Wanting what's enough

5 questions for author and searching mother Sarah W. Jaffe

Writing my book, Learning in Public, required a deep dive into one particular aspect of parenting—how to choose a school for your kid, and what that choice means for the larger educational system and those who are impacted by it. But since I’ve written it, and lived into even more ages and stages of parenting, I’ve become so aware that it is just one case study in what are so many different forks in the parenting road. Do you involve your kid in after school activities, and if so, which ones? How do you handle summers, when they are out of school? What kinds of birthday parties do you throw, where, with whom, and what are the expectations for food, gifts etc.?

Turns out, when it comes to parenting in 2022, there is no end of complex, juicy material if you’re trying to live something that even approximates a thoughtful, moral life. That’s why I found Sarah W. Jaffe’s book, Wanting What’s Best: Parenting, Privilege, and Building a Just World so damn refreshing. It takes so many of these parenting questions, and much bigger ones, and unpacks the moral implications—highlighting case studies of people who are choosing differently than their peers. In fact, the book sort of embodies my sweet spot—solutions journalism meets moral inquiry, with lots of cute kids thrown in. Eureka!

I had to track Sarah down and talk to her about this infinitely useful, truly original text. Check it out…

Courtney Martin: About childcare you write, “A repeated theme I heard about pay and benefits was that the right question was ‘What's the most we can do?’ rather than ‘What's the least we can get away with?’” Why do you think privileged people are so often asking the latter in various contexts when they have so much to give, comparatively, and so often profess to have equitable values? 

I think there’s a few elements to why this happens. First, it’s an unfortunate trick of human psychology that virtually no one ever feels truly comfortable with the amount of money they have, even if the actual numbers suggest that they’re doing just fine. So some of this phenomenon is just that we rarely see ourselves as the ones who have “so much to give.”

Also, paying your nanny/other domestic worker well is not something that there’s much cultural pressure to do. All of those negotiations happen behind closed doors. You’re unlikely to ever be asked about your nanny’s compensation by anyone in your peer group. The writer Nicole Cliffe once tweeted, “Rich people like to skimp on household employees because no one ‘sees’ that money.” I think there’s something to that. Having the nanny is itself a class symbol, but that nanny’s actual compensation is mostly invisible to the outside world.

Also, both sexism and racism have led even progressive-minded people to devalue care work. Throughout our country’s history, care work has been done predominantly by women and particularly women of color--and because those groups of people get less respect and are considered less worthy, and their work is devalued. Even what’s considered a “good salary” for care workers doesn’t really reflect either the necessity or the difficulty of the work, in my view.

But, I think it’s also important to acknowledge the simple fact that it’s also a lot of money. Even to underpay a nanny is a lot of money if you pay someone $10/hour—not a remotely appropriate rate of pay, to be clear—that’s still $1,600 a month for full time childcare. That’s a huge bill, and a huge chunk of income, for all but very few families.

I feel very strongly that the only way to have a just childcare system that works for both the childcare workers and the families is for the government to subsidize it. I quote what the famous care activist Ai-Jen Poo said on a podcast in the book: “Care is not a problem the market can solve.” This isn’t an excuse for parents to underpay and exploit workers, but I also want to acknowledge that providing market-rate compensation, paying on the books, providing benefits—yes, we should do it, but it’s a huge burden for even upper-middle-class families. The families I talked to for this chapter mostly had either a background in labor organizing or had some other moment that got them thinking about how they pay domestic employees as a values question more than just a pure math equation. But paying for childcare, particularly in the early years, is very grim math.

I’ve grown increasingly confused about the dissonance so many White, privileged people tolerate about themselves. I believe in public education’s importance, but I send my kid to private schools. Or I love unions, politically speaking, but when it comes to my own childcare, I like things informal, affordable, and “family-like.” What do you make of our capacity to live with these kinds of contradictions? 

This is kind of the heart of the book, and I don’t have a clean answer to it. But something I talk about in the conclusion is a quote in a New York Magazine article from the psychologist Dan Ariely, who found that the state of being a parent literally confuses our moral compass. I think we’re even confused on a societal level: we revere parents who “sacrifice everything” for their children, and in this deeply individualistic culture, getting your own kid “ahead” is mostly viewed as an admirable thing to do. But when the mindset of “I’m going to get everything I possibly can for my kid” becomes the moral framework for people who already have a lot of power and influence, it has dark results.

At the most extreme end of that, you get the Varsity Blues parents. I thought it was fascinating that one of the parents said that he “wanted what’s best for my son” like it was a mitigating factor for his crimes. The judge didn’t believe him, and talked about how it was clearly just his own ego and desire for prestige. But I actually do believe that the parents caught up in that scandal were motivated by thinking this was the best for their kids, and the ends justify the means. I just don’t agree with the idea that getting “the best” for your kids, no matter the cost to anyone else, is a framework for moral actions. 

Something that Eva Bogaisky and Megan Hester (who are featured in the schools chapter) also comes to mind. It was a part of my interview with them that didn’t make it in the book so I’m glad to have a chance to talk about it here! They talked about how they have frequently encountered parents who expressed admiration for their choice of sending their (White) kids to global majority schools, but then described something about their own child--too sensitive, needs more recess, needs more hands-on learning--as why it was impossible for them to send their own child to the same school.

