The barriers that middle class erected to protect itself make it painfully difficult to reproduce itself. It is one thing to have children, and another thing, as Midge Decter realized in the early seventies, to have children that will be disciplined enough to devote the first twenty or thirty years of their to scaling the educational obstacles to a middle class career. Nor is there any obvious, reliable way the older generation can help. All that parents can do is attempt through careful molding and psychological pressure, to predispose each child to retrace the same long road they themselves once took.

Barbara Ehrenreich