Commentary: The competitiveness in parenting to give kids a leg up has reached a new level

American parents are working harder than ever to give their children a leg up. Economists Garey Ramey and Valerie Ramey documented that college-educated mothers increased their childcare time by more than nine hours per week starting in the mid-1990s. They attributed this “ rug rat race” to intensifying competition for college admissions.

The competition isn’t only about time investment, and much of what parents do to give their child an advantage is hard to fault. Families routinely move from cities and their challenged public school systems to suburban neighborhoods with public schools that send large shares of graduates to elite colleges. Once a child is installed at that suburban school, the parent might add private tutoring, an SAT coach and a call to a business contact to secure the child’s summer internship.

Each decision, in isolation, seems like good parenting. And after all, it seems like everyone else is doing it. But in the aggregate, these advantages compound, and the opportunity gaps between the advantaged and the disadvantaged widen.

The Operation Varsity Blues scandal broke in 2019, but it wasn’t until 2023 that actor Felicity Huffman broke her silence — telling reporters it “felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future,” even though doing so meant breaking the law. The everyday psychology papered over an exceptional fraud.

Parents aren’t irrational for participating in this competition with such fervor. Only about half of American children born in 1980 have earned more than their parents did, compared with more than 90% of those born in 1940. Economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues call this “the fading American Dream.” As mobility has declined, the penalty for falling short has grown, and the gap between the top and the middle has widened.

Even a college degree no longer seems like a guarantee: Recent college graduates are now more likely to be unemployed than the workforce as a whole, a reversal of the usual pattern, and roughly 4 in 10 are working in jobs that don’t require their degrees.

Parents aren’t wrong that the stakes are high. They’re wrong about how to respond.

In a recent experiment, we showed a one-minute video on economic mobility to roughly 1,000 American parents. Half saw a version emphasizing that upward mobility is real and widespread (50% are in fact upwardly mobile), while the other half saw a more pessimistic message.

Parents who saw the optimistic version were modestly but significantly more willing to spend money on their child’s education and to spend time on a task related to their child. They also rated the returns they expected on the time and money they invested in their children higher than those who saw the pessimistic version. This pattern held, regardless of family income.

That was parents investing in their own children. Their attitudes toward other people’s children were another matter. In a companion experiment, the same optimistic message made affluent parents significantly less supportive of policies that would help other people’s children, such as scholarships for students from modest backgrounds. Lower-income parents’ attitudes didn’t change at all.

These results suggest that affluent parents are interpreting the message differently. For a lower-income family, upward mobility is an opportunity. For a family whose children already sit near the top, it’s a threat — more children competing for slots at selective colleges, summer internships and positions at top firms.

Research on status threat suggests that when the boundaries between social levels become permeable, those near the top grow more protective: Other children stop looking like fellow citizens and start looking like rivals. From the perspective of those already living it, the American Dream becomes a tournament.

The tournament mindset rests on a faulty premise. It’s true that a seat at a highly selective college is scarce and that each additional applicant worsens the odds. But the prize those seats represent, a secure and prosperous adult life, is not fixed in the same way. Chetty and his colleagues have shown that in places where low-income children are most likely to move up, high-income children do not, on average, do worse; lifting the bottom does not come at the top’s expense.

Opportunity, in that broader sense, is not a fixed pie.

At the level of individual spending, though, the picture is more mixed. Not all of it is a waste. When a parent pays for math tutoring, the child learns more math and is better prepared for school or a job. Their gain is no one else’s loss, and, in fact, that child’s peer may benefit from being in class or on the job with a more talented student.

But much of what affluent families buy has no positive spillover. SAT tutors, private admissions consultants and strategic extracurriculars are less about learning than about position. Social scientist Richard Reeves, in his book “ Dream Hoarders,” references “opportunity hoarding”: rigging access to scarce opportunities through exclusionary zoning, legacy admissions and internships handed out by connection. None of it makes a child more capable, only better positioned, and it lifts one child by pushing another down.

Parents aren’t hoarding because they’re selfish. They’re responding to an economy in which the gap between thriving and just getting by has widened so much that protecting their own children feels rational. Economist Jesse Rothstein has found that where children end up depends more on the job market they enter than on the schools they attended.

So the answer lies less in schools and more in widening the paths to a good life: treating apprenticeships and technical training as meaningful options, not consolation prizes, and pushing employers to drop degree requirements for jobs that don’t need them, so a secure future no longer depends on getting into a top college.

The dream works best when it doesn’t feel like a competition. The way back is to narrow the gap between winning and losing so no parent feels they must pull the ladder up behind them.

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Ariel Kalil is the Daniel Levin professor of public policy at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Rebecca Ryan is a professor of psychology at Georgetown University. Mesmin Destin is a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University.