What do you think?
Rate this book
The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis
How parents have been set up to fail, and why helping them succeed is the key to achieving a fair and prosperous society.
Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers—parents—labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It’s almost as if parents are set up to fail—and the result is lost opportunities that limit children’s success and make us all worse off. In The Parent Trap , Nate Hilger combines cutting-edge social science research, revealing historical case studies, and on-the-ground investigation to recast parenting as the hidden crucible of inequality.
Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today’s socioeconomic reality—but most parents, including even the most caring parents on the planet, are not trained in skill development and lack the resources to get help. How do we fix this? The solution, Hilger argues, is to ask less of parents, not more. America should consider child development a public investment with a monumental payoff. We need a program like Medicare—call it Familycare—to drive this investment. To make it happen, parents need to organize to wield their political power on behalf of children—who will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country.
The Parent Trap exposes the true costs of our society’s unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a profoundly hopeful blueprint for reform.
Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers—parents—labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It’s almost as if parents are set up to fail—and the result is lost opportunities that limit children’s success and make us all worse off. In The Parent Trap , Nate Hilger combines cutting-edge social science research, revealing historical case studies, and on-the-ground investigation to recast parenting as the hidden crucible of inequality.
Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today’s socioeconomic reality—but most parents, including even the most caring parents on the planet, are not trained in skill development and lack the resources to get help. How do we fix this? The solution, Hilger argues, is to ask less of parents, not more. America should consider child development a public investment with a monumental payoff. We need a program like Medicare—call it Familycare—to drive this investment. To make it happen, parents need to organize to wield their political power on behalf of children—who will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country.
The Parent Trap exposes the true costs of our society’s unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a profoundly hopeful blueprint for reform.
Audio CD
Published April 19, 2022
12 people are currently reading
279 people want to read
About the author
Nate G. Hilger
2 books7 followersNate Hilger is a researcher and writer. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
He has worked as a professor of economics at Brown University and an economist and data scientist in Silicon Valley. While in academia he was a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and continues to hold an affiliation with the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown. In 2020 he served as a lead policy consultant on early childhood and non-K12 child development issues for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.
He has won grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, and the Kauffman Foundation, and given talks at universities and research institutes around the world. He has made formative contributions to the IRS Databank and the Stripe-Stanford Survey of Internet Entrepreneurship.
His academic research on child development and inequality has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics and other leading peer-reviewed journals, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major media outlets. He lives with his wife and son in Redwood City, California.
You can learn more about Nate at https://www.natehilger.com/
He has worked as a professor of economics at Brown University and an economist and data scientist in Silicon Valley. While in academia he was a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and continues to hold an affiliation with the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown. In 2020 he served as a lead policy consultant on early childhood and non-K12 child development issues for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.
He has won grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, and the Kauffman Foundation, and given talks at universities and research institutes around the world. He has made formative contributions to the IRS Databank and the Stripe-Stanford Survey of Internet Entrepreneurship.
His academic research on child development and inequality has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics and other leading peer-reviewed journals, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major media outlets. He lives with his wife and son in Redwood City, California.
You can learn more about Nate at https://www.natehilger.com/
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 14, 2022
Interesting thesis. He proposes that parents have two roles: to love and care for their child and to also build skills that set them up for academic/economic/life success. But, the reliance on parents to build skills perpetuates inequality. He presents a lot of interesting evidence, much if which was new to me, to support this idea. And proposes that we should radically invest in public support and education from birth to reduce inequality. I like the idea. But as he explains in the last chapter, it’s unlikely to happen soon.
July 24, 2024
A hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton put in his two cents about community kitchens, a progressive experiment wherein women would be freed from the domestic drudgery of cooking by picking up a meal pre-made. He opined that such schemes would actually circumscribe women's agency, since choosing what the family ate was now under someone else's control. Now, in a proliferation of easy dinner options ranging from the Dollar Menu to frozen skillet meals to Blue Apron deliveries, the debate sounds quaint, but it rung in my head when I read The Parent Trap .
Hilger is a clear writer and approachable economist (although it isn't entirely sure who is audience is--parents? policy makers? undergrads in political science electives?), and one of his greatest contributions is to bifurcate parenting into two conflated tasks: caring for children and teaching children skills. His argument is that while parents are naturally invested and adept at caring for children, they may not be the best to teach children skills.