I saw this in this New York Times article about efforts to better integrate Minneapolis schools—one White mother in the piece cites the fact that her daughter needs a Japanese program, and needs to be on a certain bus route for the reason that she couldn’t possibly attend her assigned (majority Black) school. And then…her daughter ends up at a suburban, majority-White school with no Japanese program that isn’t on the bus route. So, it wasn’t actually about the Japanese program. It comes down, clearly, to what she thinks a “good school” looks like. And indeed, as that same article notes, White, advantaged parents use the number of other White, advantaged families attending as an indicator of school quality.

Basically, White supremacy is a very strong, pervasive, and insidious force, and I think it influences the actions of White parents much more than we even notice, or certainly would ever like to acknowledge. Myself included! So rather than talk about that, we’re very good at talking about things like bus routes and Japanese programs that are ultimately red herrings, as a way to justify our choices, rather than get at the root of what’s motivating those choices.  

You write, “I have come to think the way that privileged families think and talk about college is toxic, and antithetical to every value that I hope my own family holds.” You used an admiringly even and non-judgmental tone in the book, but I could feel the intensity behind this sentence? Can you say more about this? Why did this, in particular, strike such a chord? 

This is embarrassingly naïve, but I really hadn’t ever deeply questioned the idea that college admission was mostly about merit. I think I went into the book more aware of the other issues, but was mostly unaware of the stark equity issues in college admissions. There is this pervasive myth in privileged circles that it’s “so much easier to get in” to college if you’re a racial minority or living below the poverty line, which I hadn’t really questioned either. There was ample evidence that neither of these things were true, but I’d never bothered to look for it. Paul Tough’s The Inequality Machine, Daniel Golden’s The Price of Admission, and my interview with Liz Willen (as well as her reporting on the topic for the Hechinger Report) really blew those assumptions out of the water.

Basically, financial aid predominantly goes to the wealthy, and students who can pay full tuition have a much easier time getting in. So the intensity is perhaps just that of a new convert, who has seen the light. College admissions does seem to pull together all the most toxic aspects of “my kid at any cost” parenting, and that also might account for why I said it so strongly.

I really appreciated your chapter on wealth and giving for the ways in which you acknowledged how challenging it is to find a “good enough” strategy to socializing our kids around money. I find that the more you show up in integrated communities, in some ways, the harder this gets because you are put in positions more often where you know you could share financial resources, but have to figure out how to do it in a way that feels like solidarity, not charity. Did you talk to anyone about the ways in which proximity to class diversity actually makes these questions harder, not easier? 

I think that’s a great point, and now I want to talk to you about it!

I don’t know that I addressed that question head-on in any of the interviews, but I did feature some interviews that emphasized the mutual aid model: basically, seeing the ways in which the people in your community who have less money than you do have things to offer you as well. (And not, like, life lessons about how money doesn’t buy happiness—that’s emphatically NOT what I mean.) That’s a hard mindset shift, because money does matter, a lot. But it is not the only thing that people in a community offer each other.

I also like what Karen Pittelman says about how letting go of the idea that there’s some “perfect” way to give away money. She was born into tremendous family wealth, and has made it her mission in life to give that wealth away—she’s given $20 million so far. The main thing she has tried to with her own giving is just get out of the way, and to rely on people who have lived in poverty to distribute her wealth. But her point about there being no “perfect” way of giving comes to mind. There is still a fundamental unfairness to the fact that she has this money to give away in the first place, and the giving doesn’t erase that.

So is there some precise formula to giving where you’re doing so in a way that’s in purely in solidarity and never tips over into charity? Probably not. I think it’s OK to just ask the person or organization how they would feel about whatever it is that you want to donate, and being respectful of that answer, whatever it is. What feels like a blessing to one family might feel embarrassing or degrading to another—a lot of media presents “the poor” as some monolithic group that all want the same things. But of course they’re just…individual people, like anyone else. So being respectful of the community who is going to receive the money, moving money to what that community or family wants (rather than your personal idea of what you think they need), and doing your best to fight for broader systemic solutions so our social safety net becomes stronger—those all feel like some of the lessons that I took away from writing that chapter.

What surprised you when writing this book?

I’ll talk about a good surprise since I covered the bad one in the college answer. This book, like most non-fiction books, sold on proposal. The proposal had a little bit of research and writing about each chapter, but then it would say, basically, “then I’ll find parents who are living out the following values/doing the following kinds of activism, and I’ll interview them.” There was definitely some fear: what if I can’t find anyone to talk to?

I had some discouraging conversations with people in my peer group who literally didn’t understand what I was trying to write about.  I worried that the “my kid at all costs” culture was so pervasive that I won’t be able to find anyone to talk to about the topics of this book. But that was far from true, luckily! There were plenty of interviews that didn’t make it into the final manuscript. So that fear was just unfounded. I also found so many great organizations that were working on these issues: Hand in Hand (fair pay for domestic workers), Integrated Schools (pushing back on our segregated school system), and Coming to the Table (reparations for slavery) are just a few that come to mind.

It was exciting to find this whole world of people that I hadn’t known about before. There are lots of parents who are looking to step away from the privilege hoarding mindset, but if you’re only listening to conversations at certain playgrounds, you might not know it.

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We will be donating to the National Network of Abortion Funds in honor of Sarah’s labor in answering these questions. Thanks Sarah! What a refreshing take on parenting with an ethical lens.