Intensive parenting

Intensive’ parenting is now the norm in affluent & middle classes in many countries. How you raise your child will have a profound effect on their whole life. The style of child-rearing that most aspire to takes a lot of time and money. Supervised, enriching playtime; frequent conversations about thoughts and feelings; patient, well-reasoned explanations of household rules and extracurricular's. Lots and lots of extracurricular's are the hallmarks of a 'intensive parenting' style that has been common in upper-middle-class for at least a generation. Intensive parenting is child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive.

• Parenting is a skill, best understood by experts and very rarely by mothers and fathers. Parents are constantly informed that what they do - not only matters but also determines just about every dimension of their children’s lives. 
• Intensive parenting was identified as a middle-class phenomenon in the 1990's and 2000's. The desire and pressure to give kids every means possible to succeed: the best education, music lessons, sports groups, language skills and corresponding anxiety with limited financial means, the family budget and parent time between all kids is stretched, and so are their opportunities.
• The approach of concerted cultivation and contrasted it with the accomplishment of natural growth, which entails much less parental involvement and which is found to be more common among working-class and poorer parents. 
• It is not being poor, but poor parenting that is held to account for why children are ill prepared for school. A dad’s interest in his child’s schooling is strongly linked to academic success.
• If parents from different social class backgrounds are engaging in different parenting practices is not because those parents value different parenting practices because intensive parenting requires an abundance of time and money and some families have more resources than others. 
• Poverty not only limits parents’ ability to pay for music lessons etc, but is also a major source of stress that can influence parents’ energy, attention, and patience when interacting with children.
• Few decades ago, parenting by families with sufficient means started engaging in intensive parenting, and then everyone else followed and that elite culture gradually became mass culture.
• Intensive parenting is a style of child-rearing fit for an age of inequality, indicative of a stratified past, present, and future. The past: The tilt toward intensive parenting originated from parents’ anxieties about their children competing for education and jobs. The more extracurricular's, the better the odds of getting into an excellent college and of securing one of the high-paying jobs. The present: Intensive parenting is an ideal that’s currently out of reach for many families. The future: Practiced as it is by some families might widen inequities in future generations.
• Many children benefit from intensive parenting teaching them how to manage their time and assert their individuality. But heavily involved parenting can at the same time stunt kids’ sense of self-reliance, and over-committed after-school schedules can leave them exhausted. 
• The parents who overdo it increase the risk that their children will grow up to be depressed and less satisfied with life. And for parents, the intensive ideal can lead parents to fear that they aren’t doing enough to give their child the best future possible.

That parents exercise enormous influence over their children is not in doubt but they do so not simply through their so-called parenting skills but as members of a distinct cultural, social and ethnic community. The quality of children’s lives and their future prospects is influenced by many variables other than the behavior of their parents. This style of intensive parenting consumes parents' lives, but there isn't much benefit for the children, either. It is better to give kids the best opportunities a parent can, within their means, while still allowing the child to develop a healthy sense of independence and responsibility.

There is no job more important than parenting. 
Treat children like king till 5 years, like a slave until 15 years and like a friend thereafter.
You can't create a world for your kid. But you can prepare them to face the world. 

Children learn from parents by imitating them up to the age of 7-8 years and there after from peers in school and outside. Although learning from other's experiences is fastest, cheapest and easiest, usually most people, especially children, learn through their own mistakes which are expensive, time consuming and embarrassing. Parents must imbibe values in their children by their exemplary behavior. 'Don't do what I do, do what I say' attitude is usually counter productive. Investing in children is a positive thing, but it’s also unclear how much of children’s success is actually determined by parenting.