What skills? Loads of them: early literacy, anger management, nutrition, college financial preparation. The comparison Hilger likes to make is that teaching children the skills they need to succeed is like piloting a helicopter. The training, aptitude and time to do such complex tasks are not distributed evenly, and create a spiral out as generations create a "skills gap" between rich and poor, and between Black and white parents.
There exist programs to train children in skills, most notably the public K-12 schools, but also any number of private, non-profit and public programs. Girl Scouts, children's judo, state-subsidized pre-K vouchers, Becoming a Man, Future Farmers of America...any number of programs can piecemeal contribute to teaching children critical skills that their parents may or may not be able to teach themselves, but navigating these programs, trying to everything from researching them to paying for them (in money or in time) to literally shuttling kids to and from them present a larger burden on already burdened parents. A parental Matthew effect occurs, where rich and highly skilled parents are able to provide near constant "enrichment" to their children while parents without such a generous endowment flounder get the children they care so deeply about the basic skills they need to succeed.
And here's where those progressive take-away kitchens spring to mind. Hilger's solution is to provide quality, comprehensive, and universal skills training for all American children. The paragons are programs like the Perry preschool and the Carolina Abecedarian project, with community pick-up, highly educated staff, and best-practices curricula. Such programs, he claims, had long-lasting benefits for their participants. With the advent of Big Data research, and the decades of time elapsed, we can see the benefits from increased earnings and decreased crime and everything in-between for these children, far beyond the test score data that tends to peter out after a couple of years. Add nutritious meals and solve the problems of childhood (and beyond) obesity and chronic illness. Such programs scaled correctly out, he frequently reminds us, would pay for themselves as 1/3rd of higher earning productive members of society would filter back to the tax coffers anyway.
So if these programs are so effective, both in making young citizens' lives better for many years and as a tax-generating scheme, why haven't they been adopted?
A lack of political unity is a major factor, according to Hilger. While organizations like the AARP successfully lobby for the needs of the elderly, there is no comparable group for the needs of the children. Kids can't vote for their own needs and their parents are mostly too exhausted to organize. There's a lot of parental in-fighting, too: some parents believe that resources for someone else's kid's training will mean a lost college spot or job for their own kid. The elderly hold an outsized influence in politics, with high voter turnout and political momentum, so they get all the money and protection for a few years of (mostly non-working) life, while parents and children get crumbs for the future. And, as he insinuates in his last chapter, Republicans are white supremacists.
Now I turn to commentary. While I admire Hilger's argument in many of its broad strokes, I think Chesterton's argument is salient here. If a woman may be skittish on letting someone else decide what her family eats for dinner, how will she feel about letting someone else what skills her children are taught, how and by whom? Of course no one will object to their kid learning the ABCs and how to keep from hitting someone, but trust in institutions is not high. Even the 10% (Hilger's figure) of time that children spend in public school over their childhood is under suspicion. Just scan recent headlines about daycare carers deliberately scaring children with masks, book bannings, childcare shortages, "Don't Say Gay" legislation, school shootings, pandemic learning loss, teacher burnout, school bus driver shortages, and debates over cancelling (or not) gifted and talented programs, and it doesn't feel like a comprehensive wrap-around solution is going to feel like "more of a good thing" for many parents.
And what about those who simply do not feel supported by public schools? Among the headlines in education are the increasing numbers of homeschooling Black parents and how going back to "normal" post-pandemic schools will not be good enough for students of color who often feel threatened, controlled and dismissed. Hilger makes a big bullet point that large government programs are successes, citing the New Deal and War on Poverty, but after reading (see my review) The Color of Law and shorter texts about the racial biases in the G. I. Bill, I'm less confident that a big, comprehensive program won't perpetuate existing racism and control.
Scaling is another difficulty. The Tennessee early childhood results were disheartening, potentially setting the movement back decades, but such programs were less than ideal, shoehorning very young children into school buildings that were designed for bigger kids, with instructors of varying degrees of competency. The success of Perry and Abecedarian projects may highly what can happen, but assuming that all instructors and caretakers will act like university researchers might be a big ask. If we can't keep college-educated professionals in K-12 for limited school years and hours, how on earth can we expand?
If I can eliminate the drudgery (and technical expertise!) of cooking for my family by taking a walk down the frozen foods aisle of Walmart, but still engage the agency to decide whether I want curry or a healthy veggie-heavy stir fry or pizza tonight, can there be any analogy to child skill learning? I don't know. I can't imagine how capitalism can solve this problem as it did the dinner problem for working women.
