in both holistic and strategic terms? Sure do. Is it excessive? If my interpretation of the care ethics movement is correct, I am doing just fine. But if I tune into the corners of our culture that tell moms to just chill out, then yes, I am too much.
As for being a hyper-scheduler. Well, yes, we are kinda bursting at the seams time-wise. In addition to twice-a-week Hebrew school, which has been forced upon my kids by yours truly, my 12 year-old Augie chooses to take jazz piano and is in the boy scouts and plans on joining the volleyball team in the spring. None of these are particularly serious pursuits, but they do take time and require my husband and I to drive a lot. He’s also been prepping for his bar mitzvah—a hefty load at our traditional-ish (conservative movement) synagogue—which has added a solid 15 minutes to his nighttime routine in addition to an hour of tutoring every weekend. The kid is busy. His days are long. But I think if I only paid attention to what is going on in our house and not the noise outside it, I wouldn’t worry much and see him as a tween learning skills like discipline and time management? I think?
Levi, my 8 year-old, plays basketball and flag football, though neither is with a club traveling team, thank goodness. The activity that most makes me feel like an intensive parent is his cello playing. Unlike Hebrew school, I did not choose this for him. Levi had an adorable meet-cute with the cello: after seeing Yo-Yo Ma on Mr. Rogers, he became obsessed, and air-played a makeshift paper cello my husband made him until we allowed him to start lessons at age 4.
Levi takes traditional Suzuki which, for the uninitiated, involves a lot, a lot, of parent involvement. Far more than I knew I was taking on. I go to every lesson with him, take notes, and then practice with him every night as his “home teacher.” All together it is about seven hours a week focused on cello—a full work day! There are the standard arguments about practicing when he is tired mixed in with moments when I get to witness him have genuine encounters with beauty that fill him with awe—and me as well. It’s a lot of time, but also a great excuse to put the phone down and just do one thing. Also, importantly, intensive parenting or not, I love being Levi’s cello mom. So much that I can’t help but think that my instinct to find something wrong with it is, at least in part, the product of a culture that fails to see how meaningful connecting with kids and helping them grow can be. (Related: support educators!)
During those moments when I feel like this is all nuts, and I am clearly intensive parenting, I remember that the Suzuki method was created by Dr. Shinichi Suzuki in 1945 in a post-war Japan. So even if I am guilty of intensive parenting, the problem is an old one and there’s always some comfort to be found in learning one’s dilemmas are nothing new.
Am I too much? Is this whole essay just a wordy defense mechanism? Sincerely, I don’t know. And there is so much more to say on the subject from the perspective of children.
I will keep thinking about it. In fact, I want us all to keep thinking about it, with a close on eye on the particulars of our lives in relation to the conditions in which we are parenting while never forgetting the real care is inherently intense. Because while I can’t say for sure whether or not I, personally, am an intensive parent, I can say for sure that our shallow understanding of intensive parenting, and casual approach to throwing around the term, isn’t doing parents much good.
Reader, what is your understanding of intensive parenting? How do you define it broadly speaking? And how do you see yourself in relation to that definition?
Ooh, Elissa, you are speaking my language! This is precisely the question that presents itself in the first chapter of my manuscript. Do you know where the phrase “intensive parenting” originated? Actually, it was not intensive parenting—it was “intensive mothering.” It was coined in a 1996 book called The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, written by sociologist Sharon Hays.
I knew that, and since my own book begins in 1996, I knew I wanted to research that book. Know that two years ago, when I opened that book, I would not have called myself an intensive mother.
Then I landed on this line, a description of what mothers in 1996 were beginning to believe: “The methods of appropriate child rearing are construed as child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive and financially expensive.”
And I’ll tell you what, it was the phrase “child-centered” that got me. Child-centeredness had been my mantra. I thought about that and knew that it didn’t come from my parents. It came from my developmental psych studies in the ‘80s and my teacher training in the ‘90s.
I realized, for the first time, that culture had affected me as a mother more than I realized—and maybe I was less of a rebel and more “intensive” than I’d thought. I had to start my book from scratch!
Believe you me, I have spent the past two years questioning, in my mind and on the page, whether I was an “intensive mother.” I’m okay with claiming that moniker now. Honestly, the only descriptor on Hays’ list that I really worry about is “expert-guided.” (Well, I wish “good” parenthood didn’t have to be financially expensive, but obviously parenthood now just *is* expensive.) But “expert-guided”? That’s one place where we can push back. Parents have so much input coming in now—I really want them be able to step away from some of that and hear their intuition. It’s hard! But vital.
Anyway, I think we would have a lot to talk about over writers’ drinks 😂
I love this discussion. I've never quite seen intensive parenting framed in this way, but you're spot on: any parenting type that is intentionally very different from the one we ascribe to, or the one we are most familiar with, could be critiqued as intensive parenting. It's another version of moms being 'damned if we do, damned if we don't' by the same society that doesn't support or acknowledge us in all of these parenting expectations it places on us (and yes, it's mostly the moms by default)!
My kids aren't crazy scheduled but that's because my kids aren't that into sports. And I find that they need down time. We follow their interests for the most part but we do require some things like spanish lessons. Having 3 kids in 3 schools, some activities here and there, still feels like a LOT! We also don't have grandparent or any family help and I think that makes a huge difference too.
Ultimately, going extreme in any direction probably isn't optimal. After that, I think people need to do what works for their own family, their values, their resources... and leave the judgment - and the noise - at the door. Easier said than done though, right?