When some parents look into the future and see widespread uncertainty, they want to raise their children to be flexible, adaptable, and resilient. But in doing so, are they readying children for a brave new world of possibility, or lowering their expectations about commitment?

We don’t know what life is going to bring our children, says Stanley, a white divorced man in his 40s, laid off from several jobs, who wished fervently for his daughter that “no matter what comes, that she has the ability to deal with it.” Stanley is one of 80 parents whom, in research for my recent book, I interviewed about their job insecurity and their views on the sort of world for which they thought they were preparing their children. I learned that where we stand in America’s starkly unequal social landscape shapes our view of the kind of world our children will face, and what will help them in the future.

Parents’ experience at work has long informed childrearing. During the agrarian centuries, parenting was about transmitting known skills, and thus the most crucial child attribute was obedience.

But in the industrial economy of the twentieth century, styles of parenting by the masses seemed to diverge. Researchers in the 1950s found that social class was linked to the values parents held in their childrearing, with middle-class parents valuing and encouraging their children’s autonomy and self-direction, as befitting their occupational needs, while working-class parents expected obedience and conformity. More recently, thanks to University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau, we know that affluent parents teach entitlement through the customization of their children’s experience and the endless solicitation of their views. Less advantaged parents, meanwhile, imbue their children with a sense of constraint, given a world filled with what they experience as powerful authorities and impervious institutions.

Inequality extends to how parents respond to the new economy. In the new ways of organizing work, people expect job insecurity. But the impact of the new precariousness is radically different for the top and the bottom of our economy. Workers with more education are less likely to lose their jobs than those with less education, and when they do lose their jobs, they are less likely to endure a pay cut when they get a new one. Insecurity feels more like flexibility among advantaged workers, and more like abandonment among low-income or marginalized workers.