There are analogies, though, that Hilger surprisingly doesn't include: international ones. France's thriving public preschool program creates a "default" childcare with high standards of education and nutrition. Parents who prefer a private creche or to keep their children at home may, but the basic model is pretty great. Finland and many other Nordic countries have a rich "after school club" tradition that extends year-round and are usually free or low-cost. If the US were going to scale what were essentially university experiments, it would be good to look at how effective these country-wide efforts are.
So, to sum up, I think this is a great book. It is important to recognize the varied, valuable and difficult work parents do in our society. We need to make it easier for children to develop the skills they need and we need it to be the "base model," not something that takes a lot of navigating or negotiating. We need more focus on children and parents in our political structures. But we also need to acknowledge political realities and the ways parents feel about relinquishing control over what and how their children learn.
Hilger is a clear writer and approachable economist (although it isn't entirely sure who is audience is--parents? policy makers? undergrads in political science electives?), and one of his greatest contributions is to bifurcate parenting into two conflated tasks: caring for children and teaching children skills. His argument is that while parents are naturally invested and adept at caring for children, they may not be the best to teach children skills.
What skills? Loads of them: early literacy, anger management, nutrition, college financial preparation. The comparison Hilger likes to make is that teaching children the skills they need to succeed is like piloting a helicopter. The training, aptitude and time to do such complex tasks are not distributed evenly, and create a spiral out as generations create a "skills gap" between rich and poor, and between Black and white parents.
There exist programs to train children in skills, most notably the public K-12 schools, but also any number of private, non-profit and public programs. Girl Scouts, children's judo, state-subsidized pre-K vouchers, Becoming a Man, Future Farmers of America...any number of programs can piecemeal contribute to teaching children critical skills that their parents may or may not be able to teach themselves, but navigating these programs, trying to everything from researching them to paying for them (in money or in time) to literally shuttling kids to and from them present a larger burden on already burdened parents. A parental Matthew effect occurs, where rich and highly skilled parents are able to provide near constant "enrichment" to their children while parents without such a generous endowment flounder get the children they care so deeply about the basic skills they need to succeed.
And here's where those progressive take-away kitchens spring to mind. Hilger's solution is to provide quality, comprehensive, and universal skills training for all American children. The paragons are programs like the Perry preschool and the Carolina Abecedarian project, with community pick-up, highly educated staff, and best-practices curricula. Such programs, he claims, had long-lasting benefits for their participants. With the advent of Big Data research, and the decades of time elapsed, we can see the benefits from increased earnings and decreased crime and everything in-between for these children, far beyond the test score data that tends to peter out after a couple of years. Add nutritious meals and solve the problems of childhood (and beyond) obesity and chronic illness. Such programs scaled correctly out, he frequently reminds us, would pay for themselves as 1/3rd of higher earning productive members of society would filter back to the tax coffers anyway.
So if these programs are so effective, both in making young citizens' lives better for many years and as a tax-generating scheme, why haven't they been adopted?
A lack of political unity is a major factor, according to Hilger. While organizations like the AARP successfully lobby for the needs of the elderly, there is no comparable group for the needs of the children. Kids can't vote for their own needs and their parents are mostly too exhausted to organize. There's a lot of parental in-fighting, too: some parents believe that resources for someone else's kid's training will mean a lost college spot or job for their own kid. The elderly hold an outsized influence in politics, with high voter turnout and political momentum, so they get all the money and protection for a few years of (mostly non-working) life, while parents and children get crumbs for the future. And, as he insinuates in his last chapter, Republicans are white supremacists.
Now I turn to commentary. While I admire Hilger's argument in many of its broad strokes, I think Chesterton's argument is salient here. If a woman may be skittish on letting someone else decide what her family eats for dinner, how will she feel about letting someone else what skills her children are taught, how and by whom? Of course no one will object to their kid learning the ABCs and how to keep from hitting someone, but trust in institutions is not high. Even the 10% (Hilger's figure) of time that children spend in public school over their childhood is under suspicion. Just scan recent headlines about daycare carers deliberately scaring children with masks, book bannings, childcare shortages, "Don't Say Gay" legislation, school shootings, pandemic learning loss, teacher burnout, school bus driver shortages, and debates over cancelling (or not) gifted and talented programs, and it doesn't feel like a comprehensive wrap-around solution is going to feel like "more of a good thing" for many parents.
