“Now we don't have that freedom to not work”: Childhood and parenting in insecurity culture
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Zoe Wallace was a 13-year-old student when I interviewed her at an experimental school in Silicon Valley where tuition ran about $60,000 USD.The school relied on computers to teach math, coding and grammar while students pursued independent projects using "goal time," but, as Zoe told me, there was actually not enough of that time for all the tasks she had to complete."There's, like, 7 hours of goal time and 15 hours' worth of work, so it's hard to, like, squeeze it all [in]," she said.Her sister complained to her sometimes, but "I'm like, 'Oh, no, this is normal,'" she said."'We're all running around like headless chickens.It's normal.'" 1 If we are wondering what it is like to be a child in the era of the "invested parenting" that Nina Bandelj has so ably chronicled, Zoe and her sister sound like prime examples.Focused, stressed and resigned to time pressure, they reflect the paramount importance-to the school, to their parents, to themselves-of their own productivity.The school had recently imposed more structure on their schedule, Zoe told me, and she liked this version better.Because now we don't have that freedom to not work, which is a lot better because it's very tempting not to work when --in my first year here at least.Not anymore.In my first year here, it was tempting not to work because I was, like, so little and "oh yes, we have access to computers.Okay, let's not work!"But now it's just work.Cut adrift in a sea of privatization (Cooper, 2014), Zoe holds onto her self-governance like a neoliberal life raft.A longtime economic sociologist, Nina Bandelj has aimed her prodigious analytic energies at contemporary
Source: British Journal of Sociology
Author: Allison J. Pugh
Institution: Johns Hopkins University
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,840
OpenAlex ID: W4407852983