And what about those who simply do not feel supported by public schools? Among the headlines in education are the increasing numbers of homeschooling Black parents and how going back to "normal" post-pandemic schools will not be good enough for students of color who often feel threatened, controlled and dismissed. Hilger makes a big bullet point that large government programs are successes, citing the New Deal and War on Poverty, but after reading (see my review) The Color of Law and shorter texts about the racial biases in the G. I. Bill, I'm less confident that a big, comprehensive program won't perpetuate existing racism and control.
Scaling is another difficulty. The Tennessee early childhood results were disheartening, potentially setting the movement back decades, but such programs were less than ideal, shoehorning very young children into school buildings that were designed for bigger kids, with instructors of varying degrees of competency. The success of Perry and Abecedarian projects may highly what can happen, but assuming that all instructors and caretakers will act like university researchers might be a big ask. If we can't keep college-educated professionals in K-12 for limited school years and hours, how on earth can we expand?
If I can eliminate the drudgery (and technical expertise!) of cooking for my family by taking a walk down the frozen foods aisle of Walmart, but still engage the agency to decide whether I want curry or a healthy veggie-heavy stir fry or pizza tonight, can there be any analogy to child skill learning? I don't know. I can't imagine how capitalism can solve this problem as it did the dinner problem for working women.
There are analogies, though, that Hilger surprisingly doesn't include: international ones. France's thriving public preschool program creates a "default" childcare with high standards of education and nutrition. Parents who prefer a private creche or to keep their children at home may, but the basic model is pretty great. Finland and many other Nordic countries have a rich "after school club" tradition that extends year-round and are usually free or low-cost. If the US were going to scale what were essentially university experiments, it would be good to look at how effective these country-wide efforts are.
So, to sum up, I think this is a great book. It is important to recognize the varied, valuable and difficult work parents do in our society. We need to make it easier for children to develop the skills they need and we need it to be the "base model," not something that takes a lot of navigating or negotiating. We need more focus on children and parents in our political structures. But we also need to acknowledge political realities and the ways parents feel about relinquishing control over what and how their children learn.
May 31, 2022
I picked this up after hearing about it through Tabarrok's review on Marginal Revolution, and to be fair I was pretty sure I wasn't going to like it going in. That assessment was correct . . . there is very little in this book that I liked at all. The author's main point in the book is that there is an inequality crisis (black/white, rich/poor) and that parents have become the main problem. Therefore, the government should take a larger role in skill building than it currently does and provide answers to parents, because this is the only way to fix the current crisis.
Here are some of the main issues I found with the book:
1. The premises are flawed. Some of the studies that the author uses to support much of his work are so small that its hard to take them seriously, and the lived experience differs vastly from what the offer presents here.
2. I find the notion that parent's can't learn how to teach skills to their kids insulting and untrue. While most parents don't, I believe it is possible - it is not too complicated to learn how to instill better habits and methods in parents. I found myself wishing the author had put effort into a book whose aim was to do just that, rather than this one that seems to give up on most parents.
3. As a homeschooling parent, we spend more time with our kids than most parents. From the outside looking in, I find it difficult to think that kids spending more time in government based education programs is the solution for our current crisis.
As much as I didn't care for this one, there were some interesting takeaways. The author does a good job of showing the real gap in wages come from the skill gap rather than other factors, has a great argument for why we don't see similar racial disparities in income and education in Asian Americans compared to others, and points out that the least expensive place for lower income people to get a college education now is often Ivy League schools who have a much higher annual cost per year on paper, but end up being the most affordable.
Unconvincing, but still worth reading if you are interested in the schooling.
Here are some of the main issues I found with the book:
1. The premises are flawed. Some of the studies that the author uses to support much of his work are so small that its hard to take them seriously, and the lived experience differs vastly from what the offer presents here.
2. I find the notion that parent's can't learn how to teach skills to their kids insulting and untrue. While most parents don't, I believe it is possible - it is not too complicated to learn how to instill better habits and methods in parents. I found myself wishing the author had put effort into a book whose aim was to do just that, rather than this one that seems to give up on most parents.
3. As a homeschooling parent, we spend more time with our kids than most parents. From the outside looking in, I find it difficult to think that kids spending more time in government based education programs is the solution for our current crisis.
As much as I didn't care for this one, there were some interesting takeaways. The author does a good job of showing the real gap in wages come from the skill gap rather than other factors, has a great argument for why we don't see similar racial disparities in income and education in Asian Americans compared to others, and points out that the least expensive place for lower income people to get a college education now is often Ivy League schools who have a much higher annual cost per year on paper, but end up being the most affordable.
Unconvincing, but still worth reading if you are interested in the schooling.
Read
April 20, 2022This book is amazing. I've never read a "parenting" book that makes me feel both so big and so small, as this does. There are such large issues at play in the parenting world, and Dr. Hilger breaks them down skillfully and provides glimpses of and a plan for a better future with a more supportive social system that removes historical socioeconomic barriers. Plus, funny but not off-track anecdotes. Highly recommended for anyone with a vested interest in children, (which should be everyone).
Read
April 25, 2022The Parent Trap is a quick, insightful read that opens your mind about many challenges facing society today related to the investments (or lack thereof) we're making in our collective future. It's not just for parents - it's for educators, policy makers, would-be parents and frankly anyone that wants to further understand the structural challenges of raising the next generation of citizens and what steps we can take that would reduce or eliminate these challenges. Hilger does a great job of covering a broad set of interesting topics while staying on the mark - WHY are we here, HOW can we know for certain and WHAT can we do about it? Hilger breaks down common myths, biases and behavioral patterns that prevent us from making reasonable decisions on this topic. I love some of the hopeful ideas in the book and the comparisons to other long-standing resource groups that serve as successful models for us to think about. The Parent Trap is a conversation starter full of evidence and light on rhetoric. I recommend it for parents and non-parents alike who are considering how to invest in our future.
October 23, 2022
The Parent Trap proposes an interesting prospective. Hilger divides the tasks of parents into two main focuses: love/care and skill building. Hilger's argument and the premise of this book is that all parents come to parenting with different levels of ability to teach their children skills. Until we invest as a society in providing equality in skill building training to all children, we continue to build inequality and place unreasonable and unachievable burdens on parents. Removing this burden from parents allows them to focus on the aspect of parenting most parents are fully capable of doing and don't need extra training to be able to do: loving and caring for their family. Overall, I believe Hilger does an incredible job in arguing this and providing research to support his statements. It definitely opened my eyes to the lack of investment our government makes into children versus other groups.
April 23, 2022
This is an incredible book about parenting that is full of interesting research and stories that kept me wanting to read more. It's not a typical parenting book - I walked away with a new and better way of thinking about parenting and children. The book made me see that we absolutely can and must do more to help parents so that we can help our children and society. It is up to us to take the information in this book and use it to re-examine our own thinking and to force a change in society that honestly seems kind of overdue.
April 27, 2022
Can't recommend highly enough
I'm a mother of two kids AND an educator and I learned a LOT from this book. Lots of fun facts, history, research, etc. It kind of just puts all these different pieces together in a way that I hadn't really seen before and opened my eyes to a different way of thinking. It also made me feel even more proud of what I'm contributing as a parent (and teacher), while also making me feel better that I can't do it all perfectly on my own and that's ok.
January 22, 2023
I think the thesis of this book is really interesting and compelling. I'm less sure of the proposed solutions to the problem (more government involvement), but at the same time I don't have many other/better ideas. I do like how this book is pretty careful with describing the research and pointing out its limitations, while still being willing to draw conclusions where possible. Definitely gives me plenty to think about as a parent and in how I think about supporting schools and other programs.
June 10, 2023
Interesting argument that if society invested more in all our children it could relieve the judgment on parents, ease inequality and pay huge dividends to our nation. Having recently read The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee, I was interested in Hilger’s reference to some parents’ Zero Sum thinking about their children’s future (how can I get the best education for my child and shut others out?). In Hilger’s view, a more skilled populace benefits us all.
November 12, 2024
An interesting of about how we can create greater equality by taking on the burden on “skilling” children in a community. Teaching skills early and often is a key to success and we must prioritize that. He proposes “Family Care” which would be similar in principle to Medicare
December 23, 2022
A must read, truly
Read
January 4, 2023Interesting thesis. I wonder about its generalizability outside of the US.
January 15, 2023
Very interesting economic analysis of parenting and the society-wide benefits of early childhood education and doing more to ensure the physical and emotional well being of children. I loved it.
February 5, 2023
Super interesting policy solutions for "skills gap." I learned a lot about the history of political organizing around children's interests (which has generally failed in the US) and the latest research on how skills can close the racial earnings gap